Definition: EFF

(Electronic Frontier Foundation, San Francisco, CA) A non-profit civil liberties organization founded in 1990 by Mitchell Kapor and John Perry Barlow. It works in the public interest to protect privacy and freedom of expression in the arenas of computers and the Internet. The EFF's mission statement is "to help civilize the electronic frontier; to make it truly useful and beneficial not just to a technical elite, but to everyone; and to do this in a way which is in keeping with our society's highest traditions of the free and open flow of information and communication." First located in Cambridge, MA, the EFF continually monitors the online community for legal actions that may require its support.