John Gilmore, 76, co-founded the EFF in 1990 and in 31 years since then "has provided leadership and guidance on many of the most important digital rights issues we support today," the EFF said in a statement Friday, saying goodbye to Gilmore.
"But in recent years, we have not had the best way to communicate and work together," they said, adding that "we have not been able to reach an agreement with Gilmore on governance."
This is why the EFF Board of Directors recently made the difficult decision to vote for Gilmore's removal from the board.
"We are deeply grateful for the many years that Gilmore has given to the EFF as a leader and advocate, and the Board has elected him as an Emerging Board Member."
"I'm so proud of the impact the EFF has had on maintaining and extending individual rights and freedoms as the world has adapted to major technological change," Gilmore said.
"My departure will leave a strong board and an even stronger staff that is deeply interested in these issues."
John Gilmore co-founded the EFF in 1990 with John Perry Barlow, Steve Wozniak and Mitch Kapor and provided significant financial support that was critical to the organization's survival and growth for many years.
Since then, Gilmore has worked closely with the staff, board and attorneysconditions of the EFF on privacy, free speech, security, encryption and more.
In the 1990s, Gilmore found government documents that confirmed the First Amendment problem with government controls on the export of crypto and helped launch Bernstein's filing against the US Department of Justice (DOJ), which resulted in a lawsuit decision that wants the source code of any software to be protected by the First Amendment.
Thus, the government's regulations that prevented its publication were deemed unconstitutional. The decision made it legal in 1999 for web browsers, websites and software such as PGP and Signal to use encryption of their choice.
Gilmore also led the EFF effort to design and build the DES Cracker, which was seen as a fundamental breakthrough in how we evaluate the security of computers and public policies that control the use of encryption.
At that time (1970), the data encryption standard (DES) was integrated into ATMs and banking networks, as well as popular software around the world.
But U.S. government officials claimed the DES was safe and could steal it.
The EFF DES Cracker has publicly shown that the DES was actually so weak that it could break in a week with an investment of less than $ 350.000. This catalyzed the creation and adoption of the much more powerful Advanced Encryption Standard (AES by Advanced Encryption Standard), which is now widely used for information security worldwide.
The EFF always valued Gilmore's opinions, even when they disagreed. It is no exaggeration to say that he would not exist without him.
Gilmore also created the alt* hierarchy at Usenet, co-founded the Cypherpunks mailing list and was one of the founders of Cygnus Solutions (according to his Wikipedia page).
