76time John gilmore co-founded the EFF in 1990 and in the 31 years since then "has provided leadership and direction on many of the most important digital rights issues we support today," the EFF said in a statement Friday, farewelling 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 EFF staff, board and lawyers on privacy, freedom of 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 testimony against the U.S. MinistryDepartment of Justice (DOJ), which resulted in a court ruling requiring the source code of all software to be protected by the First Amendment.
Thus government regulations preventing its publication were ruled unconstitutional. The decision became legal in 1999 in the programs browsing ιστού, στους ιστότοπους και σε λογισμικό όπως το PGP και το Signal να χρησιμοποιούν την κρυπτογράφηση της επιλογής τους.
Gilmore also led the EFF effort to design and build the DES Cracker, which was seen as a fundamental breakthrough in how we evaluate computer security 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 publicly demonstrated that 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 stronger Advanced Encryption Standard (AES), 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.
Ο Gilmore δημιούργησε επίσης την ιεραρχία alt* στο Usenet, συν-ίδρυσε τη λίστα αλληλογραφίας Cypherpunks και ήταν ένας από τους ιδρυτές της Cygnus Solutions (σύμφωνα με τη σελίδα του στη Wikipedia).
