The Electronic Frontier Foundation is the leading nonprofit defending civil liberties in the digital world. Founded in 1990 by John Perry Barlow, Mitch Kapor, and John Gilmore, EFF has been the preeminent legal and advocacy organization fighting for user rights, free expression, and privacy online.
Cory Doctorow joined EFF as European Affairs Coordinator in the early 2000s, working from the organization's perspective on international digital rights issues including digital-rights-management-critique and copyright policy. He later transitioned to a fellowship role, maintaining deep ties to the organization even after leaving-eff-staff as a full-time employee in 2006. He rejoined formally in 2015 as Special Advisor with a mandate to eradicate DRM everywhere, as documented in eff-doctorow-rejoins-2015, marking his re-engagement with the organization that defined his early activist career.
EFF's work intersects substantially with Doctorow's core concerns: adversarial-interoperability, right-to-repair, interoperability-mandates, and opposition to DRM schemes like those pushed through the w3c's EME standard. john-perry-barlow was a founding figure whose Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace shaped early internet ideology. bruce-schneier has been a longtime EFF board member and intellectual ally.
EFF's legal battles against the DMCA's Section 1201, its Coders' Rights Project, and its work on platform accountability all reflect the same structural concerns Doctorow articulates through enshittification and chokepoint-capitalism: the way legal and technical systems combine to lock users and creators into platforms with no exit.