EFF awards Pioneer prizes

THE ELECTRONIC FRONTIER Foundation ( here) announced its Pioneer awards last night at CFP This year's winners were Dan Gillmor, technology columnist for the San Jose Mercury News ( here), Beth Givens, whose Privacy Rights Clearinghouse ( here) was the first to highlight the growing problem of identity theft, and Jon Johanssen and the other unknown members of the team that wrote DeCSS.

The winners join previous honorees such as Privacy International's Simon Davies ( privacy.org), packet-switching inventor Paul Baran, PGP author Phil Zimmermann, and frequency-hopping co-inventors George Antheil and Hedy Lamarr.

Johanssen was the only honoree not present to receive his award, explaining by videotape that his lawyers had advised him not to travel to the United States because of the risk that he could be arrested and charged under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, which prohibits circumvention of copy-protection schemes. No journalist, Johanssen went on to note, had ever asked him how many DVDs he owned: 140, mostly region 2, some 40 region 1, and a few region 4. "If the industry had the brains not to sue its own consumers, it would be a larger collection." µ

CFP 2002