CAMBRIDGE, Mass. -- Online activists handed out awards to steadfast allies and lifelong foes this week at the Computers, Freedom and Privacy conference.
At an awards ceremony Thursday evening, the Electronic Frontier Foundation gave its annual Pioneer awards to a free speech lawyer, an ex-bureaucrat from Canada, and an activist who has highlighted the perils of filtering software.
Privacy International took a different tack on Wednesday, handing its far-from-flattering "Big Brother Award" to the National Security Agency and the FBI's Carnivore system for their far-ranging surveillance capabilities.
Dave Banisar, a lawyer with Privacy International and the Electronic Privacy Information Center, said that despite the NSA's new "happy and friendly" public face, the notorious spy agency has not abandoned practices such as Echelon that invade Americans' privacy.
Banisar showed a short home-made film purporting to depict him delivering a Big Brother Award -- a gilded boot crushing a head -- to the NSA's headquarters in Fort Meade, Md. (A spoof of flicks such as Mission Impossible, it was actually filmed at the NSA's National Cryptologic Museum adjacent to the agency's campus.)
Other winners included ChoicePoint -- "greatest corporate invader" -- which has hawked personal information it obtained from government records. Runners-up included Nortel Networks and Verisign.
In a ceremony held in the New England Aquarium, EFF gave a Pioneer award to the late Bruce Ennis, who successfully argued against the Communications Decency Act before the U.S. Supreme Court. About 150 guests wandered around the circular aquarium, and the presentation was frequently interrupted by honks and calls from dozens of penguins.
Ennis was a Washington lawyer and longtime litigator for the American Library Association. After he argued the CDA case in 1997, the Supreme Court ruled the law's restrictions on "indecent" and "patently offensive" materials amounted to unconstitutional abridgements of free speech.
Stephanie Perrin, a former official for Industry Canada -- the equivalent of the U.S. Commerce Department -- won a Pioneer award for successfully lobbying for the Personal Information Protection and Electronic Documents Act. Conservative and libertarian groups have criticized the regulations as unduly intrusive and burdensome.
Perrin now works at Zero Knowledge Systems in Montreal.
Seth Finkelstein, an anti-filtering activist who lives in the Boston area, won a Pioneer award for his efforts to expose the so-called blacklists used by those products. EFF said Finkelstein's work has given ammunition to lawyers planning to challenge a federal law that all but requires libraries and schools to install the software.
"We, as a community of people respecting rights in technology, do not take enough opportunity to honor our own," said EFF director Shari Steele. "Bruce, Stephanie and Seth are shining examples of the spirit and energy that makes good things happen. We're proud to present them with this year's Pioneer Awards."
