The co -founder of EFF - the most famous NPO, protecting the rights of Internet users from the state died

John Barlow was 70 years old.

The founder of the non -profit human rights organization Electronic Frontier Foundation (Electronic Fund, EFF) John Perry Barlow died at the age of 70 in the morning of February 7, 2018. This was announced by EFF Executive Director Cindy con.

According to Kon, Barlow died in a dream at home.

Barlow was sometimes perceived as a scarecrow for naive techno-utopians who believed that the Internet could solve all the problems of mankind without creating new ones. As a person who has been working with him in EFF for the last 27 years, I can say that nothing can be further from the truth.

Barlow knew that new technologies could give rise to and strengthen evil just like good. He made a conscious decision to focus on the latter: “It is true that a good way to create the future is its prediction. So I predicted the utopia in the hope of giving free freedom before the laws of Moore and Metkalf caused what Edward Snowden today calls “Turnkey Totalitarism”.

Cindy con

Barlow eared EFF in 1990 with Mitchell Kapor and John Gilmore. The Kapor in 2003 invested $ 300 thousand in Mozilla Foundation and became the chairman of the fund, and Gilmore became known in 1985 as the co-author of the Bootstrap protocol for the issuance of IP addresses, which later led to the appearance of DHCP (the main protocol of the dynamic issuance of IP addresses).

The reason for the base of EFF was the interrogation of Barlow by the FBI agents in the case of the theft of the source code Rom Macintosh (now all this is freely available). When Barlow shared the story on the Internet, Kapor contacted him - it turned out that he also had a similar story of the conflict with the authorities. The initial donations to the fund were made by the Kapor and co -founder of Apple Steve Wozniak as well as another unnamed person.

The main task of EFF was to develop bills in the field of privacy protection and the fight against the state’s attempts to regulate the activities of network users. The fund also supported ordinary citizens in their claims against the United States, and also engaged in educational programs around the world.

In 2013, Barlow received the Internet Hall of Fame, which at different times was awarded to Julian Assanju, Bradley Manning and Edward Snowden. In 2014, Barlow interviewed Snowden at the Personal Democracy Forum conference.

Barlow was hospitalized in 2015 for a month and a half due to a series of poisoners (provoked by medical workers during other treatment and operations) diseases. After one of the operations, he had a myocardial infarction: he was in a state of clinical death for 8 minutes, but returned to life.