EFF announces Pioneer Award winners: Stephen Aftergood, James Boyle, Pamela Jones and Groklaw, and Hari Krishna Prasad Vemuru
- Cory Doctorow
- Uncategorized
- Oct 19, 2010
- Action, Business, EFF, India, James Boyle, Pamela Jones, Pioneer Award, Pioneer Awards, security, Stephen Aftergood, Technology
The Electronic Frontier Foundation has awarded its annual Pioneer Awards for leaders on the electronic frontier who are extending freedom and innovation in the realm of information technology. This year’s winners are Stephen Aftergood, James Boyle, Pamela Jones and Groklaw, and Hari Krishna Prasad Vemuru, and the awards will be presented in San Francisco at a ceremony at the 111 Minna Gallery on November 8.
I was honored to be one of this year’s judges, and I’ll be emceeing the awards in San Francisco on the 8th. I hope to see you there as we honor these wonderful activists. The Pioneer Awards are nominated by the public, and awarded by a panel of independent judges. Click through for full bios of the winners.
Steven Aftergood directs the
Federation of American Scientists (FAS) Project on Government
Secrecy, which works to reduce the scope of official secrecy
and to promote public access to government information. He
writes and edits Secrecy News, an email newsletter and blog
that reports on new developments in secrecy and disclosure
policy. Secrecy News also provides direct public access to
various official records that have been suppressed, withdrawn,
or that are simply hard to find. In 1997, Mr. Aftergood was the
plaintiff in a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit against the
Central Intelligence Agency that successfully led to the
declassification and publication of the total intelligence
budget for the first time in 50 years.James Boyle is
William Neal Reynolds Professor of Law and co-founder of the
Center for the Study of the Public Domain at Duke Law School.
Professor Boyle is recognized for his exceptional scholarship
on the “second enclosure movement” — the worldwide expansion
of intellectual property rights — and its threat to the rich
public domain of cultural and scientific materials that the
Internet might otherwise make available. An original board
member of Creative Commons and co-founder of Science Commons,
Professor Boyle has worked for over 20 years as both an
academic and institution builder to celebrate and protect the
values of cultural and scientific openness.When
Pamela Jones created Groklaw in 2003, she envisioned a new kind
of participatory journalism and distributed discovery — a
place where programmers and engineers could educate lawyers on
technology relevant to legal cases of significance to the Free
and Open Source community, and where technologists could learn
about how the legal system works. Groklaw quickly became an
essential resource for understanding such important legal
debates as the SCO-Linux lawsuits, the European Union antitrust
case against Microsoft, and whether software should qualify for
patent protection.Hari Krishna Prasad Vemuru is a
security researcher in India who recently revealed security
flaws in India’s paperless electronic voting machines. He has
endured jail time, repeated interrogations, and ongoing
political harassment to protect an anonymous source that
enabled him to conduct the first independent security review of
India’s electronic voting system. Prasad spent a year trying to
convince election officials to complete such a review, but they
insisted that the government-made machines were “perfect” and
“tamperproof.” Instead of blindly accepting the government’s
claims, Prasad’s international team discovered serious flaws
that could alter national election results. Months of hot
debate have produced a growing consensus that India’s
electronic voting machines should be scrapped, and Prasad hopes
to help his country build a transparent and verifiable voting
system.
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