Electronic Frontier Foundation



The Electronic Frontier Foundation (or EFF) is an international non-governmental organization dedicated to the defense of free speech, protection of privacy, and consumer rights for internet users. It was established in 1990 and is headquartered in San Francisco, California, and has been involved in a number of legal cases. In a lot of ways, they're essentially the online equivalent to the American Civil Liberties Union and its relatives.

Deep Crack
In 1998, they published a book titled Cracking DES in which they not only laid out a case for the United States Data Encryption Standard for not being secure, but also came to the conclusion that the NSA was very likely on its third or fourth generation of DES cracking devices at the time. In order to do this, they created their own DES cracker machine ; the bulk of the book's text is the VHDL code used to generate the code-cracking chips that did the actual work, and it's not only recommended reading for cryppies, but also for anyone interested in computer hardware design.

Criticism
The EFF has been criticized by The Baffler magazine as a highly successful astroturf group created by Silicon Valley to defend their business models especially regarding copyright and privacy, as well as having a major role into making the Internet what it is today. This is nonsensical, as the EFF is strongly pro-privacy, which runs directly counter to the business models employed by Silicon Valley companies.