2002-04-22»
Mon Apr 22 14:32:00 2002ยปIt’s been a good week. I had a blast at Computers, Freedom and Privacy. I attended last year, when it was held in the middle of a snowdrift in Boston, and I was a little too isolated, a little too awestruck to enjoy it.
This year I bumped into plenty of interesting folk for the second time, when they were happy to sit a while and talk instead of politely deferring until they knew who the hell I was.
There was also a greater sense of the game being afoot. In private e-mails from CFP ‘2001 I wrote that there was
a lot of talking-from-the-platform about various nasty supra-national organisations, without much grassroots input.This year, with all the very fresh copyright law wrangling and the higher public profile of individuals like Patrick Ball and Jon Johansen, it felt like more practical, personal, public work was going on.
The EFF in particular, seems to be transforming into more of grassroots advocacy organisation. I’m not sure whether it’s a deliberate policy move, a shift of emphasis due to an influx of new blood or just the outside world waking up to what they’ve been doing all along, but it’s highly welcome. They have some real corkers lined up.