EFF Awards Night: Celebrating Digital Rights Founders Advancing Free Speech and Access to Information Around the World

Digital freedom and investigative reporting about technology have been at risk amid political and economic strife around the world. This year’s annual EFF Awards honored the achievements of people helping to ensure that the power of technology, the right to privacy and free speech, and access to information, is available to people all over the world. 

On September 12 in San Francisco’s Presidio, EFF presented awards to investigative news organization 404 Media, founder of Latin American digital rights group Fundación Karisma Carolina Botero, and Cairo-based nonprofit Connecting Humanity, which helps Palestinians in Gaza regain access to the internet.

All our award winners overcame roadblocks to build organizations that protect and advocate for people’s rights to online free speech, digital privacy, and the ability to live free from government surveillance.  

If you missed the ceremony in San Francisco, you can still catch what happened on YouTube and the Internet Archive. You can also find a transcript of the live captions.

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EFF Awards Ceremony on YouTube

EFF Executive Director Cindy Cohn kicked off the ceremony, highlighting some of EFF’s recent achievements and milestones, including our How to Save the Internet podcast, now in its fifth season, which won two awards this year and saw a 21 percent increase in downloads. 

Cindy talked about EFF’s legal work defending a security researcher at this year’s DEF CON who was threatened for his planned talk about a security vulnerability he discovered. EFF’s Coders’ Rights team helped the researcher avoid a lawsuit and present his talk on the conference’s last day. Another win: EFF fought back to ensure that police drone footage was not exempt from public records requests. As a result, “we can see what the cops are seeing,” Cindy said.

EFF Executive Director Cindy Cohn kicks off the ceremony.

“It can be truly exhausting and scary to feel the weight of the world’s problems on our shoulders, but I want to let you in on a secret,” she said. “You’re not alone, and we’re not alone. And, as a wise friend once said, courage is contagious.” 

Cindy turned the program over to guest speaker Elizabeth Minkel, journalist and co-host of the long-running fan culture podcast Fansplaining. Elizabeth kept the audience giggling as she recounted her personal fandom history with Buffy the Vampire Slayer and later Harry Potter, and how EFF’s work defending fair use and fighting copyright maximalism has helped fandom art and fiction thrive despite attacks from movie studios and entertainment behemoths.

Elizabeth Minkel—co-host and editor of the Fansplaining podcast, journalist, and editor.

“The EFF’s fight for open creativity online has been helping fandom for longer than I’ve had an internet connection,” Minkel said. “Your values align with what I think of as the true spirit of transformative fandom, free and open creativity, and a strong push back against those copyright strangleholds in the homogenization of the web.”