The Story of EFFI

Architecture and Background

Mikko Valimaki & Ville Oksanen- The Story of EFFI. How We Started a Cyber-rights Group in Finland, Which Kicks Ass The Story of EFFI. How We Started a Cyber-rights Group in Finland, Which Kicks Ass We want to show you how just a couple of fellows can start a truly efficient cyber rights group at a regional level (state, country etc) and influence the encryption, privacy, fair use etc laws & change the public opinion. We did this in Finland in a year.

Vulnerability Analysis

EFFI was founded in 2001 and now, in summer 2003, has some 300-400 paid members and counting. We got to the nation's main newspapers in spring 2002 and hit the radio and TV in fall 2002 and been since then regulars in the media. Our top achievement so far has been stopping EU Copyright Directive (Europe's DMCA) in Finland. We've also fundamentally changed the law on the feeedom of speech and spamming (see for details).

Exploitation and Demonstrations

Next, we'll answer basic questions on how we get there. Who proposes these laws and how can even individual hackers and tech enthusiasts influence the legislative process? How did we build relationships to politicians? How did we got ourselves to TV regulars in Finland and changedthe public opinion to our support?

Remediation and Defensive Strategies

How can we extend our regional success to European level? Finally we want to explain why the political, moral and legal issues are inherently global and why the hacker community should support action in every corner of the world. We get into details of US and European hacker-unfriendly politics and compare different options to support our common cause: influence parliamentary and democratic process vs. act independently & anonymously hacking the software of "evil corporations". Our approach is to act with names and do everything politically correct.