Media Advisory BayFF Speaks Up Free Speech Advocate, Hastings Law Professor, and Bay Area Cyberjournalist Explore the Limits of Free Expression on the Net WHO: Electronic Frontier Foundation, Keith Henson, Joe Liu, Damien Cave.
WHAT: "BayFF" Meeting exploring the posting of private documents and
free expression on the Web
WHEN: Thursday, November 2nd, 2000, at 7:00PM PT
WHERE: Moscone Center, Room 101
747 Howard St.
San Francsico, CA, USA
In honor of its 10th Anniversary of defending civil liberties online, EFF presents a series of monthly meetings to address important issues where technology and policy collide. These meetings, entitled "BayFF" (Bay-area Friends of Freedom), kicked off on July 10th and will continue throughout the year. The upcoming BayFF includes panelists Keith Henson, a free speech advocate who was sued by the Church of Scientology, Prof. Joe Liu, an expert on intellectual property law, and Damien Cave, a Bay Area reporter with Salon.com who covers tech issues. They will focus on the publishing/posting of documents on the Web that are later claimed to be private, or to contain trade secrets. What are the repercussions of this type of publication? Can litigation to prevent or punish such publishing be seen as a violation of the publisher's First Amendment rights? Keith Henson, an electrical engineer and programmer by trade, and long a free speech advocate, was troubled by the Church of Scientology's 1995 attempt to destroy a Usenet news group (alt.religion.scientlogy). He was sued by them in early 1996 over an open letter to a federal judge which quoted from a Scientology instruction manual ("NOTs 34," available on the Net). Most recently, he has been exercising his First Amendment rights by picketing Scientology's desert compound near Hemet, CA. He has been charged with making "terrorist threats" to the organization, which he denies. He is also well known for founding the L-5 Society in 1975, and was heavily involved in space politics for 6 years. He is a major character in the multi-person biography, "Great Mambo Chicken and the Trans-Human Condition" by Ed Regis. In recent years he has been deeply involved with cryonics. Professor Liu was born and raised in Seattle, Washington. He received his B.A. in Physics and Philosophy in 1989 from Yale University, and his J.D. in 1994 from Columbia Law School, where he was Editor-in-Chief of the Columbia Law Review. After law school, he clerked for Judge Levin H. Campbell, U.S. Court of Appeals for the First Circuit. Following his clerkship, Professor Liu worked as a litigator at Foley, Hoag & Eliot in Boston, where his practice consisted of intellectual property litigation, securities litigation, and white collar criminal defense. Professor Liu then spent two years as a Climenko Teaching Fellow at Harvard Law School. He also serves as general counsel to an Internet startup company. Professor Liu's primary teaching and research interests are in the areas of intellectual property, property, and Internet regulation. Damien Cave is a staff writer for the technology section of Salon.com, where he focuses on policy, intellectual property and digital culture. He has written several stories on DeCSS, Napster, ICANN and other hot-button issues, while trying to keep his computer from crashing and his inbox from overflowing. Before coming to Salon.com, he attended the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism, wrote for several publications while backpacking through South America, and covered health-care at a daily newspaper in New Hampshire. His stories have also won several awards, none of which were Pulitzers. For directions to the event, you can use free services like http://www.mapquest.com or http://maps.yahoo.com to generate driving directions or maps. For BART, CalTrain and Muni directions, please call their information lines. This month's BayFF will be Webcast. BayFF is first and foremost a real space event, meant to serve as an educational forum for the local community, as well as a catalyst for like-minded activists. Locals, please show your support in person! BayFF fans and followers that are scattered across the country can check the EFF Website for a link to the Webcast. **** You can subscribe to EFF's mailing list to receive the regular BayFF annoucements. To subscribe, email <majordomo@eff.org> and put this in the text (not the subject line): subscribe bayff. The Electronic Frontier Foundation ( http://www.eff.org ) is the leading civil liberties organization working to protect rights in the digital world. Founded in 1990, EFF actively encourages and challenges industry and government to support free expression, privacy, and openness in the information society. EFF is a member-supported organization and maintains one of the most-linked-to Web sites in the world. Contact: Katina Bishop
Director of Education and Offline Activism
Electronic Frontier Foundation
+1 415 436 9333 x101
katina@eff.org