Organizations
How companies, institutions, and movements embody the sixteen values.
Greenpeace
Bear witness and act
Greenpeace was founded by activists who sailed into a United States nuclear test zone on a fishing boat, intending to halt the test by placing themselves between the bomb and its target. The boat was stopped, the test proceeded, and the act accomplished nothing except drawing media attention to a test that would otherwise have happened without public notice. That founding act established the organizational logic: direct physical confrontation with the institutions conducting the harm, conducted in public, regardless of personal risk to the people doing the confronting.
Greenpeace
Bear witness and act
Greenpeace was founded by activists who sailed into a United States nuclear test zone on a fishing boat, intending to halt the test by placing themselves between the bomb and its target. The boat was stopped, the test proceeded, and the act accomplished nothing except drawing media attention to a test that would otherwise have happened without public notice. That founding act established the organizational logic: direct physical confrontation with the institutions conducting the harm, conducted in public, regardless of personal risk to the people doing the confronting.
The moratorium on commercial whaling, secured in part through two decades of confrontational direct action making the cultural cost of whaling visible to a global audience. Nuclear test limitation agreements following sustained public witness campaigns. A funding model based entirely on public support maintaining organizational independence from the industries being challenged.
Direct action tactics that prioritize media impact over scientific accuracy, and that have at various points presented environmental risk claims exceeding their evidentiary basis. The destruction of a GMO research trial in the Philippines by people claiming Greenpeace affiliation, demonstrating the liability of a decentralized direct action model. The tension between dramatic confrontation as an organizational tactic and the sustained relationship-building that produces lasting regulatory change.
The 1995 Brent Spar campaign, in which Greenpeace occupied a Shell platform scheduled for deep-sea disposal, generated enough public pressure to reverse the decision, and then publicly acknowledged that the scientific data underlying the campaign had been wrong.
Electronic Frontier Foundation
Defending digital freedom before there was a digital public to defend it
The EFF was founded before most people knew what the internet was, by people who understood that the legal frameworks governing digital communication were being established before the public had any stake in their formation. Mitch Kapor and John Perry Barlow created an organization to defend civil liberties in digital spaces at a moment when those spaces were small enough that their norms were still being written. The EFF has spent 35 years litigating, lobbying, and publishing in defense of the proposition that rights citizens have in physical space should not dissolve at the boundary of a network.
Electronic Frontier Foundation
Defending digital freedom before there was a digital public to defend it
The EFF was founded before most people knew what the internet was, by people who understood that the legal frameworks governing digital communication were being established before the public had any stake in their formation. Mitch Kapor and John Perry Barlow created an organization to defend civil liberties in digital spaces at a moment when those spaces were small enough that their norms were still being written. The EFF has spent 35 years litigating, lobbying, and publishing in defense of the proposition that rights citizens have in physical space should not dissolve at the boundary of a network.
Successful legal challenges to surveillance overreach. The HTTPS Everywhere initiative making encrypted web browsing a default rather than an exception. Transparency reporting creating public accountability for government demands on technology companies. Legal representation for individuals facing prosecution for digital speech at the frontier of constitutional protection.
The difficulty of translating privacy and civil liberties principles into technical standards in an industry organized around data extraction. The gap between winning legal victories and changing the platform practices affecting the most users. An organizational culture more effective at identifying and opposing specific overreach than at building the affirmative infrastructure of digital rights.
The 1990 defense of Steve Jackson Games against Secret Service seizure, a case involving a game company's computer equipment that established digital speech warranted the same constitutional protections as print.