EFF announces awards

Electronic Frontier Foundation Media Release

For Immediate Release: Tuesday, October 06, 2009

Contact:

Katina Bishop
   Development Director
   Electronic Frontier Foundation
   katina@eff.org
   +1 415 436-9333 x101

Rebecca Jeschke
   Media Relations Director
   Electronic Frontier Foundation
   press@eff.org
   +1 415 436-9333 x125

Hardware Hacker, E-Voting Investigator, and Public Domain
Advocate Win Pioneer Awards

EFF to Honor Limor "Ladyada" Fried, Harri Hursti, and Carl
Malamud at San Francisco Ceremony

San Francisco - The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) is
pleased to announce the winners of its 2009 Pioneer Awards:
hardware hacker Limor "Ladyada" Fried, e-voting security
researcher Harri Hursti, and public domain advocate Carl
Malamud.

The award ceremony will be held at 7 p.m., October 22nd, at
the Westin San Francisco in conjunction with the Web 2.0
Summit, co-produced by O'Reilly and TechWeb.  LinkedIn
founder Reid Hoffmann will keynote the event.

Limor "Ladyada" Fried is a pioneer in the field of
open-source hardware and software hacking, helping the
general public to engineer and adapt consumer electronics
to better suit their needs.  Her do-it-yourself ethic is
founded on the idea that consumer electronics are best
modified for use by customers, not corporations.  Fried
runs her own company, Adafruit Industries, which sells
unique and fun do-it-yourself kits to help consumers make
gadgets such as backup iPod chargers, green power monitors,
and programmable displays for bicycle wheels.  She also
hosts an Internet video program called "Citizen Engineer"
that provides step-by-step instructions to help consumers
build and alter their own home devices.

Harri Hursti discovered gaping vulnerabilities in the
widely used optical scan voting machines manufactured by
Diebold Election Systems in 2005, in collaboration with the
Leon County, Florida, Supervisor of Elections and elections
watchdog group BBV.  The "Hursti Hack," as his breakthrough
became known, brought about far-reaching scrutiny of voting
machine hardware and software.  Research conducted in other
states confirmed numerous systematic flaws and led to the
decertification of thousands of faulty voting machines.
Hursti is currently Chief Technical Officer of the Clear
Ballot Group, a Boston company that builds tools to
rigorously and transparently verify election results.

Carl Malamud is a technologist, author, and public domain
advocate, currently known for his foundation,
public.resource.org.  As founder of the Internet
Multicasting Service, Malamud was responsible for creating
the first Internet radio station, for putting the U.S.
Securities and Exchange Commission's EDGAR database
on-line, and for creating the Internet 1996 World
Exposition.  Malamud is the author of eight books,
including "Exploring the Internet" and "A World's Fair."
He was a visiting professor at the MIT Media Laboratory and
is the former chairman of the Internet Software Consortium.

"The Pioneer Award winners this year have empowered all of
us as consumers, voters, and citizens, making sure that
advances in technology enhance our lives instead of hemming
us in," said EFF Executive Director Shari Steele.  "We're
proud to honor Limor, Harri, and Carl for the invaluable
contributions they have made to our digital world."

Awarded every year since 1992, the Pioneer Awards recognize
leaders who are extending freedom and innovation on the
electronic frontier.  Past honorees include World Wide Web
inventor Tim Berners-Lee, Linux creator Linus Torvalds, and
the Mozilla Foundation and its chairman Mitchell Baker,
among many others.

Each year, candidates are nominated by the public with
winners chosen by a panel of judges.  This year's panel
includes Kim Alexander (President and founder, California
Voter Foundation), Cory Doctorow (award-winning author and
activist), Mitch Kapor (President, Kapor Enterprises and
co-founder and former chairman of EFF), Drazen Pantic
(Co-director, Location One), Barbara Simons (IBM Research
[Retired] and former president ACM), and James Tyre
(Co-founder, The Censorware Project and EFF policy fellow).

Pioneer Awards keynoter Reid Hoffman is Executive Chairman
and a co-founder of LinkedIn.  Previously, Hoffman was
Executive Vice President of PayPal and has also held
management roles at Fujitsu Software Corporation and Apple.
Hoffman serves on the Board of Directors for SixApart,
Kiva.org, and the Mozilla Corporation.  Sponsors of the
Pioneer Awards ceremony include MetroPCS, Facebook, and
SaurikIT.

Tickets to the Pioneer Awards ceremony are $60 through
Friday October 16, and $80 afterwards.  You can buy your
tickets in advance at
http://action.eff.org/pioneerfundraiser.  Members of the
media interested in attending should email press@eff.org.

For more information about the Pioneer Awards:
http://www.eff.org/awards/pioneer

For this release:
http://www.eff.org/press/archives/2009/10/05

About EFF

The Electronic Frontier Foundation 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 and privacy online. EFF is a member-supported
organization and maintains one of the most linked-to
websites in the world at http://www.eff.org/


     -end-

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