The new politics of Silicon Valley: Revenge of the nerds
A small group of entrepreneurs, activists, writers and lawyers banded together to rally the technology community in opposition. A surprising coalition of Republican and Democratic lawmakers emerged to support the freedom fighters, many considered otherwise too liberal or too conservative to have common cause. Together, they fought back the proposal and, perhaps, saved a generation of future technological innovation.
The year was 1993, and the fight was over technology called the Clipper Chip, which the National Security Agency tried to force cell phone manufacturers to include in all consumer phones. Clipper was a government-designed chipset with built-in encryption developed by the NSA. One of its features, however, was a "key escrow" that gave the government a permanent backdoor to decrypt any conversation.
It was a terrible, terrible idea.
And the organization that formed to fight the Clipper Chip was the Electronic Frontier Foundation. In the end, its creation was the only affect the Clipper Chip actually had.