You’ve almost undoubtedly heard of the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), the not-for-profit organization dedicated to protecting digital civil rights. The EFF has gained a lot of relevance because more of our time is lived in the digital sphere and because online privacy is both more important and more threatened. What you may not know is that the EFF originated, in part, from the ignorance of the US Secret Service during their interactions with a small tabletop gaming company, Steve Jackson Games.

To understand the case, you first need to think a bit about the state of the Internet at that time. To call it the Internet is actually a bit of a misnomer; there were connected networks but no “World Wide Web” as we know it today. What happened was that Bell South, a telecom, became aware that a proprietary document it owned had been posted on a Bulletin Board Service (BBS), an online forum that people could connect to. That BBS was operated by Loyd Blankenship, known online as The Mentor. At the time, he worked for Steve Jackson Games.

The Secret Service did not take kindly to the fact that this document had been posted on Loyd’s board. In those days, they were very interested in cracking down on hacking, which had gone largely unaddressed by law enforcement until that point in time (the late eighties/early nineties). The Secret Service got a search warrant for not only Blankenship’s premises, but for Steve Jackson Games itself.

Steve Jackson Games nearly went bankrupt after 300 floppy disks and three PCs were seized by the Secret Service; several employees had to be laid off. Perhaps the craziest part of this story is that the Secret Service labeled GURPS Cyberpunk “a handbook for computer crime”. For those who are unaware, GURPS is short for “Generic Universal Roleplaying System” - this “handbook for computer crime” was actually only a manual for a roleplaying game. The Secret Service had confused fantasy for reality.

The EFF was founded, in part, to help defend Steve Jackson Games in this court case. Steve Jackson did indeed win the case, with the judge deeming that the search warrant was hastily executed. One might wonder, however, what may have happened if Steve Jackson hadn’t found the support that it did. At the time, digital communications weren’t necessarily considered private - this was at the start of our digital world, after all. Posts on someone’s messaging board being considered their responsibility or mistakenly thinking a game was a real hacker’s handbook made this a court case with a lot of twists and turns.

Though the Secret Service may have learned a thing or two about the digital world, it keeps changing rules regularly and it’s going to take a lot of work from lawmakers and attorneys to keep up with the rapidly shifting digital landscape. We use the Internet to make it easier for you to find an appearance attorney; if you need an appearance attorney on call, get in touch with us.