EFF-Austin is back with our annual unofficial SXSW shindig, and this year we’re throwing a house party and all the cyberpunks are invited! Come join us at our board member Chris Boyd’s house in Travis Heights, easy Lyft, biking, or scooter distance from downtown but a welcome oasis from the hubbub of SX at large. There will be free drinks and appetizers for our guests while supplies last (BYOB is fine as well, no additional food please) and a firepit out front. As always, our event is free to attend and doesn’t require any SX wristbands or badges. There is a suggested $20 donation, half of which will go to recoup Chris’s costs, the other half of which will be donated to Electronic Frontier Foundation. There is ample free on-street parking in Travis Heights near the party address if you are driving, but we encourage you to take public transportation if possible. If you arrive via scooter, we will have an area in the front yard where you can leave your scooter (please don’t leave them in the middle of the street).
We are honored to be joined by two very special guests this year, Cindy Cohn and Cory Doctorow.
Cindy Cohn is Electronic Frontier Foundation’s Executive Director. Named one of the 50 most important women in tech by Forbes Magazine, Cindy is a civil liberties attorney specializing in internet law. Cindy was one of the principal litigators in Bernstein v. United States, which established computer code as a form of free speech protected by the constitution and which allowed for the widespread deployment of encryption. She will be speaking to us about her current work leading EFF and where things are going in the fight for digital civil liberties. If you are attending SXSW, she will also be speaking on the following panel: https://schedule.sxsw.com/2019/events/PP90794
Cory Doctorow (craphound.com) is a science fiction novelist, blogger and technology activist. He is the co-editor of the popular weblog Boing Boing (boingboing.net), and a contributor to many magazines, websites and newspapers. He is a special consultant to the Electronic Frontier Foundation (eff.org), and he holds an honorary doctorate in computer science from the Open University (UK), where he is a Visiting Professor; he is also a MIT Media Lab Research Affiliate and a Visiting Professor of Practice at the University of South Carolina’s School of Library and Information Science. In 2007, he served as the Fulbright Chair at the Annenberg Center for Public Diplomacy at the University of Southern California.
