EFF Pioneer Award
science and engineering award

The EFF Award, formerly EFF Pioneer Award, is an annual prize by the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) for people who have made significant contributions to the empowerment of individuals online.
Winners
1992: Douglas Engelbart, Robert E. Kahn, Tom Jennings, Jim Warren, Andrzej Smereczynski
1993: Paul Baran, Vint Cerf, Ward Christensen, Dave Hughes, USENET developers (accepted by Tom Truscott and Jim Ellis)
1994: Ivan Sutherland, Bill Atkinson, Whitfield Diffie and Martin Hellman, Murray Turoff and Starr Roxanne Hiltz, Lee Felsenstein, and the WELL (the Whole Earth 'Lectronic Link)
1995: Philip Zimmermann, Anita Borg, Willis Ware
1996: Robert Metcalfe, Peter Neumann, Shabbir Safdar and Matt Blaze
1997: Hedy Lamarr and George Antheil (special award; posthumous with respect to Antheil), Johan Helsingius, Marc Rotenberg
1998: Linus Torvalds, Richard Stallman, Barbara Simons
1999: Jon Postel (posthumous award), Drazen Pantic, Simon Davies
2000: "Librarians Everywhere" (accepted by Karen G. Schneider), Tim Berners-Lee, Phil Agre
2001: Bruce Ennis (attorney) (posthumous award), Seth Finkelstein, Stephanie Perrin
2002: Dan Gillmor, Beth Givens, Jon Johansen and Writers of DeCSS
2003: Amy Goodman, Eben Moglen, David Sobel
2004: Kim Alexander, David L. Dill, Avi Rubin (for security issues with electronic voting)
2005: Mitch Kapor, Edward Felten, Patrick Ball
2006: Craigslist, Gigi Sohn, Jimmy Wales
2007: Yochai Benkler, Cory Doctorow, Bruce Schneier
2008: Mozilla Foundation and its chair Mitchell Baker; Michael Geist; and AT&T whistleblower Mark Klein
2009: Limor "Ladyada" Fried, Harri Hursti and Carl Malamud
2010: Steven Aftergood, James Boyle, Pamela Jones of the Groklaw website and Hari Krishna Prasad Vemuru
2011: Ron Wyden, Ian Goldberg, and Nawaat.org
2012: Andrew (bunnie) Huang, Jérémie Zimmermann, The Tor Project
2013: Aaron Swartz (posthumous award), James Love, Glenn Greenwald and Laura Poitras
2014: Frank La Rue, Zoe Lofgren, Trevor Paglen
2015: Caspar Bowden (posthumous award), Citizen Lab, Anriette Esterhuysen and the Association for Progressive Communications and Kathy Sierra
2016: Malkia Cyril of the Center for Media Justice, data protection activist Max Schrems, the authors of the "Keys Under Doormats" report, and California State Senators Mark Leno and Joel Anderson.
2017: Chelsea Manning, Mike Masnick, Annie Game
2018: Stephanie Lenz, Joe McNamee (from EDRi), Sarah T. Roberts
2019: Danah boyd, Oakland Privacy, William Gibson
2020: Joy Buolamwini, Dr.
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This entry incorporates text from “EFF Pioneer Award” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.