John Gilmore is an entrepreneur and civil libertarian. He was an early employee of Sun Microsystems, early open source author, and co-created Cygnus Solutions, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the Cypherpunks, the DES Cracker, and the Internet's "alt" newsgroups. He's spent 30 years doing programming, hardware and software design, management, philosophy, philanthropy, and investment. He is on the Board of the Usenix Association, CodeWeavers, and ReQuest. He's trying to get people to think more about the society they are building. His advocacy on drug policy aims to reduce the immense harm caused by current attempts to control the mental states of free citizens. His advocacy on encryption policy aims to improve public understanding of this fundamental technology for privacy and accountability in open societies.
Brad Templeton is Chairman Emeritus of EFF, after two decades of service on the board of directors. He is currently working to assure that EFF stays ahead of the curve on the civil rights implications of emerging and future technologies.
He founded ClariNet Communications Corp., the first Internet-based business. ClariNet published an online electronic newspaper delivered for live reading on subscribers machines. He has been active in the Internet community since 1979, participated in the building and growth of USENET from its earliest days, and in 1987 he founded and edited rec.humor.funny, the world's most widely read computerized conference on that network, and today the world's longest running blog. He has founded two software companies and is the author of a dozen packaged microcomputer software products.
He is track chair for computing and networks at Singularity University, a multi-disciplinary school of rapidly changing technology, and was among the founding faculty. He writes and researches the future of automated transportation at Robocars.com and worked for two years on Google's team building these cars. He is also on the board of the Foresight Institute (A nonprofit Nanotech think-tank) and technical advisor to delivery robot company Starship Technologies, NewAer, and Quanergy. He is also a well known photographer and artist at Burning Man, and a popular speaker at international events on cars, online rights and other topics.
