Independent Voting Member
John Gilmore is an entrepreneur and civil libertarian. He was an early employee of Sun Microsystems, early free software and open source author, and co-created Cygnus Solutions, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the Cypherpunks, the DES Cracker, and the Usenet’s “alt” newsgroups. He’s spent 40 years doing programming, hardware and software design, management, advocacy, philosophy, philanthropy, and investment. Along with being a board member of MAPS, he is also on the boards of the Electronic Frontier Foundation and the Marijuana Policy Project. He is trying to get people to think more about the society they are building. His advocacy on encryption aims to improve public understanding of this fundamental technology for privacy and accountability in open societies. His advocacy on drug policy aims to reduce the immense harms caused by government attempts to control the mental states of free citizens.