Background
EPIC was founded in 1994 by David Banisar, Marc Rotenberg, and David Sobel, as a joint project of the Fund for Constitutional Government and Computer Professionals for Social Responsibility. Early on, the organization focused on government surveillance and cryptography issues, such as the Clipper Chip and the Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act, or CALEA. After becoming an independent non-profit organization in November 2000, EPIC has continued to work on governmental issues: surveillance; transparency, using the Freedom of Information Act to publicize documents; and the security, verifiability, and privacy of electronic voting. It has also taken up the growing number of consumer privacy issues, such as identity theft, phone record security, medical record privacy, and commercial data mining. In 1997 Wayne Madsen, now an investigative journalist on international security issues and counterterrorism, joined EPIC as a senior fellow, leaving in 2005
Read more about this topic: Electronic Privacy Information Center
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