This article is about John Gilmore, founder of the Electronic Frontier Foundation. See John Gilmore for the jazz saxophonist, or John Gilmore for the Pennsylviania Representative.

John Gilmore is one of the founders of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the Cypherpunks mailing list, and Cygnus Solutions. He created the alt.* hierarchy in Usenet.

As the fifth employee of Sun Microsystems and founder of Cygnus Support, he accumulated sufficient wealth to take an early retirement and pursue other interests. He is a frequent contributor to free software, and worked on several GNU projects, including maintaining the GNU Debugger. He founded the FreeS/WAN project, an implementation of IPsec, to promote the encryption of Internet traffic.

He owns the domain toad.com. He runs the mail server at toad.com as an open mail relay, allowing friends who travel to send e-mail through his server. In March 2002, this was in the news since an Internet virus had that mail server hardcoded as one of the open mail relays it would use to propagate itself. In October 2002, John's ISP, Verio, cut off his Internet access because he refused to stop providing his service, even though John's relay was programmed to be essentially useless to spammers and other senders of mass email.

An outspoken libertarian, Gilmore has sued the FAA, Department of Justice, and others arguing the unconstitutionality of travel security policies.

External links

• John Gilmore's website
• Gilmore v. Ashcroft information
• http://www.toad.com/gnu/verio-censorship.html
• John Gilmore on inflight activism, spam and sarongs; interview by Mikael Pawlo , August 18, 2004.