This is a transparent hit piece, e.g. Berman endorsing CALEA is supposed to be evidence of EFF supporting it even though he was promptly removed over it and their stance is clearly against it:
Or it talks about their support for ISPs, but at the time these were the hundreds of small dial up ISPs that were each highly competitive small businesses with half dozen employees tying a modem bank to a T1 line, not the likes of Comcast and Verizon as we know them today. The EFF was consistently in favor of rules like local loop unbundling that would have prevented their monopolization of that market when it converted from dialup to broadband.
It just goes on like that, pointing to half truths and claiming them as evidence that the EFF is some kind of nefarious front.
The main claim seems to be that they should be lobbying against Google and Facebook on privacy, but that's just a policy disagreement. Privacy regulations -- most regulations -- cement incumbents. If you don't want Facebook forever then what you want is a decentralized social network, not federal utility regulation of Facebook.
From what I've read so far (about half), it definitely feels like a hit piece, but it might come out more effective than transparent.
From the beginning, there were signs and a general feeling that there was an agenda that was forthcoming, and only slightly alluded to. It comes in full force only later, when well into the article, so I wonder how many people that weren't primed to look for it or didn't sense something amiss early where successfully primed from the first portion to accept the insinuated problems later.
> Privacy regulations -- most regulations -- cement incumbents.
I’m not sure about this. This seems likely in industries where the user-facing product/service is necessarily tied to the business model (e.g. manufacturing cars, nuclear power plants, dentistry, etc.).
But that’s not the case with the Internet giants. Surveillance capitalism is the business model that Facebook and Google have chosen, but that doesn’t mean that we can’t have a social network or a search engine sustained though a different one.
It’s the business model, not the service (or the technology), which violates peoples’ privacy.
And it’s one that, upon reflection after reading the article, the EFF seem to be a supporter of.
There are a good number of valid points, but the article's arguments in support of SOPA and PIPA are weak. Even assuming that online copyright violations are a cancer on the economy, there needs to be some sense of proportionality. Most people and organizations didn't necessarily object to better enforcement; they objected to the manner. Crime is likely to decrease if we were to install surveillance cameras on every street corner, but those cameras are neither reasonable nor conducive to a free society.
The most compelling argument is the importance of large-scale corporate surveillance to infringements on civil rights. To its (partial) credit, Google is as open as it can be about governmental requests for its vast troves of information. It turns over data to governments more than 200,000 times per year [0], often without a warrant (or equivalent) and frequently to countries with appaling human rights records. Further, it has at least once turned over a list of all people who were in area at the time of a crime [1]. Google may have collected location data for benign reasons, but it has now been used to harm its users. I fear this pattern is going to play out with more frequency and greater severity.
There's certainly some truth to the idea that EFF, like all nonprofits that accept corporate funding, may be somewhat beholden to those donors. That said, over 25% of its funding is from membership dues [1]. Ironically, the Center for Democracy and Technology (CDT), only briefly touched on in the article, has a reputation for being much closer to a corporate-first lobbying organization than EFF. Of course, as the article points out, CDT was only created when EFF's members balked at Berman's complicity in CALEA's passage.
The Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC), briefly touted in the article, doesn't accept corporate donations, but it's also a fairly small organization. It also suffers from being closely associated with a single individual, as opposed to being a large, well-marketed non-profit. That said, they generally do good work, largely by filing amcius briefs in important privacy cases and exposing issues through FOIA filings.
In any case, it seems odd the author considers EFF a stealth lobbying organization when associations like TechNet are explicitly designed to lobby for the big tech corporations, while keeping their names out of the spotlight. Why not shine a light on them?
Fun fact: On the very same day that EFF was founded, the freshly created organization made a $275,000 grant to Computer Professionals for Social Responsibility (CPSR) which just a few years later would become EPIC [2].
I was really peeved at this piece the entire time I was reading.
I think there is one important takeaway I can agree with, though. Advocacy organizations like the EFF or the ACLU should be focused on their (nominative) constituents, not their (nominative) enemies. So in the EFF's case, "digital privacy" not "stopping government overreach". When advocacy organizations focus too much on a particular vector instead of the underlying goal, they risk losing their mandate.
The EFF fights the good fight on the governmental side, and has done a ton of great work on the corporate side that the author isn't giving credit for -- Do Not Track, user education (on stuff like super cookies and browser fingerprinting), and so on. Long before "you are the product" became a thing you might hear in Congress or on cable television, the phrase was already trite among EFF's core demographic.
But they could still improve their private sector digital privacy advocacy. The Santa Clara Principles are a step in the right direction.
What a bizarre and dishonest piece of historical revisionism: by cherry picking short fragments of quotes without providing proper references the author builds up some support for his completely baseless accusations. The EFF have never downplayed the privacy issues of GMail, on the contrary, they warned us all about these issues and one can easily verify this by searching their old blog posts:
And then he goes on implying that these Silicon Valley astroturfers manipulated the public opinion on SOPA so Google could make billions by publishing pirated music on YouTube... baffling indeed.
I find Yasha Levine’s writing style often sensationalist (the Tor ‘exposés’ especially), and cringed a little when I saw his name on the article, but this peice contained some great history which I was unaware of.
I’d always thought of Gmail as a defining moment for surveillance capitalism, and not being in the US at the time, wasn’t aware of extremely prescient legislation about email privacy which EFF helped crush, and were extremely rude about (before the EFF staffer on the subject went off to do PR at Google).
I find it pretty amazing that EFF have said nothing about the California Consumer Privacy bill passing in the last week, an extremely significant bill for Californians, but strongly opposed by Google.
I’ll still support the EFF, but it’s clear that I should find some more genuinely pro-privacy organizations to support too.
> wasn’t aware of extremely prescient legislation about email privacy which EFF helped crush
Interestingly, while reading that section, I couldn't help thinking EFF was in the right to oppose it. Wanting to restrict what a corporation can mine about you is laudable, but achieving it through a hack such as (in the article's description) "prohibited email providers like Google from reading or otherwise analyzing people’s emails for targeted ads unless they received affirmative opt-in consent from all parties involved in the conversation—a difficult-to-impossible requirement that would have effectively nipped Gmail’s business model in the bud." seems an extremely poorly conceived way to do so. In the real world, that would be the equivalent to requiring you to get permission from anyone that sends you a letter before showing it to someone else. That's an extremely information hostile stance, and would have likely had far-reaching effects the majority of us would consider negative.
If you really want to protect people, you give those people rights, you don't restrict specific types of third parties from performing specific actions, as that's easily circumvented and generally it ends up causing weird negative interpretations later as people try to expand it to new situations it didn't envision and we have case law expanding a restriction instead of legislation (or at worst case law expanding a right).
If what we really desire is that all parties in a correspondence need to agree before it's shared with a third party, we need to specifically legislate that, and not just use it as a shortcut for the intended goal. Something as far reaching as that and possibly conflicting with freedom of speech should not be considered lightly.
Truthfully, that's about par for how biased this article seems to be presenting things. I wouldn't be at all surprised if people found that on researching some of the claims they became more familiar, and they found they did know of them at the time and had a stance, but the presentation here is so foreign to how they remember it that as to be unrecognized when presented in the article.
I'm not going to say the EFF is perfect, or without it's own bias or conflicts, but I would be very suspect of anything you learn about them where the majority of the information is sourced from this article.
> The truth is that EFF is a corporate front. It is America’s oldest and most influential internet business lobby.
By now I hope that it's an obvious tactic to rant about radical, provocative claims and try to force everyone to respond. Let's do it differently - really the only rational way: The burden of proof needs to be on the person making the claim - I can't say, 'gravity runs backward in other galaxies', I have to prove it. So let them substantiate, thoroughly, any claims - the more radical, the more they need to substantiate it - before they are worth any of your attention.
> Apple had the ability to unlock the phone, but it refused— on principle.
On the principle that the government can't compel you to work on its behalf through the simple issuance of a warrant.
That's the problem with these kinds these cases, they usually involve protecting the civil rights of a really bad person "on principle" so later someone can come along and say they were protecting "the terrorists" instead of the rights of every single American citizen.
>How can it be, when it’s a willing participant in the PRISM program, which lets the CIA and NSA siphon whatever data their spies need directly from Apple’s data centers?
Isn't this a bit of a oversimplification? Is Apple really just opening their entire data center as described?
For an article that wants us to look deeper or take a more critical look quotes like that seem really dumb if Apple isn't just opening it all up.
So yes, this is a hit piece, and a lot of it isn’t entirely fair to the EFF. But there is some value to at least examining the organization’s track record, and while it should be lauded for its stellar record on government surveillance, the criticism of its often tepid response to corporate spying is worth considering.
It's a good article with a lot of information but I think the intro isn't too great. I would probably skip to the "Freedom, Worked Over" section and read from there.
To the article though, I honestly had no idea about this side of EFF. It's definitely changed the way I feel about them.
I agree. I've always held the EFF in a "they battle for good" light, without really researching their history or motives properly. So, it seems their marketing is at least effective.
> Facebook, Yahoo, Amazon, eBay, Mozilla, Reddit, PayPal, Twitter, and scores of smaller tech companies went into battle mode to oppose SOPA and PIPA.
This author is getting some basic points wrong in this section that force me to reserve judgment on the entire article. (Unfortunate, since I think it's a great idea for journalists to do the hard work of checking up on orgs like EFF in a broad critique like this.)
Aaron Swartz was the one who went into battle mode to oppose these bills, starting with COICA in September 2010.
Aaron's own speech on the subject:
"Now if you've been reading the press you probably didn't hear this part of the story. As Hollywood has been telling it, the 'Great Good Copyright Bill' they were pushing was stopped by the evil internet companies who make millions of dollars off of copyright infringement. But it just really wasn't true. I mean, I was in there-- in the meetings with the internet companies. (Actually probably all here today.) And if all their profits depended on copyright infringement they would have put a lot more money into changing copyright law. The fact is, the bigger internet companies-- they would do just fine if this bill passed. I mean, they wouldn't be thrilled about it, but I doubt they would even have a noticeable dip in their stock price.
"So they were against it, but they were against it like the rest of us on grounds primarily of principle. And principle doesn't have a lot of money in the budget to spend on lobbyists.
"So they were practical about it. Look, they said, this bill is going to pass. In fact, it's probably going to pass unanimously. As much as we try, this is not a train we're going to be able to stop. So we're not going to support it-- couldn't support it. But in opposition let's just try to make it better.
"So that was the strategy. Lobby to make the bill better. They had lists of changes that would make the bill less obnoxious, or less expensive for them, or whatever. But the fact remained at the end of the day it was going to be the bill that was going to censor the internet. And there was nothing we could do to stop it.
"So I did was you always do when you're a little guy facing a terrible future with long odds and little hope for success..."
If you want to know the 10 things Aaron did next to prevent internet censorship[1], listen to the rest of the speech[2].
1: Clickbait ftw. But if your going to get tricked into watching something it might as well be worthwhile every now and then. :)
I'm only about halfway through, but the whole style of this article is already setting off alarms for me. It's a lot of innuendo as opposed to explanation of why things are bad or problematic.
The idea for EFF was hatched in 1990 by two millionaires, software mogul Mitch Kapor and John Perry Barlow, songwriter for the Grateful Dead and the wealthy heir to a ranching estate in Wyoming. Barlow, who died earlier this year, is today best known for penning the “Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace,” a barely comprehensible but much-applauded rant against the evils of government influence over the internet that he typed out on an Apple laptop in some posh hotel in Davos.
So, the fact he had money, was in Switzerland, and used an Apple laptop are somehow relevant here? It feels like she's trying to use his wealth as an indicator of his character here. The next paragraph talks about how they first met:
Kapor and Barlow had met on a digital message board platform run by cult hippy entrepreneur Stewart Brand, of Whole Earth Catalog fame. The two of them traded stories about government witch hunts and botched investigations into totally normal cyberspace activities—things like hacking into computers and circulating stolen source code.
Even if entirely true, I have a sneaking suspicion that the people in question could add details that made it sound a bit less nefarious.
And then it goes on with what they were doing whenthe EFF was actually thought up, which was during a quick drop-in using one's "Bizjet" to the ranch that started all this.
There's recounting history so people have context, and then there's recounting history so to put people into a desired context, whether it's all that accurate or not. This smacks of the latter.
Berman was a Beltway insider who in the 1980s was at the center of a push to turn the ACLU into a big business lobby and an ally of intelligence agencies and right-wing political interests. Among other things, the Berman-era ACLU defended Big Tobacco from regulations on advertising and worked with the National Rifle Association to fight electronic collection of arrest data by the Department of Justice for background checks to deny firearms licenses.
So, the ACLU defends companies that traditional EFF supporters sometimes dislike? Is this supposed to be news? Isn't that one of the reasons they have a lot of respect, because they stand on principle of the issues, not on how liked the people are, as that's the only way to make sure your liberties are always respected, not just when you're part of an acceptable group?
Among Berman’s personal achievements: working with the CIA on an early version of a bill that criminalized disclosing the names of CIA agents—a law that was later used to prosecute and jail CIA officer John Kiriakou, who blew the whistle on the Agency’s use of waterboarding as a torture and interrogation technique.
Oh, and now we're criticizing a man for the how a law that he supported was later used to ill effect?
I was getting an uneasy feeling about the presentation style for the first quarter of the article, the second quarter is where all this popped out. I'm only about halfway through, so I guess I'll see how it turns out, but my expectations of any sort of fair or rational argument are definitely lower than when I began.
Yeah, the beginning really misses the mark. But two of the things you didn't like I think are actually very reasonable.
> "...totally normal cyberspace activities—things like hacking into computers and circulating stolen source code."
> Even if entirely true, I have a sneaking suspicion that the people in question could add details that made it sound a bit less nefarious.
No, I think this is fair.
The EFF has always been a huge advocate for watering down the CFAA. That's actually one of the main reasons I've donated to EFF in the past.
And FWIW I think this is a tactical error on the part of Yasha Levine. The constituency most likely to be swayed by her message is going to be turned off by this sort of tough-on-crime, throw-everyone-in-jail BS.
This piece would be 1000% more likely to resonate with its target audience if it started by acknowledging all of the good work that the EFF does, and then went on to ask why the EFF hasn't taken a stronger stance on some of the private sector abuses of some of its core values (such as digital privacy).
> So, the ACLU defends companies that traditional EFF supporters sometimes dislike? Is this supposed to be news?
I think the point the author is trying to make is that there's a precedent for civil rights advocacy organizations being co-opted by corporate interests. Which is actually a reasonable thing to point out.
Apple's pretentious stance on privacy is baffling. Threatened with a blackout in China, they rolled over like an obedient lap-dog and quietly transitioned ALL iCloud-China related compute and storage to a government controlled cloud. And, wait for it, the EFF didn't so much as make a peep
>Threatened with a blackout in China, they rolled over like an obedient lap-dog and quietly transitioned ALL iCloud-China related compute and storage to a government controlled cloud.
The Chinese App Store generates 6-8 billion annually in revenue and that's not even including the revenue from their other services. China is also one of their largest phone markets, if not the largest, and the source of their growth so of course Apple rolled over like a lap dog and handed over the data of their Chinese users to the Chinese government. The fact that the EFF has been so silent on the the hypocrisy of Apple's privacy policy says a lot.
Call me what you want, but I kinda get it. The world has a lot of places... nations, they all expect you to cooperate, is that Apple's problem to solve by sitting out? Does that really do anything?
[+] [-] AnthonyMouse|7 years ago|reply
https://www.eff.org/issues/calea
Or it talks about their support for ISPs, but at the time these were the hundreds of small dial up ISPs that were each highly competitive small businesses with half dozen employees tying a modem bank to a T1 line, not the likes of Comcast and Verizon as we know them today. The EFF was consistently in favor of rules like local loop unbundling that would have prevented their monopolization of that market when it converted from dialup to broadband.
It just goes on like that, pointing to half truths and claiming them as evidence that the EFF is some kind of nefarious front.
The main claim seems to be that they should be lobbying against Google and Facebook on privacy, but that's just a policy disagreement. Privacy regulations -- most regulations -- cement incumbents. If you don't want Facebook forever then what you want is a decentralized social network, not federal utility regulation of Facebook.
[+] [-] kbenson|7 years ago|reply
From what I've read so far (about half), it definitely feels like a hit piece, but it might come out more effective than transparent.
From the beginning, there were signs and a general feeling that there was an agenda that was forthcoming, and only slightly alluded to. It comes in full force only later, when well into the article, so I wonder how many people that weren't primed to look for it or didn't sense something amiss early where successfully primed from the first portion to accept the insinuated problems later.
[+] [-] confounded|7 years ago|reply
I’m not sure about this. This seems likely in industries where the user-facing product/service is necessarily tied to the business model (e.g. manufacturing cars, nuclear power plants, dentistry, etc.).
But that’s not the case with the Internet giants. Surveillance capitalism is the business model that Facebook and Google have chosen, but that doesn’t mean that we can’t have a social network or a search engine sustained though a different one.
It’s the business model, not the service (or the technology), which violates peoples’ privacy.
And it’s one that, upon reflection after reading the article, the EFF seem to be a supporter of.
[+] [-] arctux|7 years ago|reply
The most compelling argument is the importance of large-scale corporate surveillance to infringements on civil rights. To its (partial) credit, Google is as open as it can be about governmental requests for its vast troves of information. It turns over data to governments more than 200,000 times per year [0], often without a warrant (or equivalent) and frequently to countries with appaling human rights records. Further, it has at least once turned over a list of all people who were in area at the time of a crime [1]. Google may have collected location data for benign reasons, but it has now been used to harm its users. I fear this pattern is going to play out with more frequency and greater severity.
[0] https://transparencyreport.google.com/ [1] http://www.newsobserver.com/news/local/counties/wake-county/...
[+] [-] casiotone|7 years ago|reply
No credit should be given. Google and the states it works with are not adversaries.
[+] [-] Nrbelex|7 years ago|reply
The Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC), briefly touted in the article, doesn't accept corporate donations, but it's also a fairly small organization. It also suffers from being closely associated with a single individual, as opposed to being a large, well-marketed non-profit. That said, they generally do good work, largely by filing amcius briefs in important privacy cases and exposing issues through FOIA filings.
In any case, it seems odd the author considers EFF a stealth lobbying organization when associations like TechNet are explicitly designed to lobby for the big tech corporations, while keeping their names out of the spotlight. Why not shine a light on them?
Fun fact: On the very same day that EFF was founded, the freshly created organization made a $275,000 grant to Computer Professionals for Social Responsibility (CPSR) which just a few years later would become EPIC [2].
[1] https://www.charitynavigator.org/index.cfm?bay=search.summar... [2] http://tech-insider.org/eff/research/1990/0710.html
[+] [-] throwawayjava|7 years ago|reply
I think there is one important takeaway I can agree with, though. Advocacy organizations like the EFF or the ACLU should be focused on their (nominative) constituents, not their (nominative) enemies. So in the EFF's case, "digital privacy" not "stopping government overreach". When advocacy organizations focus too much on a particular vector instead of the underlying goal, they risk losing their mandate.
The EFF fights the good fight on the governmental side, and has done a ton of great work on the corporate side that the author isn't giving credit for -- Do Not Track, user education (on stuff like super cookies and browser fingerprinting), and so on. Long before "you are the product" became a thing you might hear in Congress or on cable television, the phrase was already trite among EFF's core demographic.
But they could still improve their private sector digital privacy advocacy. The Santa Clara Principles are a step in the right direction.
[+] [-] pera|7 years ago|reply
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2004/04/gmail-rough-guide-prot...
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2004/04/gmail-whats-deal
And then he goes on implying that these Silicon Valley astroturfers manipulated the public opinion on SOPA so Google could make billions by publishing pirated music on YouTube... baffling indeed.
[+] [-] confounded|7 years ago|reply
I’d always thought of Gmail as a defining moment for surveillance capitalism, and not being in the US at the time, wasn’t aware of extremely prescient legislation about email privacy which EFF helped crush, and were extremely rude about (before the EFF staffer on the subject went off to do PR at Google).
I find it pretty amazing that EFF have said nothing about the California Consumer Privacy bill passing in the last week, an extremely significant bill for Californians, but strongly opposed by Google.
I’ll still support the EFF, but it’s clear that I should find some more genuinely pro-privacy organizations to support too.
[+] [-] kbenson|7 years ago|reply
Interestingly, while reading that section, I couldn't help thinking EFF was in the right to oppose it. Wanting to restrict what a corporation can mine about you is laudable, but achieving it through a hack such as (in the article's description) "prohibited email providers like Google from reading or otherwise analyzing people’s emails for targeted ads unless they received affirmative opt-in consent from all parties involved in the conversation—a difficult-to-impossible requirement that would have effectively nipped Gmail’s business model in the bud." seems an extremely poorly conceived way to do so. In the real world, that would be the equivalent to requiring you to get permission from anyone that sends you a letter before showing it to someone else. That's an extremely information hostile stance, and would have likely had far-reaching effects the majority of us would consider negative.
If you really want to protect people, you give those people rights, you don't restrict specific types of third parties from performing specific actions, as that's easily circumvented and generally it ends up causing weird negative interpretations later as people try to expand it to new situations it didn't envision and we have case law expanding a restriction instead of legislation (or at worst case law expanding a right).
If what we really desire is that all parties in a correspondence need to agree before it's shared with a third party, we need to specifically legislate that, and not just use it as a shortcut for the intended goal. Something as far reaching as that and possibly conflicting with freedom of speech should not be considered lightly.
Truthfully, that's about par for how biased this article seems to be presenting things. I wouldn't be at all surprised if people found that on researching some of the claims they became more familiar, and they found they did know of them at the time and had a stance, but the presentation here is so foreign to how they remember it that as to be unrecognized when presented in the article.
I'm not going to say the EFF is perfect, or without it's own bias or conflicts, but I would be very suspect of anything you learn about them where the majority of the information is sourced from this article.
[+] [-] forapurpose|7 years ago|reply
By now I hope that it's an obvious tactic to rant about radical, provocative claims and try to force everyone to respond. Let's do it differently - really the only rational way: The burden of proof needs to be on the person making the claim - I can't say, 'gravity runs backward in other galaxies', I have to prove it. So let them substantiate, thoroughly, any claims - the more radical, the more they need to substantiate it - before they are worth any of your attention.
[+] [-] UncleEntity|7 years ago|reply
On the principle that the government can't compel you to work on its behalf through the simple issuance of a warrant.
That's the problem with these kinds these cases, they usually involve protecting the civil rights of a really bad person "on principle" so later someone can come along and say they were protecting "the terrorists" instead of the rights of every single American citizen.
[+] [-] duxup|7 years ago|reply
Isn't this a bit of a oversimplification? Is Apple really just opening their entire data center as described?
For an article that wants us to look deeper or take a more critical look quotes like that seem really dumb if Apple isn't just opening it all up.
[+] [-] mortenjorck|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] frgtpsswrdlame|7 years ago|reply
To the article though, I honestly had no idea about this side of EFF. It's definitely changed the way I feel about them.
[+] [-] forapurpose|7 years ago|reply
What about the article made you believe what Levine said?
[+] [-] wildebaard|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jancsika|7 years ago|reply
This author is getting some basic points wrong in this section that force me to reserve judgment on the entire article. (Unfortunate, since I think it's a great idea for journalists to do the hard work of checking up on orgs like EFF in a broad critique like this.)
Aaron Swartz was the one who went into battle mode to oppose these bills, starting with COICA in September 2010.
Aaron's own speech on the subject:
"Now if you've been reading the press you probably didn't hear this part of the story. As Hollywood has been telling it, the 'Great Good Copyright Bill' they were pushing was stopped by the evil internet companies who make millions of dollars off of copyright infringement. But it just really wasn't true. I mean, I was in there-- in the meetings with the internet companies. (Actually probably all here today.) And if all their profits depended on copyright infringement they would have put a lot more money into changing copyright law. The fact is, the bigger internet companies-- they would do just fine if this bill passed. I mean, they wouldn't be thrilled about it, but I doubt they would even have a noticeable dip in their stock price.
"So they were against it, but they were against it like the rest of us on grounds primarily of principle. And principle doesn't have a lot of money in the budget to spend on lobbyists.
"So they were practical about it. Look, they said, this bill is going to pass. In fact, it's probably going to pass unanimously. As much as we try, this is not a train we're going to be able to stop. So we're not going to support it-- couldn't support it. But in opposition let's just try to make it better.
"So that was the strategy. Lobby to make the bill better. They had lists of changes that would make the bill less obnoxious, or less expensive for them, or whatever. But the fact remained at the end of the day it was going to be the bill that was going to censor the internet. And there was nothing we could do to stop it.
"So I did was you always do when you're a little guy facing a terrible future with long odds and little hope for success..."
If you want to know the 10 things Aaron did next to prevent internet censorship[1], listen to the rest of the speech[2].
1: Clickbait ftw. But if your going to get tricked into watching something it might as well be worthwhile every now and then. :)
2: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fgh2dFngFsg
[+] [-] kbenson|7 years ago|reply
The idea for EFF was hatched in 1990 by two millionaires, software mogul Mitch Kapor and John Perry Barlow, songwriter for the Grateful Dead and the wealthy heir to a ranching estate in Wyoming. Barlow, who died earlier this year, is today best known for penning the “Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace,” a barely comprehensible but much-applauded rant against the evils of government influence over the internet that he typed out on an Apple laptop in some posh hotel in Davos.
So, the fact he had money, was in Switzerland, and used an Apple laptop are somehow relevant here? It feels like she's trying to use his wealth as an indicator of his character here. The next paragraph talks about how they first met:
Kapor and Barlow had met on a digital message board platform run by cult hippy entrepreneur Stewart Brand, of Whole Earth Catalog fame. The two of them traded stories about government witch hunts and botched investigations into totally normal cyberspace activities—things like hacking into computers and circulating stolen source code.
Even if entirely true, I have a sneaking suspicion that the people in question could add details that made it sound a bit less nefarious.
And then it goes on with what they were doing whenthe EFF was actually thought up, which was during a quick drop-in using one's "Bizjet" to the ranch that started all this.
There's recounting history so people have context, and then there's recounting history so to put people into a desired context, whether it's all that accurate or not. This smacks of the latter.
Berman was a Beltway insider who in the 1980s was at the center of a push to turn the ACLU into a big business lobby and an ally of intelligence agencies and right-wing political interests. Among other things, the Berman-era ACLU defended Big Tobacco from regulations on advertising and worked with the National Rifle Association to fight electronic collection of arrest data by the Department of Justice for background checks to deny firearms licenses.
So, the ACLU defends companies that traditional EFF supporters sometimes dislike? Is this supposed to be news? Isn't that one of the reasons they have a lot of respect, because they stand on principle of the issues, not on how liked the people are, as that's the only way to make sure your liberties are always respected, not just when you're part of an acceptable group?
Among Berman’s personal achievements: working with the CIA on an early version of a bill that criminalized disclosing the names of CIA agents—a law that was later used to prosecute and jail CIA officer John Kiriakou, who blew the whistle on the Agency’s use of waterboarding as a torture and interrogation technique.
Oh, and now we're criticizing a man for the how a law that he supported was later used to ill effect?
I was getting an uneasy feeling about the presentation style for the first quarter of the article, the second quarter is where all this popped out. I'm only about halfway through, so I guess I'll see how it turns out, but my expectations of any sort of fair or rational argument are definitely lower than when I began.
[+] [-] throwawayjava|7 years ago|reply
> "...totally normal cyberspace activities—things like hacking into computers and circulating stolen source code."
> Even if entirely true, I have a sneaking suspicion that the people in question could add details that made it sound a bit less nefarious.
No, I think this is fair.
The EFF has always been a huge advocate for watering down the CFAA. That's actually one of the main reasons I've donated to EFF in the past.
And FWIW I think this is a tactical error on the part of Yasha Levine. The constituency most likely to be swayed by her message is going to be turned off by this sort of tough-on-crime, throw-everyone-in-jail BS.
This piece would be 1000% more likely to resonate with its target audience if it started by acknowledging all of the good work that the EFF does, and then went on to ask why the EFF hasn't taken a stronger stance on some of the private sector abuses of some of its core values (such as digital privacy).
> So, the ACLU defends companies that traditional EFF supporters sometimes dislike? Is this supposed to be news?
I think the point the author is trying to make is that there's a precedent for civil rights advocacy organizations being co-opted by corporate interests. Which is actually a reasonable thing to point out.
[+] [-] unknown|7 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] mankash666|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bitmapbrother|7 years ago|reply
The Chinese App Store generates 6-8 billion annually in revenue and that's not even including the revenue from their other services. China is also one of their largest phone markets, if not the largest, and the source of their growth so of course Apple rolled over like a lap dog and handed over the data of their Chinese users to the Chinese government. The fact that the EFF has been so silent on the the hypocrisy of Apple's privacy policy says a lot.
[+] [-] duxup|7 years ago|reply