Inside the Electronic Frontier Foundation 98
First time accepted submitter qwerdf writes "The Electronic Frontier Foundation's goal is 'defending your rights in the digital world', and its activities span the full gamut of freedom fighting: providing help with court cases; issuing white papers that explain current threats; running campaigns to spread awareness of various issues; and developing technologies that make our online activities safer from prying eyes. Here's a short history of how the EFF came together, what it has done so far, and how it's preparing for upcoming battles."
Small factual error? (Score:5, Informative)
Taking on the United States Secret Service is a pretty risky venture... But that’s exactly what the EFF did, shortly after it was founded in July 1990. The Secret Service had raided a small videogames book publisher, looking for a stolen technical document that might fall into the wrong hands.
If it's referring to the raid on Steve Jackson Games, SJG wasn't a 'videogames book publisher'.
EFFail (Score:1, Informative)
Unfortunately, as with all freedom-seeking organizations, the EFFs scorecard consists of losses which have already occurred, partial losses, and losses which will occur in the future. DMCA? Total loss. Copyright extensions? Total loss. CISPA? Stopped for now, we'll see it in the future. Broadcast flag? Delay, then loss -- the FCC now allows cable companies to encrypt everything, and the government is attempting to end TV broadcasting entirely to give the spectrum to cell phone companies. Surveillance? Total loss, as a Snowden has revealed. Lawsuits against corporate leakers? They may have won on paper, but the chilling effect appears to have ended the juicy leaks.
Not really their fault; it's just that the age of freedom is over. Few care, and those who do are mostly against it.
Re:Money well spent (Score:5, Informative)
EFF you (Score:5, Informative)
CISPA was a big win. No, they didn't stop it forever, but if you expected that to happen you're an idiot. What was the EFF supposed to do? Murder every CEO who wanted something similar to it, murder every lobbyist who would take their money, and murder every legislator who would take their meetings? Maintaining freedom is an active process, not a one time thing.
You list about four other losses. Summarize their full list of litigation [wikipedia.org] if you're going to say they do nothing but lose.
This is not me shooting the messenger either. What you're doing is more akin to a football player in a close game screaming "We're going to lose! Repent! Defeat is inevitable! We can't win, they're going to hurt us, we may as well forfeit because our QB sucks!!!"
(Note that I never played football, but I'm pretty sure that's a good way to help the other team win)
Re:Different focus these days (Score:5, Informative)
Are you insane? EFF has been at the *forefront* of the tracking/surveillance issue. Who did AT&T whistleblower Mark Klein choose to receive his inside information about how his employer was colluding with the NSA to spy on Americans? Why, that would be the EFF, who then proceeded to bring it to public attention and sue both AT&T (Hepting v. AT&T) and the NSA (Jewel v. NSA), beginning SEVEN YEARS AGO in 2006. Fuck, read a single webpage [eff.org] and learn something, instead of ignorantly trashing one of the biggest forces for good that we have.
Re:Small factual error? (Score:5, Informative)
I remember logging in the day after the raid. Strange message came up instead of their normal B.B.S. .
Then the stories from SJG about the raid. How the 'agents' ate the teams donuts, and broke open locks with the team standing there with the keys.
It was later found out that the warrant authorizing the raid really shouldn't have been granted in the first place, to put it mildly.
I know SJG has the story on their site. If you're interested, go check it out. I'm sure it's a lot better than my so called memory.
http://sjgames.com/SS/
Re:EFFail (Score:4, Informative)
Most of it, and they got paid too.
Re:Small factual error? (Score:4, Informative)
Then the EFF's own page is wrong:
https://www.eff.org/about/history
"One of the alleged recipients of the E911 document was the systems operator at a small games book publisher out of Austin, Texas, named Steve Jackson Games."
the point is that they didn't publish videogames..
sure, some videogames were published out of the material. but not the same thing.
Re:Money well spent (Score:5, Informative)
Re:EFF is a mixed bag (Score:4, Informative)
The EFF want to ban your spam filters - they consider them to be "censorship", and unacceptable (unless there's never, ever a legitimate email accidentally blocked for any user - which isn't possibly, even theoretically).
http://w2.eff.org/spam/position_on_junk_email.php [eff.org]
(Old document, but still their current position).
Now that is a very creative (i.e. totally fucked up) interpretation of the EFF's clearly stated stance on spam. In point of fact, the EFF explicitly supports "your spam filters". To wit, "On a larger scale, EFF supports combatting spam by providing end-users with adequate tools to filter unwanted messages on the receiving end."