EFF Spinoff Pools Donor Dollars To Prevent WikiLeaks-Style Payment Blockades 95
nonprofiteer writes "Two years ago, Visa, MasterCard, PayPal, Western Union and Bank of America cut off all funding to WikiLeaks. A group of free information advocates wants to prevent a similar financial blockade on information from happening again. Daniel Ellsberg, John Perry Barlow, and EFF staffers are founding the Freedom of the Press Foundation, an org that will raise money and channel it to edgy media groups that might suffer from a WikiLeaks-style embargo. When donors give to the Foundation, they can choose to have their funding passed on to any media group under the Foundation's umbrella (currently WikiLeaks, Muckrock, The National Security Archives and UpTake). That strategy aims to make it harder to cut funding to any of those organizations, or any added in the future. And because the site is encrypted, donors who worry about being identified as giving to any particularly controversial group can do so without being identified. It's like Tor for charitable giving."
bitcoins (Score:4, Interesting)
Sounds like they described the ideal business model for a bitcoin implementation. The EFF should accept bitcoins. Oh wait, they did, then the idiots stopped for no apparent reason.
Looks like a anti-design pattern of "not invented here". My gut level guess is we're about to see the release of a BTC fork called "effcoins" or something dumb like that. Exactly like BTC but it'll have a different name.
Don't get me wrong I'm a EFF cheerleader, love their goals and ideals, and I'm a past donator, they just really dropped the ball on this specific topic.
Re:Spot the obvious problem (Score:4, Interesting)
But it should. As it is, they wield orders of magnitude more power than a small business or individual, yet have no more responsibility. This is a recipe for disaster, and indeed we are all paying the bill for the utter irresponsibility of financial businesses right now.
Make sure you DON'T (Score:4, Interesting)