

Ask HN: What does the E.F.F. do, exactly? - mtowle

https://www.eff.org/victories<p>9 items long, most of them in the 1990s, and none of them directly involve the E.F.F. anyway. What do these guys do?
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tptacek
Looking to start a fight? :)

EFF does 4 things, as I see it:

(a) They contribute to legal defenses in important online civil rights cases:

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_litigation_involving_th...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_litigation_involving_the_Electronic_Frontier_Foundation)

(b) They lobby.

(c) They run awareness efforts for (a), (b), and some related issues (like,
recently, whether companies like Google should use open standards for chat
clients). A lot of this involves stuff like blog writing.

(d) Like all nonprofits, they do a _lot_ of fundraising. Charity Navigator
tracks a lot of this stuff. EFF spends ~15% of its budget on fundraising
(putting them squarely in the middle of the pack for nonprofits).

If you're sketchy on donating to EFF (like I am), ACLU is another organization
with a similar mission to EFF that is by-the-numbers more effective; ACLU is
also (from what I can find) more transparent about what it spends its money on
(its largest single line item is "legal"; EFF doesn't break things out any
further than "Salary").

It's definitely not fair to say that EFF only has 9 "victories" because of
what that web page says.

