
All EFF’d Up - smacktoward
https://thebaffler.com/salvos/all-effd-up-levine
======
AnthonyMouse
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:

[https://www.eff.org/issues/calea](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.

~~~
confounded
> _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.

~~~
AnthonyMouse
> I’m not sure about this.

Which is why it's a policy disagreement. A lot of the people who want Facebook
dead and gone still think it should be done via competition and technology
rather than government regulation. Others may disagree. But neither position
is any proof of being a shill for Facebook.

> 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.

Right, that's kind of the point. If we can build one on a different model and
get people to use it then Facebook will wane without any requirement for
government intervention, and a lot of people are actively working on that
right now.

But if you pass new laws, they typically have unintended consequences. Normal
non-surveillance businesses will still have their customers' IP addresses,
names, email addresses, etc. for normal business reasons having nothing to do
with data mining. If regulations require anyone with that kind of information
to be a large established company in order to afford the compliance costs, you
won't get new competitors anymore.

~~~
wildebaard
I don't think the point of the article was that EFF should _not_ fight
government on privacy, but that it _isn't_ also fighting the same fight, for
the same privacy, against corporations. At least, that's how I read it. It
then goes on about how current copyright laws are broken and that SEPA was an
attempt to fix that, which should have been heralded. Personally I do not
fully agree with this, but the main point of the article (again, for me) was
the "hypocrisy".

~~~
AnthonyMouse
> I don't think the point of the article was that EFF should _not_ fight
> government on privacy, but that it _isn't_ also fighting the same fight, for
> the same privacy, against corporations.

But they are, they're just fighting it on a different front. A lot of bad laws
can't be countered with technology because the problem to begin with is that
the law prohibits the technology, e.g. you have to fight against key escrow
laws in Washington, you can't fix it with technology after the fact (and not
expect to be prosecuted).

Companies can be handled in the market, which is what they've been doing. The
EFF started the Tor project, which protects privacy _and_ promotes
decentralization through onion services. They're also behind a lot of the TLS-
promoting stuff like Let's Encrypt and HTTPS Everywhere. The more TLS there
is, the less ISPs and other MITMs can spy on plaintext. It also improves
privacy against web services because browsers treat HTTPS connections more
carefully, e.g. not providing cross-domain referrers.

That's their strategy. You fight the government in Washington and private
entities by writing code. That's hardly hypocrisy.

------
arctux
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.

[0]
[https://transparencyreport.google.com/](https://transparencyreport.google.com/)
[1] [http://www.newsobserver.com/news/local/counties/wake-
county/...](http://www.newsobserver.com/news/local/counties/wake-
county/article200271984.html)

~~~
casiotone
> To it's (partial) credit, Google is as open as it can be about governmental
> requests for its vast troves of information.

No credit should be given. Google and the states it works with are not
adversaries.

~~~
arctux
To be clear, I find Facebook and Google's tracking-based advertisement
business model repugnant. I was only giving credit as to the transparency
report, which it publishes despite not being required to do so.

~~~
casiotone
Right - but it's not like Google is unwillingly complying with surveillance.
They are happy to comply!

------
Nrbelex
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].

[1]
[https://www.charitynavigator.org/index.cfm?bay=search.summar...](https://www.charitynavigator.org/index.cfm?bay=search.summary&orgid=7576)
[2] [http://tech-insider.org/eff/research/1990/0710.html](http://tech-
insider.org/eff/research/1990/0710.html)

------
throwawayjava
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.

------
pera
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:

[https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2004/04/gmail-rough-guide-
prot...](https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2004/04/gmail-rough-guide-protecting-
your-privacy)

[https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2004/04/gmail-whats-
deal](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
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.

~~~
kbenson
> 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.

~~~
mchahn
> 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.

No, it is equivalent to the post office showing the letter to someone else.

------
forapurpose
> 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.

------
UncleEntity
> 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.

------
duxup
>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.

------
mortenjorck
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.

------
frgtpsswrdlame
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.

~~~
forapurpose
> I honestly had no idea about this side of EFF

What about the article made you believe what Levine said?

------
jancsika
> 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. :)

2:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fgh2dFngFsg](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fgh2dFngFsg)

------
kbenson
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.

~~~
throwawayjava
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.

~~~
kbenson
> 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).

I agree it would resonate more, but I think that would be counterproductive to
the goal, as it would promote critical thinking about the topic. to me,
nothing about this article seems to indicate that want to promote critical
thinking or a nuanced opinion of the EFF. It's all about driving a specific
point home, slowly, and with extreme bias, which is that the EFF is all about
supporting a specific corporate agenda instead of a set of principles.

> 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.

And it chose to make that point by insinuating the ACLU was co-opted by big
tobacco and the NRA, simply because it weighed in on cases in their favor.

What I was trying to get at, is they very much have a reputation of a "I may
hate what you say, but I'll defend to the death your right to say it" stance,
which fits perfectly well with the actions in question, at least in the detail
presented.

If there actually is a precedent as you say, then it _should_ be pointed out,
but with actual details, not innuendo. This article _insinuates_ quite a bit,
while saying almost nothing.

~~~
throwawayjava
_> This article insinuates quite a bit, while saying almost nothing._

That's certainly a valid criticism.

------
mankash666
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

~~~
duxup
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?

~~~
mankash666
It certainly isn't Apple's problem. But their marketing screams "We care about
your privacy", while their actions show otherwise.

It's completely OK for Apple to pursue their business interests, but the false
moral high-ground is deceptive.

~~~
LamaOfRuin
Apple provides the Chinese government with the same powers they provide the US
government (and don't delude yourself into thinking US laws don't also censor,
even if we have different standards). At the same time, as a local device with
iCloud disabled, they provide the most usably private device that is widely
available, in a place where there are a large number of technically
sophisticated dissidents that can benefit from it.

We may wish Apple would use their vast economic resources to attempt more
nudging towards liberal western values, but from the public information I'm
aware of, they seem far less hypocritical than most companies (or governments,
especially the US).

~~~
mankash666
> as a local device with iCloud disabled, they provide the most usably private
> device that is widely available

This! The very fact that you perceive Apple to be more private than the
competition is the exact point I'm harping on.

That's a perception, not the truth. A Google pixel, or Samsung Galaxy (with
encrypted storeage enabled) offers as much, or as little in the way of "usable
privacy" that protects dissidents as Apple. Not to mention, dissidents are a
lot more common in politically turbulent developing countries where an iPhone
X costs as much as 6 months in wages. So, let's not pretend like the iPhone is
a gift to dissidents

~~~
LamaOfRuin
I hate Apple's software design, so I'm not a user, but this is a perception
based on security researchers and actual activists being targeted by their (or
other) governments, not Apple's assertions. Google has made positive moves,
and there is hope with Treble that they can match Apple (they absolutely have
the security personnel to do it) but as yet they are not there. Apple provides
this with affordable several year old devices that are cheaper than any
remotely secure android device. Those devices will generally continue to get
software updates as long as brand new flagship Android devices.

