Hacker Newsnew | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submitlogin

https://thebaffler.com/salvos/all-effd-up-levine

https://www.wired.com/2011/11/eff-palantir/

If you know something or someone's name, which / who claims to be some sort of advocacy for individuals against the overreach of an industrialized nation's government, and that person / thing is not being COINTELPRO'd, MKULTRA'd, GLADIO'd, PAPERCLIP'd, etc, it's because that person / thing is complicit in some way with the thing they are claiming to be against.



I think you're seeing patterns that don't exist.

Maybe there is a 3-letter agency that allows the EFF to exist for strategic reasons. That's almost so unavoidable that it's irrelevant.

But the EFF happening to side with Apple is more a sign of Apple having smart PR people than the EFF being a fundamentally untrustworthy organization.

I'm willing to be paranoid, but I'm not willing to be so with paranoid as to shit on the one organization that actually gets things done.


It's less what they get done and more what they willfully ignore (such as the Cambridge Analytica story when Facebook became a donor of theirs).

There's also the case of Shahid Buttar pretending to challenge Nancy Pelosi in an election, which is a way of saying "ensured that Nancy didn't have a real challenger."


>that person / thing is complicit in some way with the thing they are claiming to be against

There's a sense in which it's tautological - when anything bad happens, the universal cause is that nobody prevented it, and everyone in the whole wide world is guilty.

Also, even if your dichotomy is sort of correct, surely every non-complicit entity must have a non-negligible amount of time before anyone gets around to "COINTELPRO'ing" it, so it can't be literally true.

The most succinct way I can express my disagreement with you is that loyalty is never wholly binary.

So arguing over whether an entity is for or against something especially when they are composite and not a single person, is a rabbit hole you don't want to go down.

There is a simple way to deal with endless BS and lies - judge by actions, and never make a final judgement.




Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: