Eff

[Rakdos]

Do you agree with their actions?

 

www.eff.org

[radiohead]

Yes. Blogs are just a way to communicate with people. It is their opinions and if they get fired for their opinions, then that is wrong.

 

EDIT: Lol, yeah, I agree with them 100%. The blogs was just an example.

[Rakdos]

i didn't mean just about the blogs but their entire purpose.

[Pangloss]

Their general purpose or their specific actions? I think it's too broad a question. Can you narrow it a bit? It's like asking if one agrees with the ACLU. The EFF takes positions on a broad variety of issues. Many of them I agree with, some of them I do not.

 

(I was a charter/founding/original member, by the way, and am presently helping with the Tor project.)

[Rakdos]

I guess I mean do you Agree with their ways of doing things.

[Pangloss]

At risk of sounding argumentative (which is not my intent), their way of doing what?

 

In general I think special interest groups have become too powerful in our country. That's not really the fault of special interest groups, it's the fault of the media, which is prone to reporting press releases of certain special interest groups (especially the environmental ones) as if they were news, and the fault of human behavior in general.

 

That having been said, they still play an important role in the political landscape, and can serve a valuable function. In my opinion EFF does some good work, but as with any special interest group, they have to be taken with a grain of salt.

 

By definition, no special interest group which relies upon money to function can ever be objective about any subject related to their work. Period. They will always spin any issue in the same direction. It's not their job, after all, to give you objective information. It's their job to stay in business and win converts to their cause. As such, they will always present issues in black-and-white clarity, even when the issues under discussion could not be more gray in nature.

 

So long as people understand that, there's no problem really. The minute people start defending them with statements like "well xyz.org isn't like that," there's a problem. Always.

[Rakdos]

the fact thet they lobby for what they want and try to do it legally and totally within the law and not resort to violent measures

[Dave]

I agree that everyone should be given the right to free speech, so I agree with the EFF on that front. Otherwise, I'm not entirely sure what they do so I'll leave it at that

[Pangloss]

Yes, that's certainly a good thing. That's the service they provide that's valuable.

 

Where I take issue is when they look at only one side of the argument. For example, one might say that free speech is an absolute, but clearly we make an exception for something like yelling "fire" in a crowded theater. Special interest groups are inherently incapable of making such distinctions. This sort of problem is common in EFF positions on electronic privacy and other tech-oriented civil liberties issues (which is their focus, and what makes them distinct from groups like the ACLU).

 

Just to give a brief (and extremely oversimplified) example of this, the EFF promotes the removal of all restrictions against downloading music, regardless of copyright. They try to paint the file sharing issue as a simple matter of consumer rights, ignoring the issue of artist rights and the vast implications of that kind of position.