All EFF’d Up
thebaffler.com
thebaffler.com
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.
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.
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.
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.
However, the article gave me pause to reflect on the EFF's legislative agenda for what it calls privacy, and made me realize that the EFF's definition is quite different to mine.
Government surveillance is a problem for privacy and freedom. But increasingly, corporate surveillance is too. I had naively considered the EFF my one-stop-shop privacy lobbying organization, but I'm realizing that they're going to fight only half of my battle.
I'm struggling to recall a time when they've backed legislation which ran meaningfully counter to surveillance capitalism as a business model. I'm aware of (and extremely thankful for) Privacy Badger, Panopticlick etc., but these are really toys for nerds, not a credible threat to widespread corporate surveillance.
I'm bothered to find no mention of the California Consumer Privacy Act anywhere on their site (an extremely significant piece of legislation I'd at least expect them to comment on, which was strongly opposed by Google). To be clear, I'm not saying that underneath a rubber mask Cindy Cohn is actually Eric Schmidt, but that the EFF's eagerness not to oppose surveillance capitalism is something I naively hadn't considered before.
You make a familiar argument about the perils of regulation -- I understand this view, but don't personally share it. I'm not trying to convince you (or get you to convince me) on this issue, but my view is that regulating government activities has unintended consequences too, and waiting for the market to implement ethical choices is an call-to-inaction that could have been made (and I'm sure was) against ending slavery, banning child labor, introducing seat-belts, etc. etc. ad nauseam.
These are from just the past couple of weeks:
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2018/07/new-rules-protect-data...
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2018/06/competition-civil-libe...
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2018/07/eff-illinois-supreme-c...
> I'm aware of (and extremely thankful for) Privacy Badger, Panopticlick etc., but these are really toys for nerds, not a credible threat to widespread corporate surveillance.
I feel like you're underselling this as a strategy. Let's Encrypt is almost singlehandedly responsible for the massive increase in TLS usage across the internet, and prior to that ISPs and others had been snooping on the plaintext for surveillance capitalism. And despite all the rhetoric (primarily from ISPs and Hollywood) about tech companies, the ISPs are really the bigger surveillance problem here. It's a lot more realistic for a normal person to use Signal instead of Facebook than to use whatever kind of artesian wireless mesh network is necessary to avoid using one of the major ISPs.
And Tor is (sadly) not used by the majority of people, but it's still there for the people who most need it, and it is actually effective.
> I'm bothered to find no mention of the California Consumer Privacy Act anywhere on their site (an extremely significant piece of legislation I'd at least expect them to comment on, which was strongly opposed by Google).
Here it is though:
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2017/10/how-silicon-valleys-di...
You couldn't find it by the name because the name changed since last year, not because they weren't involved.
> You make a familiar argument about the perils of regulation -- I understand this view, but don't personally share it. I'm not trying to convince you (or get you to convince me) on this issue, but my view is that regulating government activities has unintended consequences too, and waiting for the market to implement ethical choices is an call-to-inaction that could have been made (and I'm sure was) against ending slavery, banning child labor, introducing seat-belts, etc. etc. ad nauseam.
The argument is familiar because it's effective, because it's rooted in truth. There are times when the regulations outweigh their costs, but the costs are always there. Which means they should be reserved for situations where there really is no better alternative, like slavery and child labor.
By contrast, there appears to be an obvious market solution to Facebook -- stop using it.
On the CCPA, thanks for the link (a very good post, which I hadn’t seen, and you’re right, the name change thew me off). I’m still a bit surprised that I didn’t hear about the CCPA passing from the EFF, but the national business press, local radio etc. If they have objections, I want to hear them! I’m sure this will shake-out in time.
On commercial surveillance: This is still comforting murmurs/asking-nicely (which they’ve always done) as opposed formally endorsing/mobilizing-for specific, enforceable legislation, as they commonly do on government surveillance, copyright, NN, etc.
But, the posts you link do seem to indicate that this is now a stated legal priority for them, I’m glad to see CC and DB’s names on peice, as well as a focus on opt-in consent.
Consider me somewhat-reassured and optimistic, and thanks for digging these up.
On the regulation vs. animal-spirits question, I get the impression we’d agree in-person (all of the EFF’s recommendations in your links sound like good ones to me), but I’ll decline another round :)
From what I've read so far (about half), it definitely feels like a hit piece, but it might come out more effective than transparent.
From the beginning, there were signs and a general feeling that there was an agenda that was forthcoming, and only slightly alluded to. It comes in full force only later, when well into the article, so I wonder how many people that weren't primed to look for it or didn't sense something amiss early where successfully primed from the first portion to accept the insinuated problems later.
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/ [1] http://www.newsobserver.com/news/local/counties/wake-county/...
No credit should be given. Google and the states it works with are not adversaries.
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... [2] http://tech-insider.org/eff/research/1990/0710.html
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.
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2004/04/gmail-rough-guide-prot...
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.
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.
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.
No, it is equivalent to the post office showing the letter to someone else.
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.
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.
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.
To the article though, I honestly had no idea about this side of EFF. It's definitely changed the way I feel about them.
What about the article made you believe what Levine said?
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. :)
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.
> "...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.
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.
That's certainly a valid criticism.
The Chinese App Store generates 6-8 billion annually in revenue and that's not even including the revenue from their other services. China is also one of their largest phone markets, if not the largest, and the source of their growth so of course Apple rolled over like a lap dog and handed over the data of their Chinese users to the Chinese government. The fact that the EFF has been so silent on the the hypocrisy of Apple's privacy policy says a lot.
It's completely OK for Apple to pursue their business interests, but the false moral high-ground is deceptive.
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).
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