Comment by david_w | Hacker News Reader

Comment by david_w | Hacker News Reader

Like the EFF cares about free speech. Like they have showed up even once to campuses across the nation to defend the Constitutional rights of their ideological opponents.

Everyone knows the EFF and the ACLU are thinly camoflaged shells of their former selves, tactically pushing for whatever will advance their quest for power. Yeah, we know that if we want help defending our Constitutional rights, we go to non-psychopathic organzations like FIRE and Judical Watch and Project Veritas.

They defend strong encryption because it's a tool their side still needs, for now. Defending the Constitution and free speech is just a temporary tactic for them until they get more power, the sort of power they now wield openly on campuses across this nation and which you use to silence anyone who disagrees with them.

After that, they'll start talking about how old the Constitution is, how its from another, quainter time, and how it needs now to be put aside.... and how important it is the government oversee people's speech lest someone utter hatespeak .....and consequently we must ban strong encryption.

Or, in their own words: https://www.eff.org/pages/speaking-freely-sandra-ordonez

I like falsifiable predictions. So you predict that the EFF will turn around 180 degrees and support a ban on strong encryption. Would you like to predict a date for this to happen, to make the prediction absolutely falsifiable?

A good prediction includes not only a date on which to judge the prediction, making it falsifiable, but also a subjective probability, to account for genuine random chance. After all, there are few things in life we can be 100% certain about. For example, you may think the polls show such overwhelming support for a candidate that they will definitely win an upcoming election, but there is always a slight chance that they die of a heart attack, or be scandalously revealed as taking bribes from the opposition to be their puppet.

Here’s an example of a well-formatted prediction, from https://slatestarcodex.com/predictions-bets/: “Gay marriage will remain legal throughout a Trump presidency [confidence: 95%]” (prediction made 2016-11-15). That page also has some more detail on the theory of making predictions.

For this situation, david_w could give a prediction like “I think there is a 90% probability the EFF will support banning strong encryption by 2021-07-01.” Then, if the prediction turns out to be false, it either means David was wrong and he should have been much less confident, or he was right and encountered that unlucky one-in-ten unusual situation. And you, the observer who would personally estimate a different probability of that prediction coming true, could calculate the probabilities of those two situations being the case by using various formulas, including Bayes’ theorem. (David himself could also calculate the probabilities of those two situations, and use that to decide whether to change any of his views on the EFF.)

That link: good catch, I had no idea.

> "Hate Speech is not Free Speech".

Yes this old chestnut. This has been used to trample over our rights in the UK.

To be blunt, as a long-time privacy advocate and former supporter of EFF, I'm pretty disillusioned by them. I think got compromised by FAANG.

lol

The EFF didn’t change. You just went off the deep end. They don’t care about your pet issue of alt-right 4chan stars not getting rooms at universities because there just is no right to get meeting space at public universities.

(And what a surprise that what bothers you most is the EFF supporting a woman)

People Upset That Consitutionally Protected Speech In Jeopardy After 250 Years- A Clear Case Of Misogyny !

..is a Babylon Bee headline that just writes itself.

I'm not sure whether the EFF changed, but the ACLU certainly has.

Once upon a time, the ACLU believed so deeply in the First Amendment that they fought National Socialist Party of America v. Village of Skokie all the way to the supreme court. You may remember the plaintiffs from the Blues Brothers movie, perhaps? The Illinois Nazis? Skokie, the town, was deliberately chosen because it had a large Jewish population, and many Holocaust survivors, yet the ACLU went to court to fight for these bona fide Nazis, and won them the right to wear their Nazi uniforms and their swastikas when they marched, carrying their hypocritical signs about "white free speech."

Can you imagine the ACLU doing that today?

The former President of the ACLU has decride the current positions taken by the ACLU. I believe she wrote a book on it.

I actually remember the Skokie march. We were kids. I loved the ACLU and so did everyone else I knew. They were like Free Speech super-heros. They were an institution, a force, feared and respected.

Now, yeah, well....

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