The EFF make it their job to look for issues like this. They were the first place I heard about SOPA and PIPA, and I doubt I'm the only one. I certainly wasn't spending time monitoring congress and reading proposed legislation, and even if I was I'm not sufficiently versed in US law to know what the bills might imply.

Obviously it's difficult to measure, but I would be surprised if the EFF weren't critically instrumental in the earliest stages of awareness about the implications of these bills, which led to people taking action.

How would you propose they could have made a more significant contribution?

They had a twilio integrated page that allowed anyone in the US to call their representatives from the page. 300,000 people directed there during the blackout from Mozilla alone did exactly that. I don't have complete numbers, but they were far from silent.

More to the point, where were they between SOPA/PIPA and the last big internet bill? I only hear things from the EFF when someone is out to destroy our freedoms. Why aren't they using the same process to buy internet-friendly legislation? It would be nice to have a roadblock in front of the the next SOPA.

You were downvoted, but as a longtime EFF member I have much the same question. I pay them to get out in front of issues like SOPA/PIPA, and I was disappointed to see that it didn't happen. I don't believe I saw a single instance of press coverage, either online or off, where the EFF's name was prominently associated with the anti-SOPA resistance effort.