I feel the EFF has overstepped. At the end of the day, these people were committing crimes, an article dedicating to protecting their privacy, and impeding the law, is in bad precedent and has little to do with internet activism and more to do with prostitution laws.
In many cases sex workers are breaking the law. So are various journalists, bloggers, twitter users, homosexuals in a variety of countries. EFF & Tor often aim to protect people from official persecution under the law in their countries. Illegal does not necessarily equate to immoral.
This article and the articles it follows on from are in fact partially about protecting prostitutes from legal action and from the indirect consequences of legal action.
EFF: The seizure is part of a disturbing trend of targeting sex workers
Bay Area Sex Worker Outreach Project: we also lost extensive online forums for a community of sex workers to keep each other safe, screen clients, and blacklist predators.
The bigger context of the article is what it means for anonymity, freedom of association and free speech if an allegation and subsequent warrant can lead to extensive records of everyone associated with a site being collected and filed.
Imagine a forum dedicated to recreational drug use (one of the first online discussion groups). Various people participate anonymously. Crimes (eg selling supplying drugs are committed. The site is frequented by drug users, advocates, maybe even rehabilitation professionals. A warrant results in full records of every participant being leaked.
If you can't see the damage done to the right to free speech and association by that, you are blind.
The comment boils down to 'Prostitution is illegal therefore protecting their anonymity is wrong.' It doesn't understand the bigger point about the meta issues. It's unintelligent. Flavored with 'glory holes, hehe' it deserves a down-vote.
The 'glory hole' thing in the original post was crude and pointless, I agree. But the EFF here is straight up providing a guide to a category of persons who are vocational criminals on how to do a better job of hiding their crimes from the police. (The primary purpose of the site the FBI seized wasn't discussion, it was solicitation -- the EFF never gets around to admitting that, that I've seen, which AT BEST means they're unintentionally misleading people in the course of their advocacy.)
I think a lot of people who supported the EFF in the past did so with the understanding that they were protecting a lot of speech freedoms and privacy rights. And yes, prostitutes and their clients do have speech and privacy rights. But they're also breaking laws that have nothing to do with speech or privacy, and the website was taken down in accordance with a reasonable police investigation into such matters. If you think prostitution should be legal, that's an entirely separate discussion, to my mind. But the EFF is moving into something that seems really close to straight-up providing advice for criminals in how to get away with crimes. And these aren't crimes against repressive regimes, or civil disobedience, or anything related to what I would've thought of as the EFF's mission. It makes me a lot less comfortable with the EFF being the leading spokesman for digital freedoms.
From another perspective, it's one of those grey areas where you agree the activity should be illegal but prostitutes should be treated as victims or vulnerable persons.
Parallels to an information site for recreational drug users or a needle exchange. Harm reduction instead of law enforcement. Association is important here.
This represents a loss of a resource which provides them support and helps them bring down their risk of harm. More worringly, it's bullying. Creating a fear of that any associations will be persecuted.
From the perspective most natural to the EFF, the problem is exposing everyone because a few are suspected of criminal activity. Not all sex workers are criminals. But because some (allegedly) criminal activities happened on the site, everyone associated with it is compromised.
All together, this amounts to tactics fro preventing free association and speech. It's staring off by targeting a group that no few will openly defend, prostitutes.
I personally am sympathetic to all these views. I think prostitution (to the extent that it is consensual) should be legal. I think that if it is to be illegal harm reduction is much more important than enforcement. Arresting prostitutes is like jail-time for illiteracy.
The most scary thing out of all of this is the exposure of anyone and everyone that has visited or registered on these site. It starts with some marginal group where many/most are breaking the law, some are breaking the law on the site and everyone is marginalized by society. From there we gradually get to a situation where any online criminality leads to massive data seizure and exposure of anyone associated with the site.
Logged in to a body building site where some people sold steroids on IM, on a list. Commented on a blog discussing civil disobedience where some petrol bomber hung out, on a list.