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A Profile of the Electronic Frontier Foundation
Somnus writes "MSNBC discusses the evolution and current criticisms of the EFF." From the article: "The EFF continues to tackle issues like anonymity, electronic voting, patents and copyright, but the Sept. 11 attacks nearly five years ago have forced the EFF to spend more time on surveillance. It has sought to require more evidence before law enforcement can legally track people's locations by their cell phones, and in January the group sued AT&T, saying the San Antonio-based company violated U.S. law and the privacy of its customers. AT&T and NSA officials declined comment for this article."
can I ask (and I'm not trolling; just not from the USA) is AT&T a government thing? they seem to be close to the NSA (is that a government thing...) but I don't get why a private company would be acting like this.
about the EFF... I don't always agree with how they do things but I'm glad that at least some people are trying to raise awareness of these issues, people often just see them as something tha will never affect them, but these issues concern everyone (or should). Once freedoms have gone they are hard to get back, if people know maybe we can try some prevention rather than cure before the idea that you don't have a right to your own privacy becomes ingrained through-out the world.
*''I can't believe it's not a hyperlink.''
MSNBC is criticising the Electronic Frontier Foundation? Now that's a turn up for the books!
If you don't want to send the EFF money but would like to help the cause, consider just spreading the word a bit about what they're doing. I was shocked when I mentioned the AT&T case to a number of people whom I thought were pretty well informed on the tech industry (even if not privacy/post-911 issues) and was surprised how few have even heard of it. This is a $50 billion dollar suit! That billions with a "B"!
AT&T needs to feel some serious pain if they're found liable. This is way worse than the usual price gouging, deceptive billing, and anti-competitive behavior that people expect from the telcos. If they illegally dumped records to the NSA then I sure hope we see the execs on both sides serving some PMITA time on top of the 50 bil.
It probably wouldn't amount to shit, but I'm tracked everywhere I go. ID'd at work, the bank, the post office. Not to mention all the thousands of times I'm photographed going about my business every year. All that stuff is superflous though, ISPs in the UK tend to follow whatever rules America is following. They state it as 'policy'.
You can basically make your own laws, if you're an ISP, for this purpose. Just call them policies or put clauses in your terms of service.
...they therefore must be "with the terrorists".
I say we take off and nuke the EFF from orbit. It's the only way to be sure we get their oil.
Considering that EFF's aims are entirely contradictory to the aims of the government, I wonder if donating to EFF places one at higher risk of appearing on watch lists. If I were the government, I'd certainly use EFF support as an indication of political unreliability.
There's an "In Soviet Russia" joke in here somewhere, except that in Soviet Russia, "In Soviet Russia" jokes get (+1, Funny) and not (+1, Informative).
In that relation, they both cherry-pick what rights they want to defend and even defend rights that don't exist while more unpopularly-enforced rights suffer.
I know ACLU is like this to some extent through their religious application to separate a church from their State. Is there any evidence to that happening in the greatfull EFF? Thanks
The EFF is a vital orgnization in the ongoing fight to defend human liberty. Still, by concentrating on technological issues, the EFF calls attention away from the fact that the rights being fought over in court today concern not just internet wiretapping and music downloads, but are in fact a facet of the overall struggle for more basic rights like the right to free speech and the right to privacy.
The EFF should do more to call people's attention to the international struggle for human freedom. As long as they do not do this, they remain open to criticism that they are merely defending bourgeous privelege. Only when the worldwide proletariat is engaged in efforts to secure human rights will true progress be achieved. The enemy is not just a few misguided Bush administration functionaries, but is in fact the whole of the global ruling class.
When the day comes that people's revolution has overthrown the existing order and the means of production is in the hands of workers, then will humanity finally be free from the chains of the NSA, the RIAA, and their malignant ilk.
How easy it is to forget that just six years ago, from the EFF's perspective, the Clinton white house were the "bad guys".
"They are the lawyers for the open vision of the Internet," said Peter Swire, the Clinton administration privacy counselor who sometimes tussled with the EFF. "They are the Left Coast advocacy group."
Left Coast, huh? Pretty funny to see a Democratic politician using that word.
In fact, I think it's downright hilarious. The "liberal" versus "conservative" dichonomy has long since ceased to be about politics or ideology or even political parties; we're quite far into the stage where "liberal" is just a brush to smear those who, politically, refuse to just fit in. "Liberal" or "left" are such effective snarl words, in fact, that, as the quote above shows, even Democrats can use it...
FTA (regarding the lawsuit with AT&T):
"It's quite possibly the most important privacy and free speech issue in the 21st century"
Since the 21st century is only about 6 years old, isn't a statement like that just a little premature? Maybe the most important of the year, or even the decade. But the century?? I doubt it.
I judt got a nre Kinesis keybiartf so please excusr ant egregiou typos.
So why would we ever seriously consider an article by a new organization owned by Microsoft about the EFF anything less than horribly biased?
I contributed a few bucks to the EFF and they sent me a shiny bumper sticker. which currently resides on my filing cabinet.
Every morning... I have to pee on the tee-vee.
fo' shizzle my Paris Hilton hizzle.
And most of the damage was caused by our own over & inappropriate reations to the threat.
Despite its many legal victories, critics charge the EFF with idealism ... and sometimes extremist.
The article starts by describing the offices as informal and some fights within the organization, then descends into name calling and empty propaganda by some of the companies who's practices have been challenged by the EFF. The article is essentially a feel bad piece and people who want to know about the EFF would be better off visiting the site themselves.
Idealism, what a lame complaint. The nebulous ideals of "Intellectual Property" and "Competition" (nice M$ buzzword tie-in there M$NBC!) touted by the "critics" are much less concrete and practical than any the EFF stands for. The headline might as well have read, "The EFF, though it's success, has detractors."
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
I have donated to the EFF every year for many years now. However... ..the Sept. 11 attacks nearly five years ago have forced the EFF to spend more time on surveillance.
I think the lawsuit is a waste of time and resources. I know they will lose and I don't even agree that the government collecting and correlating call records (not call data, just call records) which I consider to be public information about use of public utilities, to be in any way illegal or even questionable. The EFF was not FORCED to spend more time on battles like this, it is a direction they have chosen.
Instead of devoting their full energies to stopping things like the rampant spread of DRM in all forms of media and incorperations of things like the broadcast flag into government mandated protocols, instead we have them (and my money) off on this wild goose chase. Even if you think it's a battle that should be fought consider that there are other groups dedicated to fighting it as well and no-one else really devoted to technology rights in the way the EFF was supposed to be.
Well I'm done. If only there were any other group trying to lobby the technological issues of today that will matter tomorrow, but I don't know of any... so I am splitting my EFF money between the FSF and the Nature Conservancy (both of whom already get something from me yearly as well). Possibly some into Creative Commons as they are solving the DRM problem from the supply side, probably the only way it will ever be solved.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
To quote my favorite columnist,
Governments around the world are -- or are on the verge of -- tracking essentially all electronic communications. Examples include recent revelations of National Security Agency data capture, legislation in the U.S. and Europe that would mandate multiyear retention of all Internet connection data, massive government-plus-commercial data integration projects, biometric passports, national ID cards and electronic health records, to name a few. The net effect is simple but profound: Governments around the world are seeking access to substantially every bit of information about you.
True, this isn't an immediate threat. (We're talking about the largest data-integration projects in the history of the world -- and they're government projects. Imagine the implementation cycle.) But most of the technical approaches to limiting the dangers in this trend need to be reflected at system design time. What's more, the ones that fall purely in the legal sphere are clearly going to require years to achieve political adoption.
From A Public Policy Troika for Techno-Activists
To err is human. To forgive is good system design.
and
That focus has left the group open to criticisms that by refusing to play the Washington game of compromising, its views are idealistic and sometimes extremist.
It seems that, when a "critic" thinks you're "idealistic," that means you're hitting close to home, and if you're an "extremist," you're probably kicking major ass. Quite simply, the EFF would rather pay their money for litigating lawyers instead of lobbying lawyers, and that's spooking the "critics," because it works.
I spend most of my time in bed, darling.
Alito and Roberts have proven to be every bit the right wing extremeists that they were predicted to be, which means that the courts are no longer a form of recourse against incursions against personal liberties.
Why can't you hippies get it through your heads that you've been conquered already?
It's things like this that make me thank the gods for institutions like the ACLU and the EFF.
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Somebody needs to mod you down.
So MS has no control over MSNBC. Which leaves only NBC... NBC, one of the big intellectual-property-holding content providers that the article criticizes the EFF for campaigning against. What a fascinating coincidence
On Slashdot? Or, really, the media in general? Naaaw... that'd never happen.
Have you been touched by his noodly appendage?
I would much rather see the EFF engage in fundemental issues about how the Internet is governed and managed (including government monitoring and including broadcast flags)
So would I - that's my beef! We're talking about call data records (CDR), not the internet at all! Like I said there are already other groups fighting this anyway, and NO ONE else going after DRM, at least not seriously.
I'm not talking about lame potshots, I'm talking about the work the EFF has done to fight off the broadcast flag (which has been great) and take it to the next level by trying to lobby for NEW laws that would make fair use truly non-ambiguous and force DRM to loosen up as a result. Or what about pushing back the next time they try to extend copyright terms again. All those things would be something only the EFF could really push for, I don't think any other groups have the technical understanding needed to bridge the technical view with lawmakers much less technical view.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
I agree that I hate to rmeove all support for them because there is NO other group that does what they do.
I'm just going to watch them all year and see how much effort they put forth on other causes. It could be I'm overblowing how much energy they are devoting to this fight, though given they are going against AT&T I cannot see how they can get away with a very large amount of legal energy put into that.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
ACLU does NOT protect the Bill of Rights. Look for its foundation to charter. It's a corporation, not politic. ACLU is a cherry-picking nigger, and I mean that in the Paris Hilton cherry-picking type. They fumble cases intentionally to support opinion, at the behest of the de jure, and the only rights are upheld are the ones that benefit its popularity such as the double-jeopardy matter that it uses to protect from failing its guaruntees of representation to suitors.
Go away, ACLU. ACLU protects lawyers as PETA protects lawyers. If we wanted them both to behave, then we would put the stock of ACLU into the hands of PETA, stock of the National Rifle Association into the hands of ACLU, and stock of PETA into the hands of National Rifle Association. They better respect one-another, because they are all holding eachother by their testicles.
I don't give you my two cents.
I though I should clarify that the alleged record transfer is not illegal since Pres. Bush has the inherent Constitutional power under the Article 2 to take all needed steps to protect America, its People, and the Constitution itself. The President has on a number of occasions delegated said power to conduct intelligence operations (e.g. to Negroponte et al.), and hence the aforementioned operations, authrized either by the Pres. or under his authority, are Constitutional.
The Senate Judiciary Committee (under A. Specter) has held a number of hearings over the Terrorist Surveillance program's legality and Bush's 'Executive Primacy' Doctrine, and while some concerts were raised, none were deemed sufficient to merit subpoenas or be otherwise escalated. To put it simply, our beloved Republican Leadership and the American People give the programs a 'green light' to carry on and expand.
While it would be trivial for the Executive branch to demonstrate that the Terrorist Surveillance and similar programs are completely constitutional, the reason the Government is maintaining secrecy is to preserve our lives protect our Freedom and the American Way of Life.
Loose lips sink ships, and all that. One would hope the NYT would learn that by now.
Obama likes poor people so much, he wants to make more of them.
Your post just motivated me to donate $100 to the ACLU.
from http://www.house.gov/nunes/documents/PatriotActQA
Obama likes poor people so much, he wants to make more of them.
How could you possibly read Article 2 of the Constitution without first reading Article 1? Under Article 1, Section 8, Congress has the power: "To define and punish Piracies and Felonies committed on the high Seas, and Offenses against the Law of Nations; [and] To declare War, grant Letters of Marque and Reprisal, and make Rules concerning Captures on Land and Water" And neither Congress nor the President gets to trump the First Amendment, which is what the EFF is defending.
Irrational fear of terrorism when you are far more likely to die in an automobile accident...yet people are afraid of these threats and willingly give up their protections, as witnessed by the jury in your example.
It is a sad state of affairs, but I see no way out of it. As long as the government can claim "We're at war, some rights are abridged" and just say "Whale Biologist!" whenever they're caught breaking the laws they are sworn to uphold...these things will continue to happen.
My only hope is that people will become immune from these fear-based control techniques over time, and decide that they want their old rights back.
I can't think of too many times in history that a population has successfully reclaimed a right taken by their government. Prohibition comes to mind...
Blar.
Is anyone else disturbed that idealism is something that critics are now charging people with? I thought the holding of ideals and living up to them was a virtue. Things like liberty, individual responsibility, honor? Or trying to make the nation we live in be something worth standing up for?
Governments cannot be trusted. Ever. If we must pay a price for that, so be it - the price we pay for being trusting will be larger in the long run. There is never a good reason to trust a government, unless it is unite or die as a nation. (Terrorism doesn't count - they do not fundamentally threaten the survival of a nation as a nation, at least not in the case of the US.) Ideals are NECESSARY - what else do we strive for as human beings?
"I object to doing things that computers can do." -- Olin Shivers, lispers.org
UST collecting call records? Like the ones the government was using to locate reporters' sources to chill media access to information?
The reporters were using phones registered to them? Really? No, I mean - really? They were reporters? Using phones registered to them?
Really?
Unfortunately when we ran your call-records we saw numerous calls to a shrink and a drug-rehab center.
Public utlity does not mean general public access, but it does mean government access. You forget that phone company employees have acccess to that same data as well.
Now back to that "reporter" or source using a phone registered in thier name...
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
I thank you for the long and detailed response, and I'll rethink my dropping support - as I've said elsewhere you guys do great work in other areas I support more. I was planning to send a response outlining my displeasure with direction, so I thank you for the email link.
I would say is that you give the tone of CALEA spreaing into voip as a bad thing, but there needs to be legal mechanisms for tapping calls over what are essentially "public" communications channels, which include companies that offer VOIP to the general consumer market.
Furthermore I draw a large distinction between computer mining of data vs. humans accessing records themselves. To me this is the same argument people had against GMail, that it was "reading thier email". No, it is scanning it and then taking some automatic action based on keywords. I could see call records being scanned for links and then if any were found the record data could be accessed by the governmetn without knowing the true identity behind the records they were looking at (with some re-writing of identity), and proceeding further only if a human examination of the links that flagged that user warranted further action. That way someone misdialing a person under surveilience when trying to order a pizza could just be dropped from consideration without anyone even knowing who he was.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
there needs to be legal mechanisms for tapping calls over what are essentially "public" communications channels
/. discussion today, Western Union refused to accept a wire of $120 because the recipient was called Muhammed and lived abroad. Of course that's not policy, it's just some overzealous and totally misguided WU employee, but you can still be sure that this caused the sender's name to get flagged. So now his calls get monitored and all his previous bank transactions are checked and his web browsing habits are analysed and his e-mail is read, all because he tried to send a miserable $120 to a friend named Muhammed.
What exactly makes those channels public? The communication, be it traditional phone or VoIP is one-to-one, so by its nature private. The lines belong to private companies. They are rented by the caller and paid for per minute. What more would it take to make a communication channel private according to you?
As for "needs be", that need could be demonstrated by a statistical relation between wiretapping and reduction in crime and/or increase in crime resolution. But it is not. Wiretapping keeps increasing uncontrollably, crime continues as usual. The victims of lowering the thresholds for wiretapping are all innocent citizens caught in the middle.
That way someone misdialing a person under surveilience when trying to order a pizza could just be dropped from consideration without anyone even knowing who he was.
The purpose of massive tapping and analysis is not to keep tabs on known suspects, but to find new, hitherto unknown, suspects. They try to correlate telephone events with other events. They save all the data they can, including the content of your conversations, because that's the only way they can go back and find what you were doing yesterday, should you become a suspect tomorrow. Thus, by definition and design, mass tapping is purposely directed against non-suspects. Known suspects are dealt with elsewhere in much more resource-efficient ways.
To make things worse, innocent actions on one surveillance system can flag you as a suspect on another and, consequently, on all of them. In another
The only good thing that has come out of all this is that we now get ten times more capacity per dollar on hard drives than we did before 9/11, partly thanks to TIA and the like.
funny I should see this story after spending the morning reading this
l
http://www.chriswaltrip.com/sterling/hackcrck.htm
I would recommend it as an interesting backgrounder it was written around 1990, and covers a lot of ground that older readers may remember and younger should find informative.
funny how so much has changed and somethings haven't.
Blarney Quality Restaurant, Plants
Since the 21st century is only about 6 years old, isn't a statement like that just a little premature?
He was making a statement with vision and foresight, not making a TOP 10 list for cases that have already taken place. Look here, www.eff.org/legal/cases/att/ for AT&T case details. While you read, consider what the next century will look like if EFF loses this and future cases like it.
Sure, we've already seen things like eschelon and carnivore, but this is by far the boldest power grab by the US government to formally & non-apologetically establish itself as Big Brother over US citizens. This case, in concert with the related ACLU case, has the *potential* to be the precedent that stops this government from using tech companies to become Big Brother for the next century. I'd say that would make it one of the most important privacy & free speech cases of the 21st century. Now they need to win and they're going to need help to fight this goliath of a case.
Your assertion is false to the best of my knowledge. How is even possible to assign congruence to the two? Gun regulation is at odds with the 2nd Amendment, how? The SCOTUS disagrees with you, but I'll hear you out.
Substantiate this, given: "A well regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed."
I'll pose it to you again: Do you believe the Second reads "nukes for citizens", i.e., an unlimited, individual right to arms? If so, justify that belief in light of the 2nd's specific use of militia, free State and the people (rather than say, "armed citizenry", "individual liberty" and "each man").
Read Heinlein's 1953 Revolt in 2100, now more than ever.
The reporters probably should be more careful, but they should have no real reason to expect the telephone company to leak their dialed numbers.
Well of course they shouldn't expect the numbers to be leaked and they should expect them to remain private.
As a practical matter however if I were talking to someone sensitive no way would I use a form of communication that could be easily traced to me. Even just borrowing a fellow reporters cell phone for a half hour is an easy step to have at least one level of indirection between you and a source. That's why I'm proclaiming them idiots, because they did not use common sense to realize that while it might not be legal to leak the numbers called it's more than possible to get them, through social engineering of phone co. employees or by other means.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley