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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."
Trust me on this, Microsoft has no editorial control at MSNBC.
Quid festinatio swallonis est aetherfuga inonusti?
Africus aut Europaeus?
AT&T is private. Much of their infrastructure was originally government funded (they are one of several companies that replaced Bell when Bell was broken up in the early 1980s). Partially because of that, and partially because of historical monopoly concerns, and partially because telcom is considered basic infrastructure, they are more heavily regulated than many private companies. Consequently, they tend to have an interest in making nice with the feds.
rage, rage against the dying of the light
It's an Associated Press article, transmitted on MSNBC.
I can't help but think that's a good thing -- no matter what I think of the article itself.
Which, by the way, as a long-time supporter of EFF, is this: it's a good survey, accurate in its description and not excessively focused on repoting criticisms.
EFF stands for Electronic Frontier Foundation. Maybe an offshoot of the group could deal with further civil liberties, but by refusing to focus on technological issues they would be overstepping their bounds a bit, in my opinion.
if you read the article, it says that the EFF is somewhat an offshoot of the ACLU, which is the organization that is supposed to do what you're asking. the EFF was formed because the folks at the ACLU didn't have the expertise to handle high-tech civil liberties issues. furthermore, the EFF has offshoots that focus on lobbying rather than litigation, and now there is even the Pirate Party which tackles these issues from a legislation perspective. one organization can't do everything.
AT&T was actually founded years earlier (in the mid-1870s) and was renamed to AT&T in the 1880s. When Vail took over he lobbied heavily for the "One Policy, One System" mantra and worked aggressively to get government rights of way and even for government usage of eminent domain power to sieze private rights of way to grant to his company. When the government began investigating the company under his watch for monopolistic practice, he compromised (around 1912 or so) on a "we can buy one phone company if we sell another" policy and promptly started acquiring geographic monopolies--if he held a company in LA and another in New York, and a large competitor did likewise, they'd swap so that one owned New York and the other owned LA and there was no messy competition to keep prices down.
The only reason they got the European system working was because of the AT&T/RCA/GE/Westinghouse compromise a year earlier that colluded to give each company a monopoly in a certain sector (and incidentally resulted in the formation of broadcasting powerhouse NBC)
Earlier, Vail lobbied heavily to get the federal government to "nationalize" phone service by giving AT&T a monopoly, and by 1918 that came to pass and they had a government-mandated control of the market which lasted until the early 1980s.
Ones they had that, they used it aggressively to exterminate small inventors. By the 1980s, they had banners hanging in corporate offices saying something like "There are 2 major forces in the US; one brought you phones, radios, radar, sonar, transistors, etc and the other brought you the Civil War, WWI, WWII, Vietnam, etc--guess which one is trying to tell the other one what to do?"
That despite the fact that AT&T had been denied patents on the transistor because it was previously invented and refined by Lillienfield and Heil (although if you look up AT&T scietists Brattain, Bardeen, and Shockley in wikipedia, it lists them as the inventors with a straight face), they'd acted to bankrupt Tesla and leave Marconi as unknown as possible as the inventors of the radio, and they'd similar coopted the radar from Hulsmeyer and Bay.
Any argument that they (or Vail) were in favor of free-market private enterprise and against government subsidies and grants has a lot of evidence to the contrary that it needs to address.
rage, rage against the dying of the light