Slashdot Mirror
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."
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.
Is this our freedoms that are at stake, or is this simply the loss of imagined freedoms that were never there? The Constitution guarentees privacy, but it does not guarentee the ability to hide the truth, and especially not to do so in a manner that will lead to the deaths of thousands of people. If these things are things that we never had, is it really something that we should have?
No one ever answers these questions. They simply ignore them and press on like machines. I think that if people truly care about what is right, they should give these questions due and proper consideration.
Just to add to the prior explanations, NSA is not just a goverment thing, it's a super-secretive government thing. The government for many years did not even officially acknowledge its existence. The joke was that NSA stood for "No Such Agency". Among other things, they are tasked with communications interception and decryption.
Where there is the necessary technical skill to move mountains, there is no need for the faith that moves mountains.
Ownership has much to do with the slant and general trends in any media organization. I suggest you read any of the dominant literature on media from the last 20 years, beginning with Manufacturing Consent by Chosmsky and Hermand.
On your point about the EFF being "over-rated" on slashdot i really don't see your point. The EFF has done nothing but persue civil liberties legislation and litigation since they were founded, slashdot tends to speak of them highly becuase they've protected and persued their rights and never betrayed that. Also the EFF doesn't really do "fund-raising drives", they have plenty of grants and funding coming from all over, including companies that share the same incentive we do as citizens to keep our rights protected.
But I do enjoy the ramblings of insane people who know nothing about which they speak.
Why should we trust you on this? What do you know that we don't? How did you come to know this?
Computers are useless. They can only give you answers.
-- Pablo Picasso
Indeed, the SC recently ruled that police may perform "no-knock" entries whenever they choose. If they want to they can blow your door off and charge in guns drawn without identifying themselves until after the fact. The interesting thing is that several states have laws explicitly giving people the right to use deadly force against intruders. I wonder what the SC will decided when someone in one of these states guns down a few cops when they come flying through his door. I know there is currently a guy on death-row for just such a thing, police raided his house by mistake and he shot and killed at least one of them. They didn't identify themselves but that didn't matter to the jury...
AT&T was 'Ma Bell', essentially THE TELCO,
They have always been a private company, but with close ties to the government do to the nature of it's infrastructure.
They made a lot of deals including a very similiar one with the NSA where it would route the telephone calls and flag 'key words' for the NSA. Joke's developed where people would say don't use 'kill' and 'president' in the same call. This deal was actually made so the government would help protect AT&T. It did, for a while, but could not do so for ever.
In the 1980s AT&T was busted up for being a monopoly. Hence the term 'Ma Bell' and 'Baby Bells' were formed.
Today, AT&T has been recollecting the bells such as SBC. The government watch group has approved the mergers. Today, there is much more competition for AT&T. Today, AT&T is allegedly routing internet packets to the NSA.
The NSA, humoursly refered to as 'No Such Agency' and is actually the National Security Agenecy. Originally was charged with collecting information for the CIA in nations abroad and employeed codebreakers and linguists. Now, they are charged with the same task, but over time, the focus has changed to all communications it can get it's hands on, all over the world.
Working with the largest telco, no brainer to me.