The root of this investigation was the EFF. If you make tech money, you can toss $50 their way without any hesitation. https://supporters.eff.org/donate
You'll get some cool swag and, more importantly, ensure that they continue their excellent work.
I haven’t followed them enough but is it possible to support them without supporting other charitable causes of a political persuasion I don’t support? I fully support everything directly related to their cause but it gets me very upset when charities are supporting other various agendas around gender/immigration for example that are unrelated to their main goal.
Seems like the obvious answer is no. But if can see that they are doing important stuff, and you're letting your hangups over unrelated political issues keep you from donating to their awesome work, I'd say that's a mistake. They have a 4/5 from Charity Navigator for spending their money effectively.
If the EFF really wants my financial support, they can split their org into two; one that focuses exclusively on defending our digital rights (to whom I would gladly donate) and one that focuses on social justice.
This mentality of packaging the bad with the good is precisely what got the US where it is now.
MZLA used AI to generate wallpapers for Thunderbird that nobody asked for, somebody is in a salaried role doing it that's funded by donations. What a complete waste of money considering the AI isn't even FOSS, and they are promoting it on the Thunderbird blog. That's without even getting into the arrogance displayed by a big name from their camp on AI ethics. Did all kinds of mental gymnastics to say he was a very talented artist for typing text into Discord.
Open source email clients don't need marketing gimmicks, they need substance.
BTW, did you know the same person in that role is now introducing a Thunderbird podcast? Who asked for a podcast for a FOSS email client? Nobody.
Dude has proven once again that Mozilla should just focus on making great software as they close-to-zero credibility left after working with Meta and shambolic PR disaster after PR disaster.
FWIW, even though I'm a huge FOSS evangelist, I switched to Vivaldi and Gmail, because fuck that.
> This mentality of packaging the bad with the good is precisely what got the US where it is now.
Well this is inevitable. People just don't have time to be involved in every issue, so you find the parties / organizations / representatives that _most_ represent you, and that's what you get. There's never going to be an org or politician that perfectly represents you; you have to pick which people/orgs will most help shape the world to be the one you want to live in.
Also, if among free speech & digital rights supporters you're in a minority that doesn't like stuff like, iono, gender equality... well you can find other ways to express that point of view. I seriously doubt EFF's work is changing peoples' minds about that anyway; their involvement in some of those issues is more reflecting how most EFF constituents feel.
My problem with these unrelated political issues is that they directly collide with the rights the EFF traditionally tried to defend. Nobody is talking about net neutrality anymore and activists actively try to convince suppliers of net infrastructure to drop the target of the day. These political issues do not converge very well and old liberties are regularly undermined.
I know I am painting with a broad brush here, but I am at a point where I want it severed into something else.
This assumes "charitable causes" can be apolitical. I guess the ACLU might be closer to what you want then? They have a recent history of criticism for defending the far-right in the name of free speech while generally being thought of as "liberal".
The problem you're facing is that "fighting against power structures" is a political gradient starting short of authoritarianism and ending at anarchism (unless you're Stirner but egoism is a different topic for debate). Because this is a gradient and because most people's political positions evolve over time through lived experience and exposure to other people, it's impossible to pin down a fixed position on that spectrum without eventually veering in one direction or the other.
The EFF generally tries to use the ideal of individual privacy as a fixture for its politics but the recent US Supreme Court rulings have shown the implications of that as e.g. Roe v Wade and other decisions that used to cement various civil justice issues ranging from interracial marriage and the abolishment of anti-sodomy laws to legalizing abortion were apparently literally based on the "right to privacy", which the Supreme Court ruled doesn't exist.
So if the SCOTUS thinks "right to privacy" is intrinsically tied "various agendas around gender/immigration", it shouldn't surprise anyone that the EFF would think the same, no matter what your stance on those issues is.
It's almost like the Overton window has two natural endpoints but will frictionlessly slide in between them if you start pushing, so if you want to prevent it from moving further you have to exert force that will easily cause it to slide back the way you started at.
PS: On a complete tangent, I think this is an apt metaphor for how the Russian revolution overthrowing the monarchy turned into the authoritarian Soviet Union as the Bolsheviks tried to reel in the more anarchist revolutionaries and asserted dominance of the party, insisting on a central command bureaucracy instead of a federated direct democracy. But I digress.
FIRE is primarily funded by conservative and libertarian foundations and pg (much like most VCs) is libertarian. I'm not saying this to dunk on them, but it's unsurprising that pg would tend towards FIRE over ACLU, which is funded by slightly more progressive libertarian foundations (unless you consider George Soros a leftist).
recent US Supreme Court rulings have shown the implications of that as e.g. Roe v Wade and other decisions that used to cement various civil justice issues ranging from interracial marriage and the abolishment of anti-sodomy laws to legalizing abortion were apparently literally based on the "right to privacy", which the Supreme Court ruled doesn't exist.
The SCOTUS decision in Loving (the anti-miscegenation laws, i.e., interracial marriage)[1] doesn't rest on right to privacy. This decision is built (approximately) on the equal protection clause. As such, the reversal or Roe doesn't put Loving on shaky ground at all. A good thing for me, since my wife and I are of different races.
Also Roe's reversal found that privacy implied in the 14th amendment doesn't imply a 3 trimester schedule of first, abortions legal, second states choice and third, illegal. That's it.
The right to privacy wasn't established by Roe so overturning Roe doesn't have any effect on it.
That was my point. Roe didn't establish a right to privacy but it was justified with a right to privacy. Roe was overturned because the SCOTUS now argues that there is no constitutionally guaranteed right to privacy so Roe was invalid.
Stirner could defend literally any politics under his egoistic framework. There's a liberal reading of the unique and it's property buried under the "anarchism" he esposed that resulted from how shitty the 1840s German state was...
It seems en vogue for every organization to have a position on every topic du jour but the EFF has done well to avoid, at the very least, taking action outside of their scope. I don't keep an eye on any social media of theirs or anything so I can't speak to what they are out there _saying_ but I don't tend to read about them spending money on scope creep.
Independent of the FSF's contributions to FOSS, I don't think this is a good direct substitution: I can't think of the last time the FSF was a significant party to a privacy or law enforcement lawsuit.
From experience (not as a donor but as someone familiar with nonprofits) if you donate enough,you can get it to fund specific programs. But, I would just email them, I am sure if they hear enough they'll be happy to set up a dedicated "privacy" or "transparency" initiatives.
To say that agendas around "gender and immigration" are unrelated to the EFF's goals is missing the point.
You can guarantee that if society moves towards criminializing trans people, or further demonising immigrants, or tracking women's fertility for the purposes of further restricting access to abortion; surveillance technology will be at the forefront of that effort and the EFF's goals of technological privacy and free speech will be important to fight against it.
To support the EFF is, in my opinion, an inherently political act and to say you support their overall aims of online privacy and free speech but also "get upset" when they support groups that directly benefit from their causes is (IMO) a contradiction.
People don't realize that once they're done coming after "them" they're coming after you.
I think the EFFs efforts to support adjacent groups is awesome and completely inline with their goals.
Thanks for pointing this out.
It concerns me that this is such a contentious argument. _Everything_ is political. Censorship, free speech and data privacy are about as political as you get. If the EFF did not take a political stance on these things, there would be no point to their existance.
Grand-parent and most folks interested in EFF are typically concerned with unnecessary surveillance of innocents, rather than protecting "law breakers."
(Not all laws are legitimate of course; it's a factor but orthogonal.)
But you seem to have grand-parent's take backwards.
given that we're commenting on a thread about invasive police surveillance it's pretty funny to think there's no very obvious correlation to immigration. Which groups do you think are among the most targeted by law enforcement surveillance tech?
People who get hung up on this, what's the underlying mindset? "I love privacy for white dudes, but god forbid they accidentally help a Mexican woman in an iCE camp or an abortion clinic"? Marginalized are always the primary target of police force, and increasingly beta-test subjects of police tech[1], so the relationship should be quite obvious.
> The "shitty technology adoption curve" describes the arc of oppressive technology: when you have a manifestly terrible idea, you can't ram it down the throats of rich, powerful people who get to say no. You have to find people whose complaints no one will listen to.
>
> So our worst tech ideas start out with prisoners, asylum seekers and mental patients, spread to children and blue collar workers, and ascend the privilege gradient to the wealthy and powerful as they are normalized and have their roughest corners sanded down.
An ingroup that is protected by the law but not bound by it.
An outgroup that is bound by the law but not protected by it.
So maximum liberty for me and law and order for thee.
Another example:
Best defense against a "bad guy with a gun" (outgroup) is a "good guy with a gun" (ingroup).
See also Rhodesia, Jim Crow South, apartheid South Africa, and Western Expansion under the Homesteading acts.
This is how some people can claim they want both maximum freedom but also, maximum autocracy and arbitrary authority entrusted in deputies.
It's how the same people can have cruel hot takes when there's a minority killed by police but pull their hair out if one of their religious or political leaders is taken to court.
It's not inconsistent. There's different systems applied to groups that get different labels. Could be based on the geographic coordinates of where they were born, perceived skin color, what religion they may vaguely be associated with, ethnic identity, personal wealth, the gender they sleep with or identify as, political identity, citizenship status, whatever. One group doesn't have the right to have rights. That's the crucial part. How to get there is somewhat arbitrary.
It's best if it's just a tiny bit porous so there's a token instance where the classification is broken so it can be pointed to in order to deny the system exists. See antisemitic organizations with an ethnic Jewish person involved, white supremacist organizations run by a non-white person, anti-feminist organizations run by a woman, etc. They play an important role in perpetuating such systems
The 'bad guy' is whoever is the aggressor. Everyone has a right to life; if someone starts shooting at you, or swinging a bat at you, you have the right to defend yourself, and if you kill the aggressor in self-defence, so be it.
I've heard from an internet lawyer that it's possible in principle for two people attacking each other to both have grounds for self-defence, too, if both were in reasonable fear for their lives. Whether A kills B, or B kills A, either may be able to argue self-defence given the right (wrong) circumstances. But that's just some internet theorycrafting I heard.
Surveillance and what's illegal don't have to go together. Look at it this way. CSAM is bad and I want it to remain illegal, but I'm opposed to Apple and Google scanning everyone's private photos to try to detect it.
> it doesn't depend on the fraction of the budget you're contributing. Money is fungible even if it is only $0.01
Practice versus theory. If I'm donating 50% of an organization's budget, I get to say what my 50% does as well as the other 50%. That's power. (If they don't comply, I pull my funding. Assuming the other half is diffuse.)
I always shop at Amazon after clicking their affiliate link. Not sure if this is bad form on HN to paste it directly but it's available on their website. You have to visit it before adding items to cart.
