[robk]

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.

[kajecounterhack]

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.

[hda2]

> I'd say that's a mistake

I wouldn't.

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.

[hammyhavoc]

This is how I feel about Mozilla.

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.

[kajecounterhack]

> 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.

[fsflover]

> They have a 4/5 from Charity Navigator

You probably mean 4/4: https://www.charitynavigator.org/ein/043091431.

[raxxorraxor]

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.

[lupire]

Charity Navigator does not try to measure effectivess. They measure overhead and transparency.

[hnbad]

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.

[shaftoe]

The ACLU has increasingly become exactly what he seeks to avoid.

https://reason.com/2022/08/31/the-student-loan-debate-shows-...

I would support a truly civil-liberties-only ACLU, but not what they currently are.

[vlod]

Thanks for posting this, I was not aware how far they've strayed off civil liberties.

Have not investigated this, but pg [0] seems to thumbs down ACLU and thumbs up FIRE:

[0] https://twitter.com/paulg/status/1533824076896260098

[hnbad]

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).

[rufus_foreman]

>> a truly civil-liberties-only ACLU

Take a look at FIRE, https://www.thefire.org.

[CWuestefeld]

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.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loving_v._Virginia

[parineum]

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.

[lupire]

There is no "the right to privacy". "Privacy" I'm various particular aappears areas appears in various court rulings, taken as implied via "penumbra."

https://www.justia.com/constitutional-law/docs/privacy-right...

[hnbad]

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.

[parineum]

>SCOTUS now argues that there is no constitutionally guaranteed right to privacy

That's not correct. They found that the right to privacy didn't cover abortion in the exact, specific and detailed manner that Roe set precedent for (see my previous comment about the specific rules for each trimester).

14th amendment "liberty" covers privacy covers abortion, only the abortion precedent was overturned privacy was not. Thomas took aim at privacy in his opinion but that's not supported by the rest of the court.

[Der_Einzige]

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...

[hnbad]

We don't talk about Stirner.

[kornhole]

Once you start following them I think you will find that they are very focused and have been quite successful at not diffusing into other areas.

[parineum]

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.

[Jiro]

They denounced Richard Stallman.

[weberer]

Then you want the Free Software Foundation.

https://www.fsf.org/

[woodruffw]

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.

[jvanderbot]

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.

[cptskippy]

You can always mail a donation and include a designation/restriction.

[maxehmookau]

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.

[sashahrzg]

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.

[maxehmookau]

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.

[smoldesu]

"First they came for the Communists

And I did not speak out

Because I was not a Communist

Then they came for the Socialists

And I did not speak out

Because I was not a Socialist

Then they came for the trade unionists

And I did not speak out

Because I was not a trade unionist

Then they came for the Jews

And I did not speak out

Because I was not a Jew

Then they came for me

And there was no one left

To speak out for me"

- Pastor Martin Niemöller

[mixmastamyk]

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.

[more_corn]

EFF is dedicated to online privacy and preventing government and law enforcement overreach with technology. That’s basically all they do.

[_V_]

I'd also donate if I could be sure that the money would go to the (online) privacy.

I honestly don't give a damn about abortions in the US and I don't care about any local policital movement, that is cool for the season.

[Barrin92]

>that are unrelated to their main goal

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.

[1]https://theintercept.com/2021/01/30/lapd-palantir-data-drive...

[Karellen]

Cory Doctorow's "shitty technology adoption curve" hypothesis covers this quite well. He's written about it a bunch of times, but an example with a really good summary is at https://pluralistic.net/2020/11/18/always-get-their-rational...

> 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.

[kristopolous]

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

[seanw444]

I don't see how the gun example fits here at all.

[kristopolous]

You have two people: one has the right to take others lives and the other doesn't have even the right to their own life.

How can that system be justified? Label one "good guy" and the other "bad guy".

It's one of the most pure forms of the ideology I've seen.

You have people like George Zimmerman doing pro-gun confederate flag artwork, the connection is rugged and robust

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Confederate_battle_flag...

The tribal ingroup outgroup dynamic happens all the time. Take Kyle Rittenhouse versus Ashli Babbitt for instance.

[curtainsforus]

>How can that system be justified?

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.

[kristopolous]

It's a cognitive trick used to assign a label. All you need is a frame of mind, a professed sincere belief and it's done.

Most wars of aggression were sold as self defense.

Jonathan Swift even poked fun of this in the 1700s. It's a really old trick.

The problem is some people get extended the credulity of self defense and others aren't.

Could I declare self defense against a police officer?

Why not?

Aren't they just another human susceptible to the same emotions and aggressions?

They are always given the benefit, a priori, regardless of circumstances, carte blanche, every time. Even in a mere theoretical framing, police are immediately assigned the "self defense" role. It could be over the death of a child playing in the front yard or a family dog, doesn't manner, apparently justified self defense every time.

That's exactly this dynamic at play again. It gets used in the writings of gruesome mass shooters. They were forced to kill all those people to defend some amorphous idea, the country or the race or some thing.

Self defense is a valid physical construct but it's what everyone claims. Do you expect someone to twirl their mustache, furl their cape, guffaw in laughter and snark on how much of an evildoer they are?

Everyone wants to think they were in the right. It's almost as if the theoretical is immaterial.

Let's take the horrible crime of rape for example. Some teenagers are quite a bit larger than adults and we can theoretically imagine a child offending an adult but we've decided that's so unusual that we defined a presumed relationship (of the child being the victim).

This is completely reasonable because the conceit of agreeing with the mental exercise doesn't dissuade us from the historical and practiced reality of sexual crime against children being so dominant that it's presumed unless extraordinary evidence is presented otherwise. I'm sure a quick Google search will reveal these unusual exceptions because it's a "man bites dog" kind of story for journalists. The fact they can be itemized as individual stories instead of presented as a statistic is evidence of its rarity.

Self defense might be similar. Perhaps the relationship is mostly aggression and antagonism. There's an occasional zebra of a true self defense where someone jumps out of the inky shadows to subdue an innocent damsel but perhaps we need to set the bar in the court of public opinion far higher (in the legal court I believe it's already quite a gambit but IANAL)

[josephcsible]

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.

[yieldcrv]

You can always designate the purposes of donations. Maybe not through their donation portal but the regulations allow for it.

Many non profits reject those kind of donations though. But money talks.

[JustSomeNobody]

To twist a quote:

First, they'll come for gender/immigration, but you didn't say anything. Then they'll come for you and nobody will be left to say anything.

[hammyhavoc]

Do you have more info on this specifically with the EFF? First I've heard of it, but admittedly lived under a rock in terms of news for a long time.

[JumpCrisscross]

> is it possible to support them without supporting other charitable causes of a political persuasion I don’t support?

For fifty dollars, no. If you’re giving more substantially, of course.

[jononomo]

money is fungible

[JumpCrisscross]

> money is fungible

To an extent, depending on the fraction of the budget you're contributing.

[jononomo]

No, it doesn't depend on the fraction of the budget you're contributing. Money is fungible even if it is only $0.01.

[JumpCrisscross]

> 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.)