The NO FAKES act has changed, and it's worse

You already need point a) to be in place to comply with EU laws and directives (DSA, anti-terrorism [1]) anyway, and I think the UK has anti-terrorism laws with similar wording, and the US with CSAM laws.

Point b) is required if you operate in Germany, there have been a number of court rulings that platforms have to take down repetitive uploads of banned content [2].

Point c) is something that makes sense, it's time to crack down hard on "nudifiers" and similar apps.

Point d) is the one I have the most issues with, although that's nothing new either, unmasking users via a barely fleshed out subpoena or dragnet orders has been a thing for many many years now.

This thing impacts gatekeepers, so not your small mom-and-pop startup but billion dollar companies. They can afford to hire proper moderation staff to handle such complaints, they just don't want to because it impacts their bottom line - at the cost of everyone affected by AI slop.

[1] https://eucrim.eu/news/rules-on-removing-terrorist-content-o...

[2] https://www.lto.de/recht/nachrichten/n/vizr6424-bgh-renate-k...

Try dialogue.

Especially at a time when the US is becoming increasingly authoritarian.

> not your small mom-and-pop startup

not sure why you said this, it's the artists / content makers that suffer.

These rules have serious consequences for privacy, potential for abuse, and also raise the barriers immensely for new companies to start up.

The problem is quite obvious when you consider that Trump supporters label anything they dislike as fake news, even when the facts are known and available to everyone. These rules would allow any opposition to be easily silenced. Restricting the measures to terrorism, illegal pornography, and other serious crimes would be more acceptable.

Your question is like asking “why don’t we have metal detectors and body scanners on every school and public building”. Just because you can, and it would absolutely increase safety, does not mean it’s a good idea.

IMO legislation should focus on how individuals can be made responsible, and prosecuted when they break the law – not mandating tech companies to become arms of a nanny state.

Sounds like the kind of system small companies can't implement and large companies won't care to implement.

So while you can compare the two, it's not an apples-to-apples comparison. You need to squint a bit.

The DMCA has proven to be way too broad, but there's no appetite to change that because it's very useful for copyright holders, and only hurts small content producers/owners. This looks like it's heading the same way.

> This thing impacts gatekeepers, so not your small mom-and-pop startup but billion dollar companies.

I don't see any exemptions for small businesses, so how do you conclude this?

[0] https://www.grcworldforums.com/risk/bridging-global-business... mentions this but I couldn't find a better article specifically addressing the differences in approach.

Or the sort of thing bigger companies lobby for to make the entry barriers higher for small competition. Regulatory capture like this is why companies above a certain level of size/profit/other tend to swing in favour of regulation when they were not while initially “disrupting”.

Suppose someone posts a YouTube video that you claim is defamatory. How is Google supposed to know if it is or not? It could be entirely factual information that you're claiming is false because you don't want to be embarrassed by the truth. Google is not a reasonable forum for third parties to adjudicate legal disputes because they have no capacity to ascertain who is lying.

What the government is supposed to be doing in these cases is investigating crimes and bringing charges against the perpetrators. Only then they have to incur the costs of investigating the things they want to pass laws against, and take the blame for charges brought against people who turn out to be innocent etc.

So instead the politicians want to pass the buck and pretend that it's an outrage when corporations with neither the obligation nor the capacity to be the police predictably fail in the role that was never theirs.

the later inherently implies using violence to suppress people

All laws that you want to be strictly enforced, requires violence. This is why people should ALWAYS remember when making laws: "Is this worth killing for?"

I remember some years ago on HN people discussing about a guy that got killed because he bought a single fake cigarrete. IT goes like this:

You make a law where "x" is forbidden, penalty is a simple fine. Person refuses to pay fine. So you summon that person to court, make threats of bigger fine. Person ends with bigger fine, refuses to pay anything. So you summon that person again, say they will go to jail if they don't pay. They again don't pay, AND flee the police that went to get them. So the cops are in pursuit of the guy, he is a good distance away from the cops for example, then they have the following choice: Let him go, and he won, and broke the law successfully... Or shoot him, the law won, and he is dead.

This chain ALWAYS applies, because otherwise laws are useless. You can't enforce laws without the threat of killing people if they refuse all other punishments.

I don't know if the guy you were discussing with is right or not, if digital era result in the need of "ruling with the iron fist", but make no mistake, there is no "strict law enforcement" that doesn't involve killing people in the end.

Thus you always need to think when making laws: "Is this law worth making someone die because of it?"

Your whole post falls apart right there.

Person 'x' refuses to pay a fine - OK, well there are mechanisms where a fine can be automatically applied in some cases, or taken from their assets by court order, or docked from pay. In some places bailiffs/repo men can be called to take assets after fines have been delinquent for long enough.

Deadly force is not really the backstop position to a fine, even a 'strictly enforced' one.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monopoly_on_violence

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Use_of_force_continuum

In countries where we don't have trigger-happy cops, the story continues this way:

* The person commits a crime or tort. Your courts fine the person.

* The person doesn't pay the fine. You extract the fine forcibly from their bank account (or force their employer to dock their wages, or forcibly obtain and auction their assets; let's go with the bank example)

* Why does the bank comply? Because you can revoke the bank's right to trade.

* Why doesn't the bank just trade anyway? Because if they do that, you can enter their buildings and take their equipment, arrest their employees, etc.

* What if the bank tries to stop you doing that? Then you send in armed police.

* What if the bank shoots back? Then you send in the army, and at worst case encircle the bank and lay siege to it.

* What if the bank has their own army which they use to break your siege? Send in your bigger army. Also have laws against private armies, and spend your time detecting private armies and breaking them up before they get bigger than the state's army.

Most people comply with the state at the earlier steps in this chain, and the state runs all the smoother for it. But you can see in failed states, one of the main reasons for the failure is some group (or groups) inside the state have managed to develop a bigger army than the state itself, or parts of the official army break away from the current government or attempt a coup. At that point, it's not the current government's country any more, it's up for grabs. The government (and the entire system of law it represents) has lost the monopoly on violence.

The point of the GP's post is that all laws are ultimately backed by violence. Most rational actors don't let law enforcement reach the explicitly violent part, but it's still there.

To bring it on topic, what this highlights is it is much better to fight against bad laws while they are just proposals, it is much harder to fight against bad laws once enacted.

Nevermind cases where people don't even have a bank account or anything you can take. Or they protect it well enough.

Personally, I find the world becoming more and more about fighting for survival while simultaneously fuck you I got mine...

But we have seen that the police may not follow the same principle. There have been cases where police have killed harmless suspects and gotten away with it.

But it sounds much worse than that: infrastructure for textbook tyranny.

Suppress speech of dissidents against the regime, take away their soapboxes and printing presses, demand that the dissident be identified and turned over to the regime, and put fear of sanctions into all who might be perceived by the regime as aiding dissidents through action or inaction.

For example, anonym29, when did you stop beating up your partner?

Or just cut off their power (or network access, or whatever)?

I know "monopoly on violence" is the term in the literature, but I think it's more like monopoly on coercion than monopoly on violence per se. The latter is one way to implement the former, but not the only way.

To give a hypothetical larger-scale example, if the population relies on a dam for water/power, then an implicit threat to destroy the dam could coerce them without any violence.

None of those attempt to curate, moderate, or pass judgment on the content they carry. They are essentially pipes that pass content through.

Social Media (and forums like HN) act more as publishers: they decide what is and is not allowed, and through that moderation, they are more responsible for what user content they choose to make available.

I’m not in favor of this law, but we should not pretend that Social Media is blameless when naughty people use it to publish their stuff.

This is true. Which is of a piece with EFF's general bent these days. They stopped caring about big issues of internet freedom long ago and are now just a parade of Big Tech Bad headlines.

And in an era where (1) Big Tech continues, after several decades, of being really quite a benign steward of society's information and (2) we have a bunch of unsupervised 20-something MAGA bros loading the entirety of the Federal government onto their Macbooks, that seems extremely tone deaf to me.

The tech privacy apocalypse is upon us. And the %!@#! EFF is still whining about Meta and ByteDance for its click stream, because like everyone else on the internet that's what they really care about.

You can hate the legislation, but it would be nice to hear some alternative ideas that go beyond, "We just have to accept all the horrific stuff that the bad actors out there want to throw onto the internet.

Never in the history of our country, was a company that openly flaunted the law, and was murdered by cop or judge.

What's the saying? "I'll believe in the death penalty when they kill a corporation in Texas"

if a iron fist rule you shoot them, but sooner or later you will end up with situations where their brother will shoot you, or there is a uprising and they lynch the police chef etc. no one wins

in country with strict rules but no iron fist rule the police person who tries to shoot someone who doesn't pose danger for other just because they try to avoid arrest by running away will lose their job

> involve killing people in the end

this is such a misleading dumb fatalistic argument, yes people will get killed, but there is a huge difference between the context.

> You can't enforce laws without the threat of killing people if they refuse all other punishments.

Except pretty much all of the EU operates _exactly_ that way with minor differences. And it works.

Sure there are edge cases where you threaten shooting at someone, and sometimes police will have to shoot. But only if there is risk to live. And most crimes don't go that far.

Exactly. This is the big boy version of "even your petty backyard patio needs a PE stamp" type crap.

Well, it seems to be the same situation as everywhere: you either obey or be killed. As far as I know, in the EU there is no option to disobey and survive.

One of the big reasons why CJEU is handing out massive fines to the big tech companies is because of the blatant non-compliance to orders from local courts and DPAs by constantly demanding appeals to them and refusing to even attempt to do anything until CJEU affirms the local courts (and usually ramping up the fines a bit more at that). It's a deliberate perversion of the judicial process so that GAFAM can keep violating the law by delaying the proper final judgement. They'd not have gotten higher fines if they just complied with the local courts while the appeal was going on; that'd be a show of good faith, which European courts tend to value.

The solution is to demand governments force social media companies to implement algorithmic friction coefficients.

It’s simply that the economic incentives involved mean there is no political will to make it happen.

The ruling class benefits from the chaos, division and confusion as perpetuated by social media in its current form. They like it just fine the way it is now.

Some Research:

Aral & Eckles (MIT, 2019): Introducing friction reduces misinformation spread without limiting freedom of expression. • Mozilla & Stanford Studies (2020–2022): Friction (such as unsharing prompts) reduces fake news virality by up to 50%. • Twitter’s 2021 experiments: Users changed or deleted tweets 25% of the time when shown fact-check prompts before posting.

They were a genuine beacon of rationality and justice in the early internet. They're junk-tier blog spam now. And I find that upsetting, irrespective of the status of AI legislation.

Now it will be used againt it, and against in right wing dissidents to the establisment fairy tales too.

Yeah, god forbid there's a place people talk somewhat freely. They might have ...bad opinions.

Except for all kinds of established laws broken by the state itself (e.g. extrajudicial deportations), or "fast and loose" startups like Uber and AirBnB, or any big enough company really.

And when they can't fit through exceptions to the law, they magically pay politicians and buy their own laws.

But god forbid people can talk freely about it. What if they don't have the right ideas about things?

They won't care to implement it. They'll follow the letter of the law, which means they'll aggressively block anything that gets (falsely) reported, but they certainly won't follow its spirit.

Physical force is permitted against nonviolent criminals so they can be apprehended, but lethal force is usually not permitted unless the criminal has used or is about to use violence.

Yes, there are of course instances where nonviolent criminals have been killed, with that act of killing being legal under that framework. For example, if a criminal is escaping in a vehicle recklessly and putting the lives of others in danger. Or cases where enforcers are given overly broad latitude in determining what constitutes a threat of violence. Or tyrannical regimes that authorize lethal force for minor infractions.

But it is not the case that most legal systems say “a criminal can be killed if they refuse to submit to punishment, regardless of the severity of their crime”. That is a misconception. People don’t get killed for not paying fines, they get killed for trying to shoot the person that comes to take them to jail for not paying the fine.

Accordingly, every single declaration of "misinformation" must be critically evaluated according to available evidence, as the claim itself has been weaponized by bad-faith, self-serving interests of those in positions of power and authority.

The "experts" are frequently wrong, and are not inherently trustworthy. Not every word that slips past their tongue is the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. They are humans, and like the rest of humans, they lie, they mislead, they are wrong, and some of them and can and do attempt to abuse social consensus mechanisms, including ostracization, to bend public discourse in their favor.

In particular, see the very first bullet point: Section 230 makes no mention whatsoever of a publisher/platform distinction. People like you appear to have invented this dichotomy out of whole cloth and attached relevance to it which does not actually exist.

Jacob Blake was shot in the back by an officer and it was justified by saying he was walking to his truck and there may have been a pocketknife in said truck.

Charles Kinsey was shot in the chest for no reason other than being on-scene while another mentally disabled person blocked traffic. He stayed to advise officers that the person blocking traffic was holding a toy firetruck, not a weapon. Kinsey asked the officer why he was shot, and the officer replied, "I don't know."

>Deadly force is not really the backstop position to a fine

It is, though. All of the things you listed as alternatives to force are actually escalations of force, and at the end of the day you either pay the fine or go to jail and when they come to take you to jail you either come along quietly or get beaten and maybe killed. The backstop of all law and order is a state-sanctioned monopoly on violence.

"Crony capitalism consists of but one principle: In-corporations who are protected by regulation, but not bound by it, alongside out-corporations who are bound by regulation, but not protected by it."

This philosophy is yours is bad for a number of reasons, but I’ll start with the fact that you have essentially constructed a loophole for arbitrarily bad laws to be passed. If you just rage yourself into not caring about bad laws because you’re mad at the people talking about them instead, then when will you ever oppose the bad laws, instead of “getting mad at randos online”? This quickly turns into cynicism and apathy in the face of unlimited cruelty and expansion of government power.

Another approach would be to develop OSS that fulfilled the basic requirements in a non-tyrannical manner that supports people who create things. There was the example of Cliff Stoll on this site just yesterday. It is objectively wrong for someone to mistreat his creative work in that way.

What would httpd for content inspection look like? Plagiarism detection? Geo-encoded fair use?

Both the state or a private entity seem like they could do the dam example.

One's a law that everyone has to follow, while the other one's a made-up piece of text that the company can change at any point in time if they wish to do so.

Platforms shouldn't be deciding for you what you see, outside of the obvious outright illegal things like CSAM

> we have a bunch of unsupervised 20-something MAGA bros loading the entirety of the Federal government onto their Macbooks, that seems extremely tone deaf to me.

The latter is the direct and consequential result of the former. Elon Musk is Big Tech, and he specifically engineered Trump's second electoral victory to get back at Gavin Newsom not letting him run the California Tesla factory at full tilt during COVID. He also turned Twitter into a 24/7 far-right slop machine.

Before that, under the latter half of the Jack Dorsey regime, Twitter was a 9-to-5 liberal slop machine. And before that it was so painfully "neutral" that it let all these far-right nutjobs get a foothold on the Internet to begin with. Remember Jack Dorsey rolling out the "world leaders" policy just to justify not enforcing the rules on Trump? Or Reddit vetoing moderators of far-right subs from shutting down their own hellholes? Big Tech's stewardship of public forums ranges from "asleep at the wheel" at best to "actively malicious and incompetent" at worst.

And this is downstream of the broader disintegration of the liberal coalition. The operation of a large enterprise involves many inherently illiberal acts, and thus the business half of that coalition no longer acts as liberals. In fact, I would argue they fell away decades ago. We didn't notice because the business class had distracted us with a culture war, specifically using their stewardship of social media to amplify opposition and division.

I have plenty of complaints about the EFF, but their lobbying against Big Tech is not part of them.

Second, if parts of system does not work as intended, then we should think of how to prevent such situations in the first place.

Where lives are at stake we cannot take a stand "it works on my machine" or "you are not holding it the right way". We need to find solutions to fix or prevent it.

If you you don't pay your drug dealer, he can't take you to court, because his entire business is illegal. So instead he beats you up to get you to comply with his payment demands. If a policeman catches him doing that, the policeman can legally arrest him for the crime of assault, and can legally use force to stop him beating you up.

His sentiments are pressaged by others, including Adam Smith (1776):

Civil government, so far as it is instituted for the security of property, is in reality instituted for the defense of the rich against the poor, or of those who have some property against those who have none at all.

<https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Wealth_of_Nations/>

Or some guy named Matthew, somewhat earlier:

For whosoever hath, to him shall be given, and he shall have more abundance: but whosoever hath not, from him shall be taken away even that he hath.

<https://biblehub.com/matthew/13-12.htm>

Counterpoint:

https://www.recordingacademy.com/advocacy/news/no-fakes-act-...

(Regardless of my agreement with either you or ajross. "Get off the Internet for a while" reads close to "touch grass", which dang's specifically addressed: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40851991>.)

1. Have come to realise that Big Tech (including many substantial backers of the organisation, in the past if not presently) is itself a major threat and ...

2. That the problem is far more nuanced than early views (Barlow's "A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace", <https://www.eff.org/cyberspace-independence> and Gilmore's "The Net Interprets Censorship As Damage and Routes Around It", see <https://quoteinvestigator.com/2021/07/12/censor/> in particular) suggested. Absolute freedom turns out to not be freedom, for many, shades of Popper's Paradox of Tolerance.

Are they saying that this act allows companies to watermark their content to prevent other companies from generating secondary content on their content?

How exactly does this act work?

I think it is DMCA for images, tools and derivative works, along as all logging needed to track the creator, the tool and the publisher.

As I said though, I just skimmed the text.

I can be easily fooled by such blog entries.

I was saying that the government can and does coerce people to do a lot of things without violence. For many laws, just cutting off access to essential goods or services forces compliance without ant violence whatsoever - even if you never comply with anything. Heck, even mere arrest and jail time isn't violent - they can occur pretty darn peacefully.

Of course if you become violent at any stage then that's what you get in response, and the government has a monopoly on doing that legally, but that's not a response to your noncompliance - it's a response to your own violence, which is separate and has nothing to do with the initial law you were actually breaking.

>Oy': you got a license for that tensor core, mate?!

----

But hey at least we're outlawing marijuana beyond what the Federal 2018 Farm Bill authorizes, nationally /s

----

Our neighboring Friend down in Texas, the goodly-astute Gov-nuh, was wise to veto similar legislations in his own jurisdiction (due to perceived unconstitutionality / legal challenges).

In point of fact, nonsense like "Big Tech Bad" became part of the general antiestablishment mania that got us into this mess! Google and Meta kept our stuff mostly private, it's the nuts we voted for who were the real threat, and we voted for them because the EFF and other thought leaders told us not to trust the people who turned out to have been the good guys.

And I've mostly had it. The EFF turns out to have been a click farm milking sincere but mostly irrelevant outrage into an engine for social destruction. No thanks.

That's still underpinned by violence. Why would the providers of essential goods or services willingly comply with a state's demands to cut off your access? Perhaps they think you're a good guy and the state has the wrong idea. Let's say they refuse the state's demand.

The answer is the state in turn threatens these providers with whatever it needs to to force their compliance. And it threatens any fourth, fifth, sixth etc. parties it needs to. It threatens them with loss of legal status, loss of revenue, loss of property, loss of freedom. And it ultimately has to use violence to uphold these threats, should everyone it asks to carry out these actions refuse.

It all traces back to state violence, it's just convenient for both the state and subject if the state doesn't have to escalate that far. But it always can. If it cannot - if the subject can successfully defend themselves against a state-backed enforcement of its laws - that's a sign of a failed state.

If indeed violence is intended be used in context X, then that is something quite different from violence is intended never to be used in context X.

Sure, on the ground, "violence is not intended to be used here, but it is being used here" can be a life-or-death question. But if the answer is that the system is indeed intending to function that way, then the route to changing that is quite different than if some actors are not obeying the rules.

Because their licenses might be revoked and that would affect how others treat them, both domestically and internationally? Because they have respect for the rule of law and want to live in a country where laws are respected? Because they realize they're playing infinite games rather than one-shot games, and that it might actually be better business to comply? I could cite a million reasons, but seriously: not every single compliance is due to indirect threat of violence. We actually have laws with penalties that simply do not escalate that far, and the vast majority of people still comply with them simply because they're the law, and a lot of people have respect for that. Hell, even violence is not enough to prevent the entire population from turning against you, even in the world's most powerful countries. The idea that every single law is ultimately backed by violence or that that's somehow necessary is just silly. Humans are more complex than that.

Anything else is just a slippery slope fallacy

Seems pretty clear to me man

<https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25982286>

This case is borderline, but I suspect mods would find it on the far side of that border. The original comment reads better without the swipe.

Attempts to regulate lying are just cover for push certain narratives to favor political opinions.

It allows anyone to provide a complaint without any evidence, about any content hosted anywhere, and puts the legal onus on the person hosting that content to prove the negative (that it isn't a "fake"), with the legal requirement to remove the content as soon as is technically feasible (ie, instantly).

So, similarly abusable to the DMCA, but with even broader requirements and even more-impossible-to-prove legitimacy, since it creates a whole new ill-defined class of legal ownership over content.

TLDR: it's a great reason to move hosting outside of the US

Matthew was a tax collector, this is literally expert advice, not just one of those religious metaphors.

1) other people can and will get hurt if you do that. Plus other damage.

2) no criminal only breaks the law once, so the police will get another chance. And, frankly, if by some miracle the criminal really does only breaks the law just once, that by definition means they're rehabilitated. Job well done.

3) If you use violence you WILL get hurt. Perhaps that's very Jesus of me but it's true. Jesus did not see fit to build in an exception for the police. And states do not take good care of police that get hurt in the line of duty. So for individuals ... SWAT pays well but on the other hand there's demands. Demands you will never meet again if you get even a severe kick in the knee, and that represents years/decades of lost income that the state will not replace. So ...

This is something people forget, but even animals behave like that. And it makes sense: a tiger may be powerful, but he cannot survive long term eating just you. Plus the calories the tiger gains from eating you justify maybe a few scratches, nothing more. In other words: an attack will only happen if the tiger is either desperate or VERY sure there's no risk. Not even a small risk of getting knifed.

Yes, we're still human, and if you really make it clear your a dangerous lunatic, say kill a cop, or kids, or ... yes some police will risk their own safety to arrest/kill you. So there's exceptions. But mostly, no.

In contrast, American jurisdiction is "come down hard from the get-go if it's warranted, but the richer you are the better your chances are at just lawyering yourself out of trouble", and the cultural attitude is "it's better to ask for forgiveness than permission". That fundamentally clashes with our attitude, and not just the general public but especially the courts don't like it when companies blatantly ignore our democratic decisions just to make short term money (e.g. Uber and AirBnB).

This is just not true.

It's such a reductionist argument that it's nonsense. You either pay the fine or ... they find a way to get the money outside of direct payment and if they can't because you have no assets or income then most often the fine goes unpaid, sometimes for many years.

Jacob Blake and Charles Kinsey were Americans, right?

Your society has a violence problem and I don't think ought to be used as any sort of example. If the initial claim was "enforcing any law may cost lives in a broken society in which the police can murder with seeming impunity" that's a very different proposition.

Looking at the monopoly on violence as the backing to the entire system of law? Sure, it's absolutely there. It's something to consider when discussing the merits of the existence of the state at all.

But within the context of the state already existing, looking at the introduction of an individual rule that may result in a fine through the lens of "is this worth someone's life" is nonsensical - it's just not going to cost anyone's life, it's not a reasonable thing to consider. Especially outside of countries where law enforcement are routinely armed and trigger-happy - there is no reasonable pathway to a fine costing lives. What we do see is fines just going unpaid if they can't be recovered by administrative means.

It is notable that in both your and the GPs timelines, the other party turns to violence first. Your line -

> What if the bank tries to stop you doing that? Then you send in armed police.

really seems only to apply in places like the US where you have a bigger problem with police killings and a societal leaning towards firearms and escalation of violence. The UK (for example) will only send in armed police as a response to situations in which the other party is also armed and a credible threat to lives, they won't just start shooting.

tl;dr - considering the consequences of complete societal breakdown as part of your scenario when deciding to introduce a new type of parking fine is... well it's fricken hilarious really.

I ... was well aware of the EFF for at least the latter half of that period, and this doesn't seem to correspond well with my recollection, though I suppose one could argue that Jackson Games cast AT&T as Big Evil Tech. The defendant in the case however was the US Secret Service, a federal government entity. The Church of Scientology was of course another notable early non-government focus.

But largely at least through 2000, and for much of the decade of the 2000s, EFF's principle focus was law and policy, not abusive tech giants. Rather than abandoning the former, the EFF seems now to consider both as significant concerns. Even key EFF staffers themselves (e.g., Doctorow, Cohn) acknowledge this shift.

(Not about Matthew's occupation but the meaning/interpretation of the verse.)

I haven't seen the EFF weigh in once on the legality or privacy concerns of a just-hired unvetted contractor walking around with the entire IRS on his MacBook, or of the trolling of law enforcement data that disappeared a thousand people into cages in some Salvadoran jungle.

Instead, the EFF seems more concerned with making sure we all buy iPhones instead of Pixels.

Spare me, basically. I know what I care about. The EFF doesn't represent my interests. Which sucks, because they used to.

Taking this a step further, it's logical to conclude that society itself is a constant war between rich people, who use their wealth (influence/power) to enlist the poor in their attacks on one another. Taking it another level, we could say that "society" itself is merely a side-effect of this war, in fact it is the current state-of-the-art weapon in this struggle. If something better than capitalistic society comes about (such as, most obviously, human-level AIs and robotics), the rich will not hesitate to abandon the society strategy.

I've quoted the passage, which describes the political balance and division between the optimates, populares, and equites, roughly the oligarchs, labour, and petit bourgousie, in this (now archived) Reddit post:

<https://web.archive.org/web/20230607042525/https://old.reddi...>

The durability of such conflict makes me strongly suspect that this is innate to human polity, and Jones's description of the respective groups' political platforms, concerns, and ideologies strike me as both insightful and possibly innate.

I've mentioned this several times previously on HN:

<https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...>

EFF and a coalition of privacy defenders have filed a lawsuit today asking a federal court to block Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) from accessing the private information of millions of Americans that is stored by the Office of Personnel Management (OPM), and to delete any data that has been collected or removed from databases thus far....

<https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2025/02/eff-sues-doge-and-offi...>

"EFF Sues OPM, DOGE and Musk for Endangering the Privacy of Millions" (February 11, 2025)

(Concerns same action.)

"The Dangers of Consolidating All Government Information" (June 5, 2025)

The Trump administration has been heavily invested in consolidating all of the government’s information into a single searchable, or perhaps AI-queryable, super database. The compiling of all of this information is being done with the dubious justification of efficiency and modernization–however, in many cases, this information was originally siloed for important reasons: to protect your privacy, to prevent different branches of government from using sensitive data to punish or harass you, and to perserve the trust in and legitimacy of important civic institutions.

Just three of several DDG results at eff.org for 'doge "government efficiency"': <https://duckduckgo.com/?t=ftsa&q=site%3Aeff.org+doge+%22gove...> (there are numerous dupes, mostly of these three items best I can tell).

I hope this somewhat restores your faith in EFF, and if not, I'd appreciate hearing why, if you care to say.

The house is burning down, and EFF is just business-as-usual. And their business is freakout out about Facebook and Google, not protecting the citizenry from technology abuse.

[1] An organization I do support, who are doing good work, often at great professional risk to themselves. It's not like there aren't good lawyers out there. It's that the EFF have poisoned themselves into impotence.