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

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.

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.

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.

> 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.

(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.

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.

<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.

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.

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.

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.