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

> The new version of NO FAKES requires almost every internet gatekeeper to create a system that will a) take down speech upon receipt of a notice; b) keep down any recurring instance—meaning, adopt inevitably overbroad replica filters on top of the already deeply flawed copyright filters; c) take down and filter tools that might have been used to make the image; and d) unmask the user who uploaded the material based on nothing more than the say so of person who was allegedly “replicated.”

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

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

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.

I'd argue quite strongly the opposite, that the EFF do care very deeply about internet freedom, but:

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.

The EFF has been yelling that Big Tech is a major threat for like three decades now. The dystopia seems not to have arrived. Until now, when it seems to be rolling out as offical administration policy.

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.

Would you happen to have any notable examples of EFF's treating Big Tech as the enemy (or major threat if you prefer) during its first five or ten years? That would be 1994--1999 or 1994--2004, roughly.

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.

Touche. Should have said two decades. You got me. But I really don't see how that's responsive.

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.