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Comment by guelo | Hacker News Reader

If you think they do important work why do you consider it your duty to go on every advocacy thread and say how you disagree with their tactics? How does your tactic of constantly discouraging people from advocating for these issues serve your stated shared goals better than EFF's?

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Probably for the same reason that you clearly feel it's your duty to repeat this same comment on all those threads. I'm guessing it's a shared feeling of someone being wrong on the Internet.

I'm really not sure what's so complicated about this.

I have a hard time thinking of legal support EFF has provided that I don't support. If EFF was just legal support, I'd be a donor.

I think their technical work is mostly good; it would be entirely good but for the egregiously terrible Secure Messaging Scorecard --- but hey, that scorecard won me a $1000 bet against Matt Green, so some good came out of it.

Virtually all of EFF's policy advocacy, I find untrustworthy. I don't even believe they take it seriously. I think they play to the crowds, in the hope that the retweets and upvotes will generate more donations.

Is it really that hard for you to see that as a plausible narrative? I'm not asking you to agree with it.

You're conducting this conversation in a manner I find to be vocalizing the precise feelings I've had about CISA and CISPA, and especially, EFF.

> Virtually all of EFF's policy advocacy, I find untrustworthy. I don't even believe they take it seriously.

This is an interesting conspiracy theory.

> Is it really that hard for you to see that as a plausible narrative?

My theory is that they really believe in what they're doing. They are based in SF, so they are surrounded by well-funded startups offering high salaries. Employees of EFF could be making small fortunes, and instead they choose to fight to secure civil rights. Why? Because some people value freedom over currency. This narrative seems more plausible.

The people doing advocacy work at EFF are generally not technologists, from what I can tell.

I'm not sure what your point is, regarding technologists.

Technologists working for EFF are probably giving up outsized salaries at SFBA startups. Advocacy journalists are probably not.

I'm sure they're all good people who believe in what they're doing. It does not follow that they believe in every individual position they advocate for; they're a nonprofit, so fundraising is a huge part of their job.

Cool, thanks for elaborating on your stance

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