The lords of the internet care very little about user privacy—what they want to preserve, is their own commercial license against government regulation of any kind.
The EFF believes every slope is very, very, very slippery indeed.
Many of them aren’t that slippery. Cleaving absolutely to a hard rule is just walking away from the hard work of good governance. I wish they’d focus way more on privacy and competitive goals like adversarial interoperability and a lot less on speech because they often have an approach to speech that makes me a little gag-y.
It’s funny, because the first time I heard an academic type seriously talking critically about the idea of free speech being an unfettered and absolute right was on the EFF’s own podcast. Pointing out that we as a society have all kinds of very real limits on speech that nearly no one thinks of as at all controversial (e.g., anti-defamation rules, sexual harassment bans, or all kinds of conspiracy/incitement statues). Yet they then come and make statements like they did about the KiwiFarms case where the threat they believe in is just so overstated.
I think it’s a lot rarer for the ACLU to have me raising my eyebrows. To me, they feel a lot more steadfast and predictable. The ACLU will defend a LOT of genuine criminals, but they do so because we factually live in a police state propped up by repeated anti-civil rights SCOTUS opinions. They do so because the outcomes of those cases WILL affect innocent people in a straight line – the police WILL take every opportunity to violate you without a second thought even if it ISN’T allowed, and will do so with gusto when it is. I don’t think there is a similar straight line with a Tier 1 ISP killing traffic to a known hate site that regularly threatens and incites violence against specific people.
The ACLU tends to rabidly support anything that labels itself as free speech, even if it actually stifles it. Most importantly, to me, their continued support for Citizens United.
But maybe that’s the only real case and it’s just loomed so large in my mind for the chilling impact “corporations get free speech, and their dollars count as that” has had on the US political landscape.
The EFF believes every slope is very, very, very slippery indeed.
Many of them aren’t that slippery. Cleaving absolutely to a hard rule is just walking away from the hard work of good governance. I wish they’d focus way more on privacy and competitive goals like adversarial interoperability and a lot less on speech because they often have an approach to speech that makes me a little gag-y.
It’s funny, because the first time I heard an academic type seriously talking critically about the idea of free speech being an unfettered and absolute right was on the EFF’s own podcast. Pointing out that we as a society have all kinds of very real limits on speech that nearly no one thinks of as at all controversial (e.g., anti-defamation rules, sexual harassment bans, or all kinds of conspiracy/incitement statues). Yet they then come and make statements like they did about the KiwiFarms case where the threat they believe in is just so overstated.
I think it’s a lot rarer for the ACLU to have me raising my eyebrows. To me, they feel a lot more steadfast and predictable. The ACLU will defend a LOT of genuine criminals, but they do so because we factually live in a police state propped up by repeated anti-civil rights SCOTUS opinions. They do so because the outcomes of those cases WILL affect innocent people in a straight line – the police WILL take every opportunity to violate you without a second thought even if it ISN’T allowed, and will do so with gusto when it is. I don’t think there is a similar straight line with a Tier 1 ISP killing traffic to a known hate site that regularly threatens and incites violence against specific people.
The ACLU tends to rabidly support anything that labels itself as free speech, even if it actually stifles it. Most importantly, to me, their continued support for Citizens United.
But maybe that’s the only real case and it’s just loomed so large in my mind for the chilling impact “corporations get free speech, and their dollars count as that” has had on the US political landscape.
I never really thought about them defending that bullshit, but that’s worthy of heavy criticism.
Any time you find yourself on the same side of an issue as the Cato Institute, you should think real long and hard about your position.