All EFF’d Up | Yasha Levine

This person wrote an awful lot about the Apple/FBI issue without, apparently, bothering to learn the first thing about it.

The FBI had requested Apple to give them a special version of iOS with weakened security features so they could attempt to brute-force the passcode. If Apple had complied, the FBI (and anyone else who got their grubby hands on it, which you can bet woukld be pretty close to "everybody") could have used it on ANY iPhone.

Apple was absolutely right to deny this request. And yes, secure communication saves lives, all over the world. Why is that surprising?

That's a lots of words to say the EFF focuses on countering government surveillance, while doing little about business surveillance.

From EFF's About page:

Protecting Freedom Where Law and Technology Collide

...or in other words, water is wet.

Criticizing the Apple case, trying to paint Privacy Badger as an "ad blocker extension for Chrome—a browser made by Google" like somehow endorsing Google's surveillance which it blocks (and I have it running on Firefox), or making fun of free OpenSource privacy tools and encryption... all come through as highly disingenuous attempts to discredit the EFF in order to... what? Prove that it does what it says it does?

Sure, the modern boogie man is "big corp" like Google or Facebook; that doesn't mean the former boogie man of mass government surveillance has gone away.

PS: as I write this, and it gets federated unencrypted onto hundreds of instances all over the world, let me salute all our friendly data mining AIs —present and future— from Google, Meta, Criteo, AdRoll, QuantCast, FBI, CIA, MI5, MI6, FSB, MSS, and surely many others.

I'm not sure why this is being posted as if it's news, this is from July 2018.

At least, not at first. As the scandal heated up, EFF took an impassive stance. In a blog post, an EFF staffer named Donna Wentworth acknowledged that a contentious debate was brewing around Google’s new email service. But Wentworth took an optimistic wait-and-see attitude—and counseled EFF’s supporters to go and do likewise. “We’re still figuring that out,” she wrote of the privacy question, conceding that Google’s plans are “raising concerns about privacy” in some quarters. But mostly, she downplayed the issue, offering a “reassuring quote” from a Google executive about how the company wouldn’t keep record of keywords that appeared in emails. Keywords? That seemed very much like a moot point, given that the company had the entire emails in their possession and, according to the contract required to sign up, could do whatever it wanted with the information those emails contained. EFF continued to talk down the scandal and praised Google for being responsive to its critics, but the issue continued to snowball. A few weeks after Gmail’s official launch, California State Senator Liz Figueroa, whose district spanned a chunk of Silicon Valley, drafted a law aimed directly at Google’s emerging surveillance-based advertising business. Figueroa’s bill would have prohibited email providers like Google from reading or otherwise analyzing people’s emails for targeted ads unless they received affirmative opt-in consent from all parties involved in the conversation—a difficult-to-impossible requirement that would have effectively nipped Gmail’s business model in the bud. “Telling people that their most intimate and private email thoughts to doctors, friends, lovers, and family members are just another direct marketing commodity isn’t the way to promote e-commerce,” Figueroa explained. “At minimum, before someone’s most intimate and private thoughts are converted into a direct marketing opportunity for Google, Google should get everyone’s informed consent.”

Google saw Figueroa’s bill as a direct threat. If it passed, it would set a precedent and perhaps launch a nationwide trend to regulate other parts of the company’s growing for-profit surveillance business model. So Google did what any other huge company caught in the crosshairs of a prospective regulatory crusade does in our political system: it mounted a furious and sleazy public relations counteroffensive.

Google’s senior executives may have been fond of repeating the company’s now quaint-sounding “Don’t Be Evil” slogan, but in legislative terms, they were making evil a cottage industry. First, they assembled a team of lobbyists to influence the media and put pressure on Figueroa. Sergey Brin paid her a personal visit. Google even called in the nation’s uber-wonk, Al Gore, who had signed on as one of the company’s shadow advisers. Like some kind of cyber-age mafia don, Gore called Figueroa in for a private meeting in his suite at the San Francisco Ritz Carlton to talk some sense into her.

And here’s where EFF showed its true colors. The group published a string of blog posts and communiqués that attacked Figueroa and her bill, painting her staff as ignorant and out of their depth. Leading the publicity charge was Wentworth, who, as it turned out, would jump ship the following year for a “strategic communications” position at Google. She called the proposed legislation “poorly conceived” and “anti-Gmail” (apparently already a self-evident epithet in EFF circles). She also trotted out an influential roster of EFF experts who argued that regulating Google wouldn’t remedy privacy issues online. What was really needed, these tech savants insisted, was a renewed initiative to strengthen and pass laws that restricted the government from spying on us. In other words, EFF had no problem with corporate surveillance: companies like Google were our friends and protectors. The government—that was the bad hombre here. Focus on it.

I don't know whether it is illegal for someone to open a letter addressed to you or not, in the country you live, but this is pretty important. If the information presented here is accurate, this is not simply EFF focusing on the government, its EFF actively resisting similar rules to be applied on e-mail as those applied on regular mail. Would anyone use any of the non-electronic mail service providers or courier services if it was a given that for each piece of mail sent, there would be exactly one open and read, shared with multiple other parties besides the sender and receiver?

It seems to me that this is the whole point of this (quite long, but interesting) article and this instance probably illustrates it better than any other chosen to discuss in the article.

Whenever anyone reading this feels stupid or embarrassed, just remember the “protesters” standing out in the cold in support of Apple. It will make you feel better.

Archived link

Yasha Levine has always been a cynic for the sake of being a cynic. I can respect it most of the time but it can also just be futile.

:/