Additionally, if you're an Amazon user, Amazon Smile allows you to choose the EFF to donate to. There are Firefox/Chrome plugins that redirect normal amazon.com links to smile.amazon.com links so you don't forget.
"There is no reason why digital rights cannot triumph as often as gun rights. The triumph of anything is a matter of organization. If there are such things as digital rights activists, I hope that they are organized along the lines of the NRA." – Kurt Vonnegut, mutatis mutandis
You can also donate by making your Amazon purchases through http://smile.amazon.com and picking the EFF as your charity of choice. I believe they get 0.5% of each purchase.
Is there anywhere that an individual could get more involved with these five principles and the EFF? Maybe like a slack group to discuss and promote encryption and privacy?
"We anticipate participation from diverse movements such as Occupy, the Tea Party, Black Lives Matter, and the movements for immigrant rights, drug policy reform, peace and justice, gun rights, and others.”
Alright, so i’ll be the first to say this. Colleges, and the mentioned movements, ESPECIALLY BLM, have a sick, warped sense of what the word “free expression” means.
If you truly want to implement the 5 principles you mentioned, and you want support from rational people, you can’t be looking for the backing of organisations that are currently working hard to stifle them.
I’m all for what you’re saying, but you seem to be turning towards people who push for more government control, and regulation. So, sorry, but so far you look like a threat to freedom more than anything else.
I was fully expecting someone in HN to get very upset about Black Lives Matter. I don't know much about them, but judging from their Wikipedia entry, as a whole the movement seems to be doing much more good than harm.
It's also a pretty diverse group, and some have used the BLM monicker while being denounced by other members of BLM. So don't paint them all with the same brush. It's like saying that you're against John Stuart Mill or Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz because you dislike feminism[1]. It will be interesting to see which part of BLM the EFA considers to be representative.
Really? A person can be the flagship of a movement that is so opposed to your point of view as to be dangerous. A radically religious up and coming politician for example. Or, I suppose, Hitler.
Of course, but he was quoting a "list of feminists", which I haven't clicked but I guess contains dozens or even hundreds of individuals, whose lives most likely don't revolve around feminism.
And there are plenty of people whose lives didn't revolve around the KKK either. You would find that most KKK members believed in different treatment based on a person's skin colour, but disagreed with lynching or physical violence.
I argue that any group who focusses on itself is similar. You get some vocal intolerance (see the attack on Matt Taylor for a list of tens of thousands of intolerant feminists). However, what you get from the collective group is a misguided sense of entitlement. Eg. The founder of she++ dislikes gender based groups, so she established one herself! In fact, I'd argue she++ is one of the few gender based groups I know of.
As far as I'm concerned, prejudice is prejudice. BLM focus on black lives only. Feminism focuses on special treatment based on gender. how are either of these things fair or reasonable? Such movements can't help but encourage intolerance (eg. the attack on Matt Taylor). Hence, they should be denounced in the same way we denounce the KKK.
After having read the talk pages and controversies surrounding a number of politically charged wiki articles, I could not in good faith use them as a source to determine which political groups have a positive or negative influence.
I'm starting to think disjoint, disorganized movements like BLM are a bad idea just from an organizational standpoint. It means your message can't be controlled, it means its up to each individual member what the groups means, and worst of all, It takes just one idiot doing something wrong before the whole movement is permanently tainted - mostly because the majority of people will not exercise the same benefit of the doubt you just did.
That's a good point. We should let the elites handle everything because they have our best interests at heart and are much more intelligent than us. We can't trust "regular people" with political discourse.
I'm confused. Where did you get the idea "elites" need to handle everything? Parent simply stated unorganized groups with a non-unified message allows a single member to ruin the entire movement.
So where do "elites" come into play?
Edit: oh I see your account was created 15 minutes ago to just post bullshit. Sigh.
It's deleted now but at the time when I read it it didn't appear sarcastic at all. I thought I was usually good at figuring out sarcasm on the internet so I'm going to blame their terrible ability to express it (if that was the case). :)
Possibly trollish sarcasm aside, I didn't say anything about elites, only about organization. It's more important that there's a hierarchy who can say "no, we don't support this person" with the rest of the group's implicit backing when something inevitably goes wrong.
This means that your group is at the mercy of a figurehead, but that figurehead may or may not ruin the group. Leaving it up to the whims of your membership tends that probability towards 1.
These disjoint, disorganised movements exist to try and avoid another issue; that of a single person or group of people who can be 'discredited' or attacked by their enemies.
If you have a proper structure, you provide targets to discredit in order to bring down a movement or group. Groups like Occupy and Black Lives Matter and whatever else don't want a 'pope' like figure that the media can focus all their efforts on attacking, nor an organisational structure that can get infiltrated or corrupted.
Unfortunately, that causes the trade off you mention; you have no way to control the message your movement sends. This is what's caused so many problems with GamerGate as well, the fact it's entirely based on a hashtag and a loosely associated bunch of forums and blogs means that their enemies accuse them of absolutely everything they don't like that day.
But it's a trade off. Either have it decentralised and avoid the issue of a single leader/organisation being a media target (but lose the ability to control the message and who's involved) or have it centralised with a clear leader and structure at the cost of these people getting attacked non stop by their enemies and people trying their best to decredit/arrest/potentially kill them.
Any movement that focuses on one section of society (KKK, feminism) inevitably drives intolerance. Just ask Matt Taylor who was crucified by feminists for wearing a shirt designed by a woman. It is one of many examples that highlights why BLM and feminism are flawed in the same way.
EFA should only promote groups who represent everyone equally. You wouldn't accept the KKK, why accept others who encourage equivalent prejudices.
> Any movement that focuses on one section of society (KKK, feminism) inevitably drives intolerance.
If a section of society is marginalized and persecuted in the society as a whole, a movement to equalize things is bound to crop up. By your argument, you would prefer the African-American civil rights movement never to have existed, is that correct?
As a sidenote, I would like to remark that many feminists would like to define feminism as the struggle to end sexism for everybody. Consider this quote by bell hooks:
"In Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center, I suggest that defining feminism broadly as “a movement to end sexism and sexist oppression” would enable us to have a common political goal…Sharing a common goal does not imply that women and men will not have radically divergent perspectives on how that goal might be reached."
(devil's advocate) Arguably feminism has already succeeded in achieving equality by the end of the second wave. Although some feminists may indeed fight to end sexism for everybody, feminism still bears the implicit assumption that women are currently disadvantaged.
It reminds me of how Occupy was discredited: "They're just thugs and lazy people who don't want to work...and they're occupying our parks, for crying out loud!"
Because why would anyone other than thugs and lazy people who don't want to work ever protest Wall Street?
For sure, thoigh some of them advocate violence and separatism, and at some points people with such views had a lot of followers, kind of like the Trump followers who are filled with fear of Muslims.
Note that the BLM logo is the black panther logo, and they were largely viewed as separatists. I'm all for the movement when it is peaceful and respectful of American values, but when people who advocate having their own space start having a louder voice, then I lose interest.
Every source is biased. Wikipedia tries harder to be less biased. And hey, you can frequently change the bias if you just go and edit the article yourself.
I suppose I should read Wikipedia and Conservapedia and take the average of the two to get closer to the truth? :-)
And vice versa - the older generation seen by the younger as holding back progress (in the west at least, eastern societies tend to respect the older generation more)
Well, if there was a more right-leaning advocacy organization that provided a similar level of lobbying and awareness for all of the digital issues that are important to people like me, I might consider contributing. I donate to the EFF now and will continue to do so.
I don't like the mention of groups like Occupy and BLM. Those are anarchist groups and I have no use for them. Coordinating with them will do our side (the side that cares about making sure we retain all of our rights in the "digital world" that we do in the physical one) more harm than good.
During the time of the debate around SOPA or PIPA, I found the Cato Institue particularly useful for two reasons:
1. There are a lot of people who won't read something from an organization with a liberal reputation regardless of the merits of the argument.
2. Their arguments matched up closely with mine. From an economic and game theory perspective I was mostly concerned about the implicit favoring of incumbent market participants, where upstarts wouldn't be able to build a business involving anonymous user-generated content. And, that there would be fewer lively communities and discussions overall with anonymous contributors.
I don't understand why the EFF (and ACLU for that matter) are considered liberal. Aren't they libertarian, if anything? Don't conservatives care about privacy, freedom of expression, freedom of the press, religious freedom, and other civil rights?
Rejecting the EFF and ACLU looks to me like partisanship over country or principle: We don't care what they are doing, we're going to reject them because there is some association with liberalism. Fighting liberalism is more important than civil rights or anything else.
The ACLU specifically was on the opposing end of plenty of Bush-era legislation and got labeled as such. My childhood memories are pocketed with soundbites of Bill O'Reilly denouncing the ACLU as a bastion of American liberalism.
> The ACLU specifically was on the opposing end of plenty of Bush-era legislation and got labeled as such. My childhood memories are pocketed with soundbites of Bill O'Reilly denouncing the ACLU as a bastion of American liberalism.
They've been labeled as such for much longer than that. My point is, the label doesn't make sense. Bill O'Reilly doesn't like them because they are a threat to some of his political causes, like civil rights for people he doesn't like (prisoners, alleged terrorists, illegal immigrants, etc.). The ACLU opposes the much of what every President does - that's the main threat to civil liberties - including Obama's surveillance programs, for example.
The ACLU is also a liberal association[1], although I agree liberals and conservatives work together in some issues. There's no doubt about it.
And yes, I think it's okay to reject them, because I am afraid of them gaining affection from everybody just to push an agenda later. If they wanted to herald digital freedom, they should have remained completely neutral in political issues, but they chose not to...
How can they be neutral on issues directly related to civil liberties? It seems to me the liberal positions happen to align on issues of personal freedom, not that they are pushing a liberal agenda.
edit: The only questionable thing listed is their position on gun rights.
I don't buy Wikipedia editors' version of a political debate. I don't see the ACLU take political positions; can anyone name some (based on something besides Wikipedia)?
There's nothing inherently wrong with a lobbyist. They're there to help inform representatives. As for being the gatekeeper, well, nothing is stopping you from making your own website or group and sharing your own views, or writing to and calling your representatives. They are likely really confused about the digital world and some might appreciate a call from any respectful fellow who offered to clue them in. I could be wrong but anyway it wouldn't hurt and it'd give you a sense for how far your voice can project.
"There's nothing inherently wrong with a lobbyist. They're there to help inform representatives. "
You are naive.
"Intended as an internal document. Good reading to understand the nature of rich democracies and the fact that the common people are not allowed to play a role."
Please don't take threads on pointless ideological tangents. You are welcome to not like BLM, but you should know that there's no good outcome to litigating it here.
The EFF mentioned BLM in passing, right after the f'ing Tea Party. The commenter upthread doesn't want to talk about the EFF. They just want to talk about BLM on HN.
Who the EFA aligns with is relevant to the thread.
Currently the left in USA seems to conflate freedom of expression with freedom from different opinions, and, at least the mainstream left, seem to want more government involvement in the policing of speech.
So again, all of this matters, because it shows how they do, or might, define what their principles mean to them versus what they mean to you or me.
They can work together where they agree, and if they can't agree then maybe the backing they anticipated won't be there. I'm glad they're trying to bring people together behind this cause regardless.
I think you're mixing up different groups of people. I know a lot of people who work in the area of criminal justice reform, and they're by and large not the same folks freaking out about what people say in colleges. Their primary interest is in sentencing reform, holding police accountable, and drug decriminalization. It's pretty far fetched to paint those folks as pushing for more government control.
You won't get freedom of expression from today's American colleges. Today's American college kids aren't the idealists they were back in the day. These new breeds are much more vicious and cut-throat.
I think what tptacek is saying here, in paraphrase, is: "Hacker News is not the place to discuss potentially polemic content in posted news items. Read and move along, citizen."
I wish the EFF would explain more clearly why digital rights for users are important. Technology in the hands of the few and powerful can lead to authoritarianism, which is part of what makes their work so important. Right now their site only explains that digital rights promote human freedoms. Maybe they don't want to sound too "radical," but for people looking to donate, shouldn't they explain why better privacy, free expression, and digital rights laws are valuable? Love their work though!
Couldn't agree more. More succinct education with facts, rather than FUD, backing up certain viewpoints is needed. For example I found their open letter to the President about encryption to be too much about math to really attract the kind of reader whose opinion we want to change.
I agree. And I think your point touches on one of the problems I have with EFF. I think they're too adverse to upsetting right leaning libertarians by sounding "radical."
But the problem with that is you kind of have to sound radical to explain to people why digital rights are important.
Frankly, it's marginalized groups that have the most to fear. Groups that by nature are unpopular. But once you're positioned as defending unpopular groups well then, that may make your more conservative donors uneasy...
Honestly, I just personally don't have a lot to fear from state and corporate power. But the Muslims who live across the street? Or the queer couple on the next block? Yes, those folks have some very legitimate reasons to fear surveillancs.
I guess I could sum up my problem with EFF by saying that they look and act like people like me. Indeed my social circles intersect with quite a few EFF employees.
But people like me really aren't the first targets of authoritarians, so it's going to be hard to get beyond an abstract, theoretical fear of privacy violations.
I don't actually agree; looking at the recent history, and even current events, the intelligentsia and non-aligned influential people have always been targeted. Their position might grant them more "deference", but on the other hand, they are also more likely to have surveillance used to discredit them.
You even have a recent case of a Ron Paul-admiring right-wing libertarian being convicted of "domestic terrorism by trying to devalue the currency": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bernard_von_NotHaus
I like this project. It comes from a good organization fighting for democracy. It will create more interest and activity. The tie-in to political groups that create more fighting than action has me a bit uncomfortable. I like that they start with principles all should have in common. It's very important to come up with clear, basic principles all groups can fight together over against corrupt government. Further, we'll all need to remind them of that as little scuffles break out.
Supporter of EFF here. Just call me skeptical when I read lines like this:
> Bringing together community and campus ... will serve as an increasingly vital hub for activism and organizing
> free expression: people should be able to speak their minds to whomever will listen.
In my experience these types of organizations are not very interested in discussing topics or ideas that might make them feel uncomfortable. See college safe environments as an example.
Why even make this a priority if you don't really mean it?
If you try to engage with people, you might engage with people or you might not. There's no guarantee that anything will come of it. If you don't try to engage with people, there is absolutely a guarantee that nothing will come of it.
In my experience if you spend your time trying to find choirs to preach to, you're wasting your time even when you succeed. Staying away from groups of people because some of them might disagree with you is counterproductive to all participants.
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Alright, so i’ll be the first to say this. Colleges, and the mentioned movements, ESPECIALLY BLM, have a sick, warped sense of what the word “free expression” means.
If you truly want to implement the 5 principles you mentioned, and you want support from rational people, you can’t be looking for the backing of organisations that are currently working hard to stifle them.
I’m all for what you’re saying, but you seem to be turning towards people who push for more government control, and regulation. So, sorry, but so far you look like a threat to freedom more than anything else.
It's also a pretty diverse group, and some have used the BLM monicker while being denounced by other members of BLM. So don't paint them all with the same brush. It's like saying that you're against John Stuart Mill or Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz because you dislike feminism[1]. It will be interesting to see which part of BLM the EFA considers to be representative.
--
[1] Or absolutely all of these people:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_feminists
I don't see why you'd have to be against a person just because they support a different point of view on some specific issue.
I argue that any group who focusses on itself is similar. You get some vocal intolerance (see the attack on Matt Taylor for a list of tens of thousands of intolerant feminists). However, what you get from the collective group is a misguided sense of entitlement. Eg. The founder of she++ dislikes gender based groups, so she established one herself! In fact, I'd argue she++ is one of the few gender based groups I know of.
As far as I'm concerned, prejudice is prejudice. BLM focus on black lives only. Feminism focuses on special treatment based on gender. how are either of these things fair or reasonable? Such movements can't help but encourage intolerance (eg. the attack on Matt Taylor). Hence, they should be denounced in the same way we denounce the KKK.
I'm starting to think disjoint, disorganized movements like BLM are a bad idea just from an organizational standpoint. It means your message can't be controlled, it means its up to each individual member what the groups means, and worst of all, It takes just one idiot doing something wrong before the whole movement is permanently tainted - mostly because the majority of people will not exercise the same benefit of the doubt you just did.
So where do "elites" come into play?
Edit: oh I see your account was created 15 minutes ago to just post bullshit. Sigh.
This means that your group is at the mercy of a figurehead, but that figurehead may or may not ruin the group. Leaving it up to the whims of your membership tends that probability towards 1.
If you have a proper structure, you provide targets to discredit in order to bring down a movement or group. Groups like Occupy and Black Lives Matter and whatever else don't want a 'pope' like figure that the media can focus all their efforts on attacking, nor an organisational structure that can get infiltrated or corrupted.
Unfortunately, that causes the trade off you mention; you have no way to control the message your movement sends. This is what's caused so many problems with GamerGate as well, the fact it's entirely based on a hashtag and a loosely associated bunch of forums and blogs means that their enemies accuse them of absolutely everything they don't like that day.
But it's a trade off. Either have it decentralised and avoid the issue of a single leader/organisation being a media target (but lose the ability to control the message and who's involved) or have it centralised with a clear leader and structure at the cost of these people getting attacked non stop by their enemies and people trying their best to decredit/arrest/potentially kill them.
EFA should only promote groups who represent everyone equally. You wouldn't accept the KKK, why accept others who encourage equivalent prejudices.
If a section of society is marginalized and persecuted in the society as a whole, a movement to equalize things is bound to crop up. By your argument, you would prefer the African-American civil rights movement never to have existed, is that correct?
As a sidenote, I would like to remark that many feminists would like to define feminism as the struggle to end sexism for everybody. Consider this quote by bell hooks:
"In Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center, I suggest that defining feminism broadly as “a movement to end sexism and sexist oppression” would enable us to have a common political goal…Sharing a common goal does not imply that women and men will not have radically divergent perspectives on how that goal might be reached."
Because why would anyone other than thugs and lazy people who don't want to work ever protest Wall Street?
Note that the BLM logo is the black panther logo, and they were largely viewed as separatists. I'm all for the movement when it is peaceful and respectful of American values, but when people who advocate having their own space start having a louder voice, then I lose interest.
If you say you support a particular movement, you’re taking on the whole baggage it brings. If you don’t want the whole baggage then don’t name names.
Every source is biased. Wikipedia tries harder to be less biased. And hey, you can frequently change the bias if you just go and edit the article yourself.
I suppose I should read Wikipedia and Conservapedia and take the average of the two to get closer to the truth? :-)
"The children now love luxury; they have bad manners, contempt for authority; they show disrespect for elders and love chatter in place of exercise."
Every older generation tend to view the younger generation as a problem.
I don't like the mention of groups like Occupy and BLM. Those are anarchist groups and I have no use for them. Coordinating with them will do our side (the side that cares about making sure we retain all of our rights in the "digital world" that we do in the physical one) more harm than good.
1. There are a lot of people who won't read something from an organization with a liberal reputation regardless of the merits of the argument.
2. Their arguments matched up closely with mine. From an economic and game theory perspective I was mostly concerned about the implicit favoring of incumbent market participants, where upstarts wouldn't be able to build a business involving anonymous user-generated content. And, that there would be fewer lively communities and discussions overall with anonymous contributors.
Those groups are the furthest from anarchists groups so I wonder why you would call them that.
Rejecting the EFF and ACLU looks to me like partisanship over country or principle: We don't care what they are doing, we're going to reject them because there is some association with liberalism. Fighting liberalism is more important than civil rights or anything else.
(for a Bush-era, Bill O'Reilly-ish-style definition of "liberal")
They've been labeled as such for much longer than that. My point is, the label doesn't make sense. Bill O'Reilly doesn't like them because they are a threat to some of his political causes, like civil rights for people he doesn't like (prisoners, alleged terrorists, illegal immigrants, etc.). The ACLU opposes the much of what every President does - that's the main threat to civil liberties - including Obama's surveillance programs, for example.
And yes, I think it's okay to reject them, because I am afraid of them gaining affection from everybody just to push an agenda later. If they wanted to herald digital freedom, they should have remained completely neutral in political issues, but they chose not to...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Civil_Liberties_Union...
edit: The only questionable thing listed is their position on gun rights.
You are naive.
"Intended as an internal document. Good reading to understand the nature of rich democracies and the fact that the common people are not allowed to play a role."
Crisis of democracy
http://trilateral.org/download/doc/crisis_of_democracy.pdf
http://www.amazon.com/Crisis-Democracy-Governability-Democra...
Our brains are much worse at reality and thinking than thought. Science on reasoning:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PYmi0DLzBdQ
Manufacturing consent (book)
http://www.amazon.com/Manufacturing-Consent-Political-Econom...
Protectionism for the rich and big business by state intervention, radical market interference.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WHj2GaPuEhY#t=349
Manufacturing consent:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KwU56Rv0OXM
https://vimeo.com/39566117
Testing theories of representative government
https://scholar.princeton.edu/sites/default/files/mgilens/fi...
Democracy Inc
http://www.amazon.com/Democracy-Incorporated-Managed-Inverte...
It is vital to understand that free speech, privacy, and many other rights, are inherently in conflict to some degree.
Whether you think people are striking the right balance is a different matter, and not one I will talk of here, though.
Currently the left in USA seems to conflate freedom of expression with freedom from different opinions, and, at least the mainstream left, seem to want more government involvement in the policing of speech.
So again, all of this matters, because it shows how they do, or might, define what their principles mean to them versus what they mean to you or me.
But the problem with that is you kind of have to sound radical to explain to people why digital rights are important.
Frankly, it's marginalized groups that have the most to fear. Groups that by nature are unpopular. But once you're positioned as defending unpopular groups well then, that may make your more conservative donors uneasy...
Honestly, I just personally don't have a lot to fear from state and corporate power. But the Muslims who live across the street? Or the queer couple on the next block? Yes, those folks have some very legitimate reasons to fear surveillancs.
I guess I could sum up my problem with EFF by saying that they look and act like people like me. Indeed my social circles intersect with quite a few EFF employees.
But people like me really aren't the first targets of authoritarians, so it's going to be hard to get beyond an abstract, theoretical fear of privacy violations.
You even have a recent case of a Ron Paul-admiring right-wing libertarian being convicted of "domestic terrorism by trying to devalue the currency": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bernard_von_NotHaus
I've been working loosely with EFF and ACLU on Surveillance issues for nearly three years.
The process of transitioning from passive interest to part time activism wasn't easy as no on ramps really existed. I had to build them myself.
I'm hoping EFA will become one of those on ramps.
> Bringing together community and campus ... will serve as an increasingly vital hub for activism and organizing
> free expression: people should be able to speak their minds to whomever will listen.
In my experience these types of organizations are not very interested in discussing topics or ideas that might make them feel uncomfortable. See college safe environments as an example.
Why even make this a priority if you don't really mean it?
In my experience if you spend your time trying to find choirs to preach to, you're wasting your time even when you succeed. Staying away from groups of people because some of them might disagree with you is counterproductive to all participants.
moves along