Technology

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.