08.17.19

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Electronic Frontier Foundation Makes a Mistake by Giving Award to Microsoft Surveillance Person

Posted in EFF, FSF, Google, Microsoft, Patents at 6:25 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Like they don’t give a f*** about their reputation anymore

eff

Summary: At age 30 (almost) the Electronic Frontier Foundation still campaigns for privacy; so why does it grant awards to enemies of privacy?

In July 1990 the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) was founded by John Gilmore, John Perry Barlow, and Mitch Kapor. Barlow died a couple of years ago, so the EFF is now run by its chief executive officer Cindy Cohn. Some of our longtime readers say they have lost confidence in the EFF; the old timers actually told us it had lost direction and nowadays caters for ‘hipsters’ with their ‘gadgets’ near its headquarters (main office in California). The EFF recently lost the person who fought software patents for the EFF (he moved to Mozilla) and they never cared about software patents in Europe or EPO scandals. Never. Not even once. They have some extremely valuable people, such as Cory Doctorow (who fought for the EFF on copyright issues in Europe), but we recently felt upset that they had taken money from Google. This harmed the EFF’s position on patents — and to a lesser degree on copyrights — and indirectly harmed all of us who fight software patents. Even the EFF’s own, namely Birgitta Jónsdóttir, openly expressed dissatisfaction over this. She cited Techrights at the time.

“It probably wouldn’t have happened under Barlow’s watch.”Nobody is perfect and the EFF certainly isn’t perfect. Similarly, several years ago we expressed our disagreement with the FSF after it had given an award to a provocateur who liaised with other provocateurs. 4 years ago there was another anti-Torvalds coup. Don’t forget who did it and how. It was attempted again not so long ago and for the first time in almost 30 years Torvalds took a break from Linux development.

We don’t want to link or name who the EFF has just granted an award to; but it’s someone hypocritical from Microsoft and someone who contributed a great deal to the company’s ‘surveillance capitalism’. Is the EFF totally drunk? Stoned maybe? It probably wouldn’t have happened under Barlow’s watch.

Come on, EFF. You can do better than this. █

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