The EFF Should Know Better, But It Is Promoting Mass Surveillance by Facebook (an Endorsement of Lies)
Today we'll write about the Electronic Frontier Foundation Inc (EFF), which we didn't typically criticise because in the past (historically) it was on our side. Nowadays, after leadership changes (co-founder was ousted and another one had died) they are in effect herding people into meat farms like Facebook - the horror show which in fact they should be telling people to dodge. They ought to shun Social Control Media and caution people about the surveillance among other dangers.
Misguided leadership, not malice, is likely to blame for all this. It tries to be friendly to corporations, perhaps viewing this as a financially favourable position (in reality the EFF perishes morally, not financially, as companies like Google chip in and "support" or reward the EFF). The hush-money-as-a-business-model thing is sometimes known as "a sellout". Becoming rich (revenue of $23,876,681 last year) was not the goal of the EEF at the start, but that's what it is now, much like the Linux Foundation.
What we see here, instead, is tacit endorsement of a lie. The EFF helps Facebook lie about encryption, giving people a false sense of privacy while attacking PGP as not secure (citing HTML as 'email', calling the whole phony scandal "efail"). The EFF says "this rollout is a huge win for user privacy across the world. Users will also have many more options for messaging security and privacy, including how to back-up their encrypted messages safely, turning off “read receipts,” and enabling “disappearing” messages. Choosing between these options is important for your privacy and security model, and we encourage users to think about what they expect from their secure messenger."
This enthusiasm is misplaced.
The EFF is helping pull the wool over people's eyes in regards to end points and what is actually going on in their computer, one person told me. By running unknown proprietary code in the browser, basically misusing it as a VM for foreign code, that part of the system is no longer theirs but Facebook's. So that is in practice not their end point but Facebook's end point.
Days ago EFF staff even celebrated for TikTok, whose owners and handlers oppose free speech. What is going on at the EFF?
Sadly, along with the EFF we see some security-centric news sites doing the same. This one says "Meta Makes End-to-End Encryption a Default on [Facebook's] Messenger", but this is misleading. Facebook and governments can see everything. It's not E2EE but a fake variant of it.
More misleading nonsense came from the self-described (or falsely described) "journal of record". It says "[l]aw enforcement authorities say the privacy makes it harder to track criminals." But how is this relevant? This is in no way prevents Facebook and the state from reading everything. The "ends" are Facebook, not the two people who communicate. And Facebook controls the keys, too.
Even some spamfarm sites (corporate propaganda for a fee, disguised as "journalism") wrote to say Facebook "gets end-to-end encryption privacy enabled by default".
They are cheapening and attacking the very notion of "end-to-end encryption" by associating it with mass surveillance. Even the acronym: "The company announced the completion of the project on Wednesday, noting that the upgrade will bring E2EE..."
Nonsensical spin. This is misleading. Facebook can see all the communications. This is done wrongly, by intention. Then, Facebook shares it all with select states and state agency/ies.
We expect better from the EFF, but not anymore. Today's EFF is garbage.
Similarly, the notion of security has come under attack. They confuse the masses by promoting a fake solution, in effect distracting from the real one/s.
Consider UEFI "secure" boot, which once again proves to be less secure than old BIOS. We accumulated many links about this and added the bits about BSoD in Linux, which is being vandalised by Microsoft staff.
Poettering's Windows mindset is going to afflict the BSOD onto Linux, one person told me. That tool is not going to be needed unless they plan to make Linux all crashy and unreliable like Windows. Thus the Windows mindset adds to the Windows TCO.
We've also just added an accumulation of links about how the corporate/"tech" media talks about Android, Linux, and macOS security issues while Microsoft blames Windows holes on "Russia". Unless Exchange and Windows are Russian products, this isn't the fault of Russia. Also pay attention to how the media shifts attention to Linux. But that's probably a matter to be discussed in another article.
The bottom line is, the media helps mischacterise non-solutions (or even bigger problems) as supposed 'solutions', ensuring the problems never get solved at all. EFF staff plays along. More corporate money from Facebook for EFF? Maybe next year? █