Not All Legal Counsels Are Fat Cats With a Licence to Print Money (Lawyers)
THE subject of this post has been preying on my mind as I needed to write about it but worried it would harm the SFLC's reputation. Self-censorship is generally not a good thing, but stating the motivations in advance is of utmost importance. It's actually not about the SFLC alone. It's about an issue I've been aware of for years. I saw sites condemning the SFLC (no link, no need!) - and by extension the FSF - for high salaries given to lawyers like Daniel Ravicher, who seems to have embraced right-wing fanaticism. There's a rift and some genuine disputes. Some aspects of the disputes are covered in old comments, but this post is not about the dispute still ongoing between SFC (imitation organisation, splinter group) and SFLC.
There's nothing wrong with being a lawyer per se. We don't categorically blast all lawyers, not when we deal with patent law or even defence lawyers who protect criminals from lengthy jail sentences. To be clear, this is not a rant about the occupation as a whole.
In this post I wish to speak about SFLC, but I want to state upfront that the SFLC does good work, respects the founders of GNU/Linux, and this is not a condemnation. I kept wanting to cover this in video form to avoid being misquoted or quoted out of context, but videos limit visibility/audience.
Without further ado (and the caveat above):
So a few weeks ago I checked the IRS filings from the SFLC, only to find diminishing funds (SFC probably poaching some clients or prospective clients of theirs). I also noticed that Mishi Choudhary was taking an obscenely high salary - higher than Professor Moglen's and more or less on par with that of Sandler at SFC (when adding up the bonuses).
(Please note we refer to Choudhary as "Mishi" from here on. We'll refer to her by her first name because Moglen does too, even in public.)
Let's assume for a while that our focus should be on what the SFLC does rather than how much its people make (even people who already departed). One might leap ahead and argue along the lines of, if the SFLC does good, positive work, then power to them! SFLC staff should be proportionally compensated.
I spoke to some people about Mishi and others, I wrote a little about this in IRC, and I found myself puzzled, even a tad conflicted. Some people did not trust Mishi or doubted her true motivation (money, freedom, or what?).
To me, as I kept insisting, Mishi was a good person. She linked to Techrights on occasions, she "liked" things that I wrote, and I never saw her saying something I can object to.
It's not clear what happened 16 months ago, so I won't speculate about her departure. Some people know what happened. I don't. The official press release says:
After 17 years with SFLC, Legal Director Mishi Choudhary will depart to become General Counsel and Senior Vice-President at Virtru.Ms. Choudhary began working with SFLC in 2006, held the first SFLC Graduate Fellowship for LLM study at Columbia Law School, and became Legal Director in 2015. She has represented SFLC clients across the entire range of FOSS communities, including the Free Software Foundation, Cloud Native Computing Foundation, Linux Foundation, Debian, Ethereum, the Apache Software Foundation, and OpenSSL. She founded and developed SFLC’s FOSS Code of Conduct practice, assisting FOSS non-profits and unaffiliated projects to develop and administer CoC policies. She has served as the Code of Conduct mediator for the Linux kernel community, among many others.
In 2010, Ms. Choudhary founded SFLC.in, SFLC’s sister organization in India. Under her leadership and with SFLC’s support, SFLC.in has become the premier Internet freedom policy, research and training institute in humanity’s largest society.
“There is no part of the success of SFLC to which Mishi has not profoundly contributed,” said Columbia Law School Professor Eben Moglen, SFLC’s founder and Executive Director. “Her brilliance and precision as a lawyer; her adroitness as a mediator, negotiator and diplomat; her style and wit as a writer and speaker; her blunt honesty and unfailing judgment as a counselor and law partner have made us what we are. She is a creator and builder; it has been a privilege and honor to practice with her. I look forward to continuing to work with Mishi in other roles, and I wish her all success in her new endeavors.”
“I am deeply grateful to Eben for opening the wonderful world of collaborative production and Internet Freedom to me,” Ms. Choudhary says. “I have had the great opportunity to represent some of the world’s most important FOSS projects who are on the cutting edge of innovation. Now I take the knowledge and relationships built over years to bring more privacy and security to the world. I am very excited to join the team at Virtru and will continue to work in Free and Open Source community in my new role.”
I do not wish to speculate that she left because they offered more money. I honestly don't think she values money more than freedom because she had been involved in India's branch of the FSF (close to SFLC.in) well before leaving the SFLC, where she made over a million bucks.
Yesterday we published the transcript of a video portion where Mishi spoke. The video portion names some client they had, some lessons they learned along the way, and there was nothing 'rogue' about it. That's why we promoted the message. One might say that making over $200k a year by signing papers and speaking is getting overpaid, but the same can be said about most lawyers. If her work promotes Software Freedom, and essentially helps Free software projects, does that make it ethical?
In a rich European country the salary is something in this range:
Mishi makes (or made) far more than that.
Someone who watched the clip said that Eben Moglen tried really hard to encourage her, but looking at the video she appeared bored and disinterested most of the time there on the stage.
"The main thing, in the face of attempts to cancel Eben Moglen," this person added, "is to amplify the message he has promoted." That is the real goal of Kuhn and Sandler trying to close him out of government proceedings, it seems.
I've checked where Mishi works now. The company sells proprietary software, but unless she does something bad (personally), it is not her fault. Is she there to assure licence compliance? This official page, which boasts the controversial Michael Chertoff, suggests it is connected to the OpenTDF project, which is outsourced to Microsoft GitHub (proprietary). It's closely connected to the National Security Agency (NSA). Professor Moglen is not a fan of those people because they restrict adoption of Free software, falsely tying it to illegal activities.
The OSI showed classic cases of revolving doors (e.g. companies paying people inside the OSI for favours by contracting them for work; it is a form of corruption Bruce Perens spoke about).
Why did Mishi leave? She was paid very well already. To assume something other than a motivation to "move on" would be counterproductive. Given the time that she left, it's unlikely to be connected to the dispute between SFC and SFLC. █