All EFF’d Up
I&#x27;m only about halfway through, but the whole style of this article is already setting off alarms for me. It&#x27;s a <i>lot</i> of innuendo as opposed to explanation of why things are bad or problematic.<p><i>The idea for EFF was hatched in 1990 by two millionaires, software mogul Mitch Kapor and John Perry Barlow, songwriter for the Grateful Dead and the wealthy heir to a ranching estate in Wyoming. Barlow, who died earlier this year, is today best known for penning the “Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace,” a barely comprehensible but much-applauded rant against the evils of government influence over the internet that he typed out on an Apple laptop in some posh hotel in Davos.</i><p>So, the fact he had money, was in Switzerland, and used an <i>Apple</i> laptop are somehow relevant here?  It feels like she&#x27;s trying to use his wealth as an indicator of his character here.  The next paragraph talks about how they first met:<p><i>Kapor and Barlow had met on a digital message board platform run by cult hippy entrepreneur Stewart Brand, of Whole Earth Catalog fame. The two of them traded stories about government witch hunts and botched investigations into totally normal cyberspace activities—things like hacking into computers and circulating stolen source code.</i><p>Even if entirely true, I have a sneaking suspicion that the people in question could add details that made it sound a bit less nefarious.<p>And then it goes on with what they were doing whenthe EFF was actually thought up, which was during a quick drop-in using one&#x27;s &quot;Bizjet&quot; to the ranch that started all this.<p>There&#x27;s recounting history so people have context, and then there&#x27;s recounting history so <i>to put people into a desired context</i>, whether it&#x27;s all that accurate or not.  This smacks of the latter.<p><i>Berman was a Beltway insider who in the 1980s was at the center of a push to turn the ACLU into a big business lobby and an ally of intelligence agencies and right-wing political interests. Among other things, the Berman-era ACLU defended Big Tobacco from regulations on advertising and worked with the National Rifle Association to fight electronic collection of arrest data by the Department of Justice for background checks to deny firearms licenses.</i><p>So, the ACLU defends companies that traditional EFF supporters sometimes dislike?  Is this supposed to be news?  Isn&#x27;t that one of the reasons they have a lot of respect, because they stand on <i>principle</i> of the issues, not on how liked the people are, as that&#x27;s the only way to make sure your liberties are <i>always</i> respected, not just when you&#x27;re part of an <i>acceptable</i> group?<p><i>Among Berman’s personal achievements: working with the CIA on an early version of a bill that criminalized disclosing the names of CIA agents—a law that was later used to prosecute and jail CIA officer John Kiriakou, who blew the whistle on the Agency’s use of waterboarding as a torture and interrogation technique.</i><p>Oh, and now we&#x27;re criticizing a man for the how a law that he supported was later used to ill effect?<p>I was getting an uneasy feeling about the presentation style for the first quarter of the article, the second quarter is where all this popped out.  I&#x27;m only about halfway through, so I guess I&#x27;ll see how it turns out, but my expectations of any sort of fair or rational argument are definitely lower than when I began.