Letter to the EFF

[em3rgentOrdr]

tl;dr summary .... EFF lawyers soiled their corduroys at the "complex legal issues" surrounding bitcoin ... << bleeding edge lawyers, I guess.

Thanks!  I forgot about the tl;dr peeps out there...  I should have highlighted (bold+italics+underline) the one important sentence:

However, we’ve recently removed the Bitcoin donation option from the Other Ways to Help page on the EFF website, and we have decided to not accept Bitcoins.

[FreeMoney]

Fuck them. So are they endorsing VISA and MasterCard or not? Fuck them. Are they endorsing dollars used around the globe for terror, theft, and rape?

[Drifter]

Because of this, we’re giving the Bitcoins that have been accumulated, or that may accumulate in the future, in the account set up in our name to the Bitcoin faucet, so that they can continue to circulate in the community.

I didn't donate my bitcoins so you could put them in the fucking faucet, EFF. I donated so you could help defend against privacy rights. If I had known you were throwing my coins down the toilet, almost quite literally, I wouldn't have done so!

Why would a business like EFF accept bitcoins, and then months later ask their lawyers about the legalities? Shouldn't that have been discussed before, I don't know, thousands of dollars was wasted that came from those who donated and supported your cause?

"We've collected thousands of dollars in donations in order to secure your rights! Except we're not so sure we want to use your money anymore, so we're just going to walk down the road and hand it out to any stranger we see!"

Pathetic.

[em3rgentOrdr]

Because of this, we’re giving the Bitcoins that have been accumulated, or that may accumulate in the future, in the account set up in our name to the Bitcoin faucet, so that they can continue to circulate in the community.

I didn't donate my bitcoins so you could put them in the fucking faucet, EFF. I donated so you could help defend against privacy rights. If I had known you were throwing my coins down the toilet, almost quite literally, I wouldn't have done so!

+1.

Electronic Frontier Foundation => "Stone-Age" "Safe-Previously-Explored-Land" "Money-Dumper".  Yeah, I had trouble finding antonyms for those words. 

Anyway, looks like I'm going to have to peel my EFF bumper sticker off my car. 

[em3rgentOrdr]

Here's The Inquieter's take on EFF's recent decision: "The EFF loses confidence in Bitcoin"

[Litt]

The moment they decided to not support bitcoin, they proved to everyone that they are not who they claimed to be. Even if they were before, they obviously aren't anymore since. Probably in the pockets of someone else at this point. F*ckin useless.

[FreddyFender]

EFF was founded to preserve the FOSS stance during the tumult of the late 90's and early century against a hegemony of Microsoft lawyers. They have not professed to be experts of finance. If Bitcoin was a simple software litigation issue then EFF would be the perfect candidate for our current woes. I think EFF is a formula that you take to ward off colds of the litigious nature. We have a severe case of fiscal cancer and no one is sure if Bitcoin is the cure or the disease. Either way, the remedy is a sister-style organization to the EFF that confronts the excesses and extremes within Bitcoin and the very certain attack from without.
The internal issues with Bitcoin and its offshoots are numerous but definable and therefor resolvable. The external issues will be multiplied by our success and unpredictable. We should ask for advice from EFF and other FOSS advocacy groups that are willing to guide us during this expansion phase.
Any thoughts from the grownups?

[Karmicads]

This is very disappointing indeed.  I hope all the contributors to this effort and those who donated to the EFF, are not too disheartened though. Your efforts were noble and commendable. You can only lead a horse to water. I guess any friends the EFF might make, by deserting bitcoin after taking donations and then denouncing their endorsement (not to mention squandering those donations), will not be such trustworthy, honorable bedfellows. When I first saw this thread I thought about the FSF, as being an even better advocate and more deserving of donations too. I just checked and it seems they already came on board back in early May. I hope they will be more loyal, as I expect they will. We have to be thankful for small blessings I guess.

[Bind]

The EFF is a defender of your digital rights.

They are preserving their ability to remain neutral, thus the ability to provide a unbiased defense if and when bitcoin litigation hits the courts.

The last thing they need is to be disqualified because of a conflict of interest in an important bitcoin case.

[casascius]

The EFF is a defender of your digital rights.

They are preserving their ability to remain neutral, thus the ability to provide a unbiased defense if and when bitcoin litigation hits the courts.

The last thing they need is to be disqualified because of a conflict of interest in an important bitcoin case.

+100

[marcus_of_augustus]

The EFF is a defender of your digital rights.

They are preserving their ability to remain neutral, thus the ability to provide a unbiased defense if and when bitcoin litigation hits the courts.

The last thing they need is to be disqualified because of a conflict of interest in an important bitcoin case.

They are already conflicted because they are accepting dirty, bloodied Federal Reserve Dollars.

Although it is good to know what side of the fence they are sitting on, for now.

[em3rgentOrdr]

The EFF is a defender of your digital rights.

They are preserving their ability to remain neutral, thus the ability to provide a unbiased defense if and when bitcoin litigation hits the courts.

The last thing they need is to be disqualified because of a conflict of interest in an important bitcoin case.

Bullshit...

They do not have to be neutral, the EFF is supposed to be an advocate.

+100.  The EFF used to be very bold.  Just read http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electronic_Frontier_Foundation#History and you will read about how the EFF was formed in response to raids by the FBI and Secret Service upon many of the early great 'hackers' (using the positive connotation of hackers, that is) such as John Perry Barlow.

The creation of the organization was motivated by the massive search and seizure on Steve Jackson Games executed by the United States Secret Service early in 1990. Similar but officially unconnected law-enforcement raids were being conducted across the United States at about that time as part of a state-federal task force called Operation Sundevil. However, the Steve Jackson Games case, which became EFF's first high-profile case, was the major rallying point where EFF began promoting computer and Internet-related civil liberties.

And for those that aren't aware of Operation Sundevil (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Sundevil):

Operation Sundevil was a 1990 nation-wide United States Secret Service crackdown on "illegal computer hacking activities." It involved raids in approximately fifteen different cities and resulted in three arrests and the confiscation of computers, the contents of electronic bulletin board systems (BBSes), and floppy disks.

So yeah, EFF was taking some pretty bold positions at that time.

EFF's second big case was Bernstein v. United States led by Cindey Cohn, where programmer and professor Daniel J. Bernstein sued the government for permission to publish his encryption software, Snuffle, and a paper describing it.

So we might not have had public access to as much encryption software had it not been for early EFF activism.

Now it seems that all EFF does is battle patent and copyright trolls, which is a noble goal and important to the free exchange of information on the internet.  However, that is much more safe than promoting bitcoin.  Anyway, I wouldn't depend on EFF for too much defense of bitcoin users. 

[FreddyFender]

Does anyone know if Aaron Swartz still visits the forums?
He has extensive advocacy background and could possibly aid in preliminary ideas:

Aaron Swartz is the founder and director of Demand Progress, a nonprofit political action group with nearly half a million members. For the latest updates, visit the Demand Progress Blog.

He is the author of numerous articles on a variety of topics, especially the corrupting influence of big money on institutions including nonprofits, the media, politics, and public opinion. In conjunction with Shireen Barday, he downloaded and analyzed 441,170 law review articles to determine the source of their funding; the results were published in the Stanford Law Review. From 2010-11, he researched these topics as a Fellow at the Harvard Ethics Center Lab on Institutional Corruption.

He has also assisted many other researchers in collecting and analyzing large data sets with theinfo.org. His landmark analysis of Wikipedia, Who Writes Wikipedia?, has been widely cited. He helped develop standards and tutorials for Linked Open Data while serving on the W3C's RDF Core Working Group and helped popularize them as Metadata Advisor to the nonprofit Creative Commons and coauthor of the RSS 1.0 specification.

In 2008, he created the nonprofit site watchdog.net, making it easier for people to find and access government data. He also served on the board of Change Congress, a good government nonprofit.

In 2007, he led the development of the nonprofit Open Library, an ambitious project to collect information about every book ever published. He also cofounded the online news site Reddit, where he released as free software the web framework he developed, web.py.

me@aaronsw.com

- source from the website: http://www.aaronsw.com/

[EhVedadoOAnonimato]

I also found quite disappointing their decision. I know it is not as if there was a contract or anything, but people who donated to them did so in expectation they would use this money to support what they stand for.  And then they decide to drop the donations like that... shame on EFF.

[cbeast]

"We understand that we cannot close the account that has been set up in EFF’s name and that returning the donations to the individual donors would be complex and difficult." ~ EFF

Wink, wink, nudge, nudge, say no more EFF