2 ms·
Ask HN: What does the E.F.F. do, exactly?
https://www.eff.org/victories
9 items long, most of them in the 1990s, and none of them directly involve the E.F.F. anyway. What do these guys do?
- tptacek 13y agoLooking to start a fight? :) EFF does 4 things, as I see it: (a) They contribute to legal defenses in important online civil rights cases: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_litigation_involving_the_Electronic_Frontier_Foundation http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_litigation_involving_th... (b) They lobby. (c) They run awareness efforts for (a), (b), and some related issues (like, recently, whether companies like Google should use open standards for chat clients). A lot of this involves stuff like blog writing. (d) Like all nonprofits, they do a lot of fundraising. Charity Navigator tracks a lot of this stuff. EFF spends ~15% of its budget on fundraising (putting them squarely in the middle of the pack for nonprofits). If you're sketchy on donating to EFF (like I am), ACLU is another organization with a similar mission to EFF that is by-the-numbers more effective; ACLU is also (from what I can find) more transparent about what it spends its money on (its largest single line item is "legal"; EFF doesn't break things out any further than "Salary"). It's definitely not fair to say that EFF only has 9 "victories" because of what that web page says.