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this post was submitted on 03 Sep 2023
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Technology
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Fantastic article, thanks for sharing. I'm disappointed in the EFF's stance here. I understand the reasoning but I don't feel that such hateful, dangerous speech is a good candidate for this argument. (Hateful and dangerous as in actual deaths have occurred from this.)
The EFF supported the prosecution of people from Kiwi Farms for their activities, just opposed their website to be taken out at the ISP level. I feel a lot of people jumped on the EFF without reading the full article.
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2023/08/isps-should-not-police-online-speech-no-matter-how-awful-it
Let’s say they were organizing using telephones instead. Would you want the telephone providers to proactively listen in on their conversations and cut them off based on content? No. You get the police or FBI to investigate and hunt down the people, possibly with warrants obtaining information from the telephone companies, and target the people doing the crimes.
I feel it should be exactly the same with ISPs. The ISP shouldn’t be doing the policing, the police should be doing the policing. The ISP’s job should be passing bits from MAC address A to MAC address B, nothing more.
It's weird to me because the first time I ever heard someone being seriously critical of any absolute idea to free speech, at least at a high-level, was on the EFF's how to fix the internet podcast.
I'm with you. Their logic makes some sense, but it's just not practical or reasonable to me. I just don't see the slope as particularly slippery. Kiwi Farms was enthusiastically engaging in dangerous, heinous, and illegal activities.
Perhaps we do need some kind of serious due process for this kind of intervention. I'll sign that petition or forward to my reps that letter. But in the meantime, I'm happy to say bye to this scumb.
The EFF understands that "somebody do something!" is an invitation to erode liberty, and guarding against those types of power grabs by corporations and the government is important.
In this case, EFF is arguing that ISP's should not have the ability to choose which sites to block. They are spot-on that this precedent would be used to block access to abortion assistance programs in Red States, and would get people killed.