The EFF has taken a position that really misses me: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2025/02/eff-sues-doge-and-office-personnel-management-halt-ransacking-federal-data

The EFF is a good organization. They advocate for the privacy and digital rights of citizens against government and sometimes corporate overreach. But on this issue I could not disagree with them more. Federal employees do not have a right to privacy against investigation. The federal government is allowed to know my social security number and a lot more about me if they were investigating something. In fact they are allowed to know and collect a lot more than that about me even under normal circumstances. An employer is able to know and see my social security number.

Frankly I don't consider federal employees to have rights at all.

I think the EFF needs to hear from more than myself that their job is to protect the rights of citizens and not to defend criminal elements of our government and corruption.

Here is my letter to them:

Thank you for contacting me about this suit.

As a past donor I would ask you to consider ending this lawsuit. I have agreed with you in 95% of your advocacy over the years but I have to admit this is one of the deepest misses for me. For years the EFF has advocated for citizens' data privacy and digital rights against overreaching government and corporations. To be frank I don't know if I consider federal employees to have rights of any kind. They certainly do not have a right to have the federal government not know their social security. DOGE is a part of the federal government. The government has a right to know this information about me under normal circumstances.

There are two conditions that accelerate DOGEs right to know in excess of the federal government's right to know the same information about me under normal circumstances.

1. There is an investigation
2. The federal government is their employer

I really do want to hear less about the supposed rights of federal employees who work to suppress the rights of American citizens every day. I would rather have every federal employee fired than hear anything about them having privacy rights.

It would take a lot to win me back over. I am not going to consider donating to you in the foreseeable future. There are plenty better ways to resist the Trump administration than defending criminal elements of our government and corruption.

Trump recently agreed to help accelerate all of the necessary eminent domain needed to secure 500b in funding for Project Stargate. One founder of Project Stargate, Larry Ellison, once said that he intends to use AI to "make citizens behave" because in his world view there should be cameras and sensors everywhere, coupled with AI, to determine always if citizens are "behaving". This eminent domain would also benefit one company and would not be a true public interest. Not only that but a hardware advantage of that scale would push more inference to a consolidated location where everything can be monitored. This is not a good turn of events for what is becoming the most intimate use of digital technology. Certainly government and finance putting their weight on the scales toward that model is something to advocate against.

Maybe just maybe focus your limited resources toward either awareness or action in that realm. That seems like a much more efficient use of the resources we have given you.

In short, please reconsider,
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