Lawsuit reactions: EFF behaviour reveals zombification, censorship

09:00 Wed, 11 Feb 2026

We haven't even started the depositions process and we have an intermediate result from the lawsuit. Let's Encrypt, part of the EFF uses Discourse as a community forum. The administrators have hidden / censored the thread about the lawsuit.

This is significant because the EFF was the birthplace of the Blue Ribbon campaign for free speech online. Today, the blue ribbon is in tatters.

Peter Eckersley, who founded Let's Encrypt and died a few years ago was a friend of mine since our time at the University of Melbourne in the 1990s. Look at how new people come along, they take over Peter's work and they rub out his friends. What a cruel thing to do to Peter's friends after he dies.

Peter Eckersley, Daniel Pocock, DebConf15

The reason EFF is named in this lawsuit in the first place is because they censored another thread mentioning Peter Eckersley's blog has been restored.

EFF's bylaws somehow fail to mention anything about their aims or free speech. The last three pages (Schedule O) of their tax filing, where they claim non-profit status, gives their aims in more detail:

Electronic Frontier Foundation, Inc. ("EFF") was formed for the purpose of understanding and fostering the opportunities of digital communication in a free and open society.

EFF, Form 990, schedule O, aims, objectives

Are they really entitled to keep their non-profit charitable status and receive tax-deductible donations from the public if they are contradicting the very claims about freedom used in their tax filings?

The written commitments to freedom, including those in the tax filings, the website and other documents are an enforceable contract between the community participants and the association.

When the US Secret Service raided a business in 1990 to look for a leaked document, the EFF was founded by John Gilmore, John Perry Barlow and Mitch Kapor. Barlow is deceased. Gilmore and Kapor are no longer really involved. The EFF removed Gilmore from the board in 2021 without giving any reasons. Maybe Gilmore was not the problem: the EFF, without the original founders, is becoming a zombie organization.

The process of zombification is easy to understand. On the outside, they try to create the image that the body is intact. Inside, however, the soul is gone.

As long as people keep donating money to the organization, the new owners will continue maintaining the charade that it stands for the original values. Yet their actions, notably the censorship of news about their own lawsuit, suggest the values are not shared by the professional fundraisers who are milking the EFF community for cash.

As the saying goes, do as we say and not as we do.