Comment by disk0

Both orgs have absolutely done what's right many, many times, but 100% is a little high.

I'd highly recommend checking out All EFF'd Up [0] in The Baffler—it's quite long, but below is a relevant bit for both orgs:

> Leading EFF’s invasion of Washington, D.C., was Jerry Berman, who had been a top ACLU attorney and founder of ACLU Projects on Privacy and Information Technology ... Berman was a Beltway insider who in the 1980s was at the center of a push to turn the ACLU into a big business lobby and an ally of intelligence agencies and right-wing political interests. Among other things, the Berman-era ACLU defended Big Tobacco from regulations on advertising and worked with the National Rifle Association to fight electronic collection of arrest data by the Department of Justice for background checks to deny firearms licenses. Among Berman’s personal achievements: working with the CIA on an early version of a bill that criminalized disclosing the names of CIA agents—a law that was later used to prosecute and jail CIA officer John Kiriakou, who blew the whistle on the Agency’s use of waterboarding as a torture and interrogation technique.

> ... Berman also helped craft the 1986 Electronic Communications Privacy Act, a controversial law that gave the government power to grab electronic metadata from cellphone calls, email, and other digital communications without a warrant, which is now routinely used to collect user data from companies like Google, Twitter, and Facebook...

> Freedom to Surveil

> ...His signature achievement had been collaborating with the FBI to draft and rubber-stamp a law that expanded FBI surveillance into the digital telecommunications infrastructure. Known as the “Communications Law Enforcement Assistance Act”—or CALEA—the 1994 law required that telecommunications companies install specialized equipment and design their digital facilities in a way that made it easy to wiretap.

> ...

> When EFF’s role in crafting this surveillance law came out, outraged members of its cyber-libertarian base cried foul. EFF, they’d been led to believe, was created to push back against government control of the internet...

> ...

> In reality though, the outrage stemmed from a basic confusion about what EFF was created to do. EFF emerged as a lobby for the budding internet industry...

[0] https://thebaffler.com/salvos/all-effd-up-levine (Ctrl/Cmd+F "Buying Silence" to skip the intro portion)