Wednesday, December 22, 2010

LightHouse for the Blind and Visually Impaired has greater financial transparency than Electronic Frontier Foundation

Thanks to Canadian science fiction author, blogger, and copyright activist Cory "Boing Boing" Doctorow, I learned that the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) recently helped restore sign-language music videos created by ASL Ally for deaf and hard-of-hearing people to YouTube after music industry titans had them removed.

While this is wonderful news and an important cause, EFF, a San Francisco-based non-profit organization founded in 1990 whose mission includes fostering and promoting the creation and use of digital tools to allow “the public to more closely examine government and corporate entities, and to hold them accountable for deception, censorship and corruption,” should continue its literacy campaign and help restore public confidence in itself by publishing its IRS Form 990's and Audited Financial Statements on its website.

You see, after twenty years of activity but increasing public concern over its relationship to WikiLeaks, here is the suspicious shallowness of EFF's commitment to digital financial disclosure and transparency, as posted on its website:
Contrast that with these documents, all posted on the website of the LightHouse for the Blind and Visually Impaired, a non-profit organization founded in 1902 and “the largest agency providing direct service, advocacy and information to the blind and visually impaired community of Northern California”:
Perhaps 2011 will be the year when the geeks at the Electronic Frontier Foundation join the transparency movement!

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