The EFF has been suing the government to protect people's privacy for decades. How is suing the NSA over data collection any less political activism then suing DOGE over data collection? The only difference is that you like the people they're suing.
These are hardly meaningful differences from EFF's perspective. They see their role as protecting American's data privacy from government overreach. Why should they restrict themselves only to abuses in data collection and ignore issues with data retention and dissemination? Just like in the NSA cases, EFF's argument is that DOGE is violating the law and, to use your phrase, abusing their capabilities. There's no reason for EFF to trust that DOGE is abiding by the law and not trust the NSA. If anything, the NSA acted far more professionally. To my knowledge, the NSA never hired a 19-year-old who goes by the moniker "Big Balls" and had previously been fired for unauthorized information disclosure. To my knowledge, they never hired a 25-year-old who proudly displayed racial animus.
I think EFF will have a difficult time trying to identify any illegal disclosure to unauthorized personnel. The lawsuit is speculative at this point, and discovery will likely show that personal information was not disclosed outside of DOGE. If their claim is that DOGE is unauthorized, their arguments will be novel.
Maybe so, but the harms in the NSA cases were also speculative. A lot of what EFF has historically advocated against, going back to the Clipper Chip in the nineties, were about potential injuries, not actual injuries. The point was to intervene before the abuse happened.
