Tim Lee is right. The Electronic Frontier Foundation post announcing its decision to accept Bitcoin is strange.

“While we are accepting Bitcoin donations,” the post says, ” EFF is not endorsing Bitcoin.” (emphasis in original)

They’ve been using dollars over there without anyone inferring that they endorse dollars. They’ve been using various payment systems with no hint of endorsement. And they use all kinds of protocols without disclaiming endorsement—because they don’t need to.

Someone at EFF really doesn’t like Bitcoin. But, oh, how wealthy EFF would be as an institution if they had held on to the Bitcoin they were originally given. I argued at the time it refused Bitcoin that it was making a mistake, not because of the effect on its bottom line, but because it showed timidity in the face of threats to liberty.

Well, just in time for the Bitcoin 2013 conference in San Jose (CA) this weekend, EFF is getting on board. That’s good news, but it’s not as good as the news would have been if EFF had been a stalwart on Bitcoin the entire time. I have high expectations of EFF because it’s one of the great organizations working in the area of digital liberties.

Berin has already done a fine job tearing apart this latest effort by 10 activist groups to break the Internet by imposing burdensome regulation or punishing legal liability on Internet operators for the crime of trying to deliver relevant advertising to users that can actually pay for the content and services given away to users for free. To that, I would add my deep disappointment that the Electronic Freedom Foundation (EFF) choose to join this cabal.  After all, the other members of the coalition are frequently heard calling for regulation of one variety or another. But EFF always prides itself on supposedly avoiding online regulatory schemes.  That’s what makes it so surprising that they chose to jump on this bandwagon for an Internet industrial policy in the name of “protecting privacy.”

EFF’s embrace of regulation is particularly inconsistent given their excellent filing in the FCC’s “Child Safe Viewing Act” proceeding this summer.  As I’ve previously noted, this proceeding raises the specter of “convergence-era content regulation” with Congress authorizing the FCC to look into “advanced blocking controls” for “wired, wireless, and Internet” platforms.  EFF’s comments rightly stressed dangers of expanded content controls or Internet regulation, and noted the many “less-restrictive means” available to the public that provide compelling alternatives to government regulation:  “Blocking technologies are widely available in the market and do not require further government support.”  And EFF has been instrumental throughout the years of making the case in courts for applying the less-restrictive means test and strict scrutiny when it comes to government efforts to regulate speech.

Why, then, does EFF take the diametrically opposite position when privacy concerns enter the picture? Berin and I appreciate the concerns some people have about their online privacy, just as we appreciate the concerns others have about media content or online child safety. But the only really important question here from a legal perspective is: Do people have tools and methods at their disposal to handle these concerns for themselves, or must government intervene and play Big Momma for them?

Berin and I have argued that citizens have more tools and methods at their disposal than ever before that enable them to make decisions for themselves and their families—both for parental controls and privacy-protecting technologies. In fact, we believe a good case can be made that privacy controls are actually superior to parental controls in terms of providing protection against the concerns at issue. That doesn’t mean privacy controls are perfect, but when properly configured, they can actually do a better job protecting user privacy than parental controls can against objectionable content.

So then, if current-generation privacy controls represent superior “less-restrictive means” to current generation parental control technologies, why does EFF support government regulation for privacy but not for child safety? It doesn’t make any sense to me.  They should be consistent in their support for real Internet freedom.

We’ve failed to keep our podcast alive here at the TLF — and I apologize about that — but there are still a lot of good tech policy-related podcasts out there for you to listen to. Here’s a new one that sounds very promising. It’s called the “Intellectual Property Colloquium” podcast, and it’s hosted by the brilliant Doug Lichtman, a professor of law at UCLA Law School.

The first show features a discussion that took place in one of Prof. Lichtman’s classes in which the always-interesting Fred Von Lohmann of the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) begins by talking about the controversial Cablevision DVR case and then transitions into copyright law and infringement more generally. Doug jumps into the conversation about 12 minutes and needles Fred with a litany of excellent questions that really get the debate going. Whenever Doug and Fred go at it, it is a real intellectual clash of the titans.

The upcoming shows look just as good. Next up is a debate between Stacey Byrnes of NBC-Universal and Tim Wu of Columbia University about the DMCA notice-and-takedown process. The November show will include Dan Solove talking about “Privacy in a Networked World.” [I am just finishing up his important new book, Understanding Privacy, and I will be posting a review of it here soon.] And the December show is called “Everyone Hates DRM,” and is set to include Ed Felton of Princeton University versus Dean Marks of Warner Brothers. That should be a interesting conversation.