What do you think keeps EFF from being more prominent in the public eye?
Heck, that's an easy one. They don't politic. They have their core mission set of interests and that's what they generally stick to. AFAIK, they've never sold out their own membership to score points. You don't get to the top of the mountain by sticking to your principles and being honest. They also don't sell out to a political party as both the ACLU and the NRA have done on a regular basis.
The rest of it is more mundane. They spend their cash on suing the government to try to get them to follow the law or defending folks from blatantly unconstitutional laws. They don't spend huge amounts of dollars on PR. They don't use FUD. Their core mission is defending civil liberties, and that's never popular with a lot of folks.
EFF's starting to do more PR work, of sorts. They're having a significantly larger presense at Defcon, so literally thousands of hackers are at their disposal.
Boston Transit Authority case is a prime example. Last year, BTA sued a couple MIT students to prevent them from giving a speech at Defcon. Essentially, the idiots at the BTA encoded the fare amount on the cards (and not on a central server) and thought they could fix the flaw by attempting to silence a couple of kids. Sound stupid? Yea... Worse, they waited until the kids were out of the state and filed an injunction filled with many demonstratively false statements. Well... Couple problems for the BTA. First off, the details were published on a CD and handed out to a couple thousand hackers before the injunction was filed. Second off, the EFF took up the case at Defcon. On the spot, with no reservations. Third, hackers tend to have a persecution complex and a strong dislike for heavy handed authoritarian types.
Here is a photo of the internal data structure of the fare card with the MIT students in the background, with EFF at the podium. Folks, and not just hackers, tossed in every conceiveable resource at the EFF. Money, equipment, space, secure internet access, industry expert testimony, etc. If the EFF needed something or someone at 4am, it was delivered by 4:15. The injunction forced the kids to miss the presentation, but we found someone else to give an impromtu presentation that covered even more stuff. After the conf, the EFF did manage to crush the BTA suit. They're heroes, and I'm not the kind of guy to say that lightly.
