T-Mobile USA CEO John Legere has spent much of today defending the carrier's controversial "Binge On" program, and he didn't hold much back when answering his critics.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), which has criticized T-Mobile for throttling video streams down to 480p, asked him on Twitter whether T-Mobile is altering the video streams or just limiting their bandwidth.

Legere responded in a video:

What Binge On does, it includes a proprietary technology and what the technology does is not only detect the video stream but select the appropriate bit rate to optimize to the video, the mobile device. That’s part A of my answer. Part B of my answer is, who the fuck are you, anyway, EFF? Why are you stirring up so much trouble, and who pays you?

EFF Activism Director Rainey Reitman responded with a blog post titled, "Friends, Please Tell T-Mobile’s CEO About EFF," pointing out that it is "an advocacy organization fighting for civil liberties in the digital world," supported by donations from tens of thousands of people. (Ars readers are among those donors.)

The EFF isn't the only critic of Binge On, but it helped push the debate to a new level with tests that showed T-Mobile is limiting video streams and downloads to about 1.5Mbps.

Binge On downgrades quality of video in order to save data and exempts video services from data caps if the provider of the video service meets some technical criteria. The throttling is turned on by default, but users can disable it.

The EFF accused T-Mobile of violating net neutrality rules, but it's not a clear-cut case as we explained earlier today. T-Mobile will be meeting with the Federal Communications Commission soon to discuss whether Binge On complies with net neutrality rules.

Legere received a lot of reply tweets criticizing his response to the EFF, with one saying, "Are you high John?! The EFF has been a huge part of ensuring digital rights for decades."

Legere backed off a bit after his initial response, tweeting that he's not waging a "personal campaign against @EFF."

"Let me be clear- I know who the @EFF is," he added. "I’m sure they do a lot of great things for a lot of consumers, but innovation can be controversial!"