The EFF and the ACLU are fine for what they are, but they've got too broad of a mandate to have the kind of focused impact you want. You can't be an effective mainstream advocacy organization when you're off defending unsympathetic people for principled purposes. That's an important thing too, but it's a different thing.

For people interested in effecting real political change, I seriously recommend watching this documentary on the Prohibition: http://www.pbs.org/kenburns/prohibition. One group of people got a nation that until (and during and after!) prohibition drank 140 million gallons of liquor a year to outlaw alcohol. The money wasn't on their side (the government made 1/3 of its revenues from liquor taxes and the beer makers had tremendous power), but they accomplished their goal by masterful politicking: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wayne_Wheeler.

"Under Wheeler's leadership, the League focused entirely on the goal of achieving Prohibition. It organized at the grass-roots level and worked extensively through churches. It supported or opposed candidates based entirely on their position regarding prohibition, completely disregarding political party affiliation or other issues. Unlike other temperance groups, the Anti-Saloon League worked with the two major parties rather than backing the smaller Prohibition Party."

But privacy advocates are frequently at odds with tech companies over privacy issues. See CISPA for example, which pretty much every major tech company supported, but privacy advocates hated.

The NRA's issue aligns gun manufacturers, gun retailers, and gun enthusiasts, which makes fundraising a lot easier. I don't think privacy is like that, though. No one makes or sells privacy.

The labor or environmental movements might be better models for a privacy movement--both started out as grassroots campaigns without any substantial corporate support. The environmental movement in particular has done a good job of turning their issue into a popular cause, forcing companies to go along, at least publicly.

Edit to add: What the environmental movement did so well was to create a personal sense of danger--YOUR kid might get sick from pollution. YOUR favorite animal might go extinct. Etc.

Privacy advocates have, IMO, done a terrible job of this so far. To many of them just take it for granted that awareness is enough--that everyone agrees with them that it is horrifying for personal information to get collected and aggregated. Most people don't care, though, because they don't have a reason to care.

What privacy advocates need are personal stories that demonstrate how impingements on privacy led to direct harm to innocent people--and they need to be the sort of thing that make John Q. Public think, "that could happen to me!" or "That could be my child!"

What specific incidents, with victims most will empathize with, can the privacy effort point to?

I wonder if "diffuse harm happening to everyone" can ever compete with "concrete harm happening to specific people you identify with". It's clear "concrete harm happening to people about whom you give zero fucks, or actively dislike" is meaningless.

In the first category, let's go with atmospheric nuclear testing -- a small but concrete global cancer risk increase. We ended that, but only after doing it a lot, and getting most of the benefit. I'm not sure if occasional-but-universal things like car accidents (measures like airbags, etc.) count as the first or second category. The second gets a whole range of things. The third, virtually everything about warfare. All serious privacy/comsec things to date have been in the third category (unless you don't hate drug users, in which case some might be in the second category). The harm of the first category has been exceptionally minor, even if you believe humans at NSA read every single packet.

Visibility is a particular challenge for the privacy issue. On the one hand, it means that advocacy groups should make transparency one of their platform's planks; on the other hand, it exposes advocacy group to the criticism that they are conspiracy theorists asking the government to reveal violations that ostensibly don't exist.

Do the NAR or the Chamber of Commerce need atrocities?

This is exactly what got me started on this issue in the early '70s.

But as I said, you haven't done your homework, or checked this https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6185918 top level comment of mine where I detail some of the more notorious cases:

"Our side can point to kittens killed ("I swear I am not making this up"), pregnant mothers who miscarried, people crippled for life, mothers shot dead while holding a baby (Ruby Ridge, in which the BATF was enlisted to try to force her husband to spy), and many many outright killed (Waco started out as a BATF "ricebowl" operation, they wanted some nice video for their first budget in the Clinton Administration). Plus a constant drumbeat of gun owners ensnared by "flypaper" laws in gun grabbing localities; even NYC has realized it's damaging their tourist industry."

Please do your basic research before making more such howlers.

[1] With some exceptions. Carrying guns is still fairly common in sparsely populated rural areas, especially those with bears (northern Norway/Finland/Sweden). And, non-carry possession in the home is common in Switzerland. Switzerland is an interesting case because they cover both extremes: their law combines mandatory universal gun ownership with a very restrictive carry regime that makes it virtually impossible to carry a loaded gun out of the home (and even restricts the transportation of unloaded guns).

But irrelevant to my general point of:

Gun grabber atrocities were followed by gun owner political power.

A stark lack of privacy atrocities is correlating with no privacy political power.

The choice of giving money to, say, EFF, is also easy for me to make, but I couldn't point to a specific and targeted threat in this case, it is more of a feeling that things take a wrong direction, which is not as mobilizing.

https://www.EFF.org

https://www.EPIC.org

https://www.PrivacyCoalition.org

https://www.privacyinternational.org/

https://www.ccc.de

PS I second rayiner's rec' of the PBS series. I was surprised to learn that the Federal gov't had funded itself almost entirely with alcohol tax proceeds prior to Prohibition.

Bingo. There is a strong ally for privacy advocates in the NRA. This hasn't blown up in the media yet, but you can be sure it will next time discussions of gun registration/background checks comes up.

For both causes we're going to have to depend a lot on other methods of publicity. E.g. I'll bet you haven't heard that the Democratic administration running Missouri illegally gave the Social Security Administration the entire list of the state's concealed carry licensees.

My point is more that some privacy advocates and some gun advocates share their distrust of governmental data snooping. The NRA has long fought data collection/abuse about gun owners and is well used to doing do. It would behoove the privacy movement to learn from and work with the NRA on the issue as it pertains to guns, because that knowledge will be useful in the more general case.

I think it's better to treat privacy as a multi-faceted issue worth the time of several organizations. The First Amendment has been defended by various numbers of journalistic and religious organizations as well as the ACLU...There is some overlap, but each organization fights best within their specific domains.

That can be two-way though. Cracking down only builds a stronger underground, which is where I see the entire surveillance issue going. As with all other ails in society, the ones with the power to effect real change are precisely the ones who would suffer most by said change. So it won't happen. Petitions, demonstrations, appeals courts, etc, are all useless. And there could never be a massive, singular pro-privacy effort as there is no money to be made. The NRA and big pharma have huge lobby groups playing with billions of dollars because there's billions more to be made.

So what? It's harder to combat guerrillas than a standing army. There's not always safety in numbers, sometimes that just results in a bigger target. So what if the Feds can tap into the larger encrypted anythings, give them a thousand tiny encryption outlets to deal with instead. Not a united cause, but a million different efforts. OWS failed bigtime because there were too many cooks in the kitchen. Aligning forces means individual voices get lost in the shuffle of the crowd. And Prohibition aligning with the Suffrage movement only resulted in the Suffrage movement being falsely placated to as a new target for Capitalism. Sell them ladies some cigarettes! Sell them some clothes-washing machinery! Let them know how much we respect their struggles by giving them things to go broke on!

(Apologies for any lack in logic- still working on 1st pot of coffee.)

https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20120817/02295020080/so-ma...

The biggest civil rights movement left is the War on Drugs, with soldiers routinely terrorizing minority communities, putting them in chains en-masse, taking their right to vote.

Considering the DEA's use of Laundered NSA intelligence, and the Black Caucus's support for the Amash Amendment (due to the FBI's historical relationship with the civil rights movement) this might be a good fit.

Too much of this is secret, Star Chamber stuff for the voters to be easily involved.

If you hate the NRA, it's easy to paint this political stance as nothing but a move of pure-gun-lust...however, such stances set precedent for other privacy related rights. To put it another way, just because the ACLU defends pornographers, it doesn't mean the ACLU is doing it purely out of love for pornography.

edit: In any case, there will never be a "NRA for Privacy". Pause and think about it. What does the average person experience in terms of privacy invasion? Not too much, and not at a constant clip. Would that average person be able to discern between heavy privacy protections versus some privacy protections, on a daily basis? Not really, you mostly only know your privacy is being invaded when it's too late.

Compare that with how your life as a gun owner changes if, say, conceal and carry is revoked. Or AR15 rifles are banned. You experience that immediately.

Also, good luck getting celebrities on board. They are used to having their privacy violated as a matter of routine. For them to experience a real change in privacy would involve infringing on certain First Amendment rights (look up the difference between public and private figures)

The problem is, it's mostly supported by individuals, not the industry. And there are a lot more individuals interested in gun rights than electronic rights. It has a budget that's a tiny fraction of the NRA's.

But I'm a little worried about the idea of EFF having to lobby Congress the way NRA does (by paying them). I wouldn't want EFF to become a corrupted organization because it starts receiving a ton of money from the industry instead of the users.

I don't think any NRA member thinks they are corrupted. They are doing the exact job they are supposed to given the rules of Washington DC. Like the ACLU and other rights organization they know to defend the extremes because the first compromise will not be the last. Sadly, there is no room for reasonable where rights are concerned.

I don't think any House or Senate member fears the EFF during election time. If we want the 4th amendment to be defended, then we need an organization they do fear.

So it would have to appeal to people differently. Psychologically, 'privacy' is higher up the hierarchy than 'security' and 'food'. I think that's one of the main hurdles.

Getting Google et. al. to resist this requires an entirely different approach.

Ah, one good analogy: while it was owned by some Brits, Smith and Wesson was the only company to play ball with the Clinton Administration in 2000 and it got crushed by a boycott: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smith_and_Wesson#Agreement_of_2...

But, then again, it's only because we're politically organized, and had to do so in self-defense starting in the '70s, that this came about. But if a prominent Internet company lost 40% of its business due to privacy issues that would get serious attention.

http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2013-03-14/the-nras-cor...

$100 million alone was from membership fees, $11 million from royalties, $11 million from sales of goods, $20 million from advertising, etc.

Those who claim that the NRA is just an arm of the firearms industry don't understand the fervency of gun owners in the US.

EFF needs to be the NRA of privacy and electronic freedom and everyone needs to get as fervent about privacy as gun owners are about the 2nd amendment.

1: http://ia601205.us.archive.org/32/items/NationalRifleAssocia...

In related news the EFF should definitly clean up their merch offerings. Especially their fashion section looks like crap. I would definitely leave more money there for apparel that appeals beyond a DefCon crowd. With a single blog post "submit t-shirt designs" and a followup with a bit of voting would fix that problem. Or just having one getting design by somebody like Fairey.

Bottom line, there's vastly more money going into fighting against privacy than for it.

If the EFF had 5 million members, we could throw our weight around too, but for some reason they don't have membership, only donations.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Rifle_Association

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Civil_Liberties_Union

Fabrique Nationale of Belgium is a great example, they've been selling to the US market since the '20s or '30s, the first shotgun in my family is a Browning Auto-5 with FHN markings bought by the grandfather I'm named after, we still have the papers for it.

Something you can reconcile with the NRA's $1/4 billion annual turnover would be great.

If you listen to people talk, you'd assume the NRA is one of the big spending DC lobbyists. They're not. Look up where they rank on open secrets and how much they donate to candidates. They have a presence, but it's no where near indicative of their power.

About a week before each election every NRA member gets a bright orange postcard in the mail with a list of the candidates, local and national, that are up for election and exactly what the NRA thinks of their stance on guns. Those members pay attention and vote. That is what makes the NRA powerful.

1. They don't file audited accounts (the NAGR are as bad)

2. 4 million members is widely seen as a large overestimate (the NAGR figures don't attract as much noise)

3. The NRA board aren't really accountable to their membership (the NAGR says they are)

4. It's unusual for a grassroots organisation to have most of its money come from sources other than membership fees and merchandising. The NRA seems to be around 40%, the NAGR claims that most of its money comes from subscriptions. It is common for corporate supporters to make donations on behalf of lobbyists, rather than to the lobbying outfit, and pay the lobbying outfit "consultancy fees".

> About a week before each election every NRA member gets a bright orange postcard in the mail with a list of the candidates, local and national, that are up for election and exactly what the NRA thinks of their stance on guns. Those members pay attention and vote. That is what makes the NRA powerful.

That's a good argument. I'm not sure what I think, to be honest, but the EFF seems to be grassroots to me in a way that the NRA isn't.

The NRA has serious credibility and no serious person doubts their 5 million cited membership number. You do realize that's only a fraction of the country's gun owning population?

OK, today the NRA is not accountable to its membership, I'll grant you that hands down. But it was during the critical period of the '70s.

I don't mean tax returns, I mean regularly filing audited accounts. If they have filed those, I'd be delighted to find out where I can obtain them.

> no serious person doubts their 5 million cited membership number

The figure for NRA membership has been an active controversy for the last decade, after a former NRA board member asserted that the NRA was lax in a number of ways about how it maintain its membership list (e.g., not taking people of their list of life members when they died). The WaPo did a short Q&A about it - http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/fact-checker/post/does-t... (a rare example of a WaPo story on the NRA that didn't get attacked by the 2nd-amendment media)

> only a fraction of the country's gun owning population

At what, 2%? Which makes the fact that they are de-facto the voice of gun-owning voters kind of odd.

Even the Washington Post's fact checker column couldn't find fault with their numbers. And that's as anti-gun a newspaper as exists.

As far as the NRA pushing the industry around, there was a very public spat with Smith & Wesson around 2000 that nearly ruined the company. Google it. These days, the industry is more in line with with the NRA, but make no mistake about who has the power - it's the NRA (i.e. the customers).

http://www.congresslink.org/print_lp_specialinterestgroups_f...

Straight from the horse's mouth:

"NRA ranks no. 1 in this year`s "Power 25", Fortune magazine`s listing of the most influential lobbying groups. Compiled by Fortune`s senior writer and Washington bureau chief Jeffrey H. Birnbaum, the "Power 25" is based on responses to a survey sent to over 2,900 people, including every member of Congress, senior Capitol Hill staffers, senior White House aides, professional lobbyists, and top-ranking officers of the largest lobbying groups in Washington."

http://www.nraila.org/news-issues/in-the-news/2001/5/nra-ran...

If you don't like the company selling guns then you can easily go to another one -- you're not invested in one particular company.

And there's no single category I can think of that's sole source, not counting curiosities like FNH's PS90 (as seen in original full auto mode in Stargate).

Privacy? Not so much. But we do have the EFF. So donate!

This is why rms gets up in arms when people describe his views with the phrase "open source".

Your tone suggests you have made up your mind on this, but if you really want to know why the NRA is powerful, read this: http://www.forbes.com/sites/amyshowalter/2013/05/16/five-rea... .

It's the people, not the money.

As the first "Called-Out" comment notes, it helps when you are right. For the current privacy concerns ... that's messier, e.g. there are people who want to harm us, like the Boston bombers, then again, our national security apparatus was completely useless against them, or the underwear bomber despite explicit warnings from e.g. his father. Etc. My point is that this is a lot less clear cut.

Most importantly, gun owners vote, and there are a lot more of them than NRA members. We vote in numbers that easily throw many elections, or even control of the Congress as in 1994. There are many national level politicians who found themselves spending more time with their families after betraying gun owners.

So we need to get more people voting on privacy. I should close this off for now, but I've got some observations I'll probably post at top level on how this works for gun owners.

Here's the Steve Jobs of the NRA: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5ju4Gla2odw

Those aren't gun-toting wingnuts in the audience, they're business leaders and politicians. You can't buy that kind of reverence.

I'm sure there are a lot of prominent people that still remember fondly about the past, and when they die their sentiment will die with them.

Just wish privacy advocates would stop fumbling on their Macbooks and instead find that universal appeal in their speeches. Imagine getting JPB's "A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace" presentend in the Heston's kind of way.

I'm a Constitutionalist. I'm (very slowly) studying for the bar (without college or a law degree) so that I can understand the Constitution better.

The Constitution is a living, breathing document. It lives and breathes through ratification, and through amendments. The problems we're facing in our day is that people are violating its tenets without bothering to ratify, especially where they know that such a ratification would be futile.

I'm a gun owner, and a Constitutionalist, and I've long said, that if it were truly the will of the people enough that the second amendment were ratified out of the Constitution, I'd abide it. Until then, almost every act against the second amendment is an attempt to circumvent the Constitution, and should cost politicians their jobs.

I don't care if a politician supports or does not support the second amendment, but I damn well care whether or not they're upholding their oaths of office, the first of which is to defend the Constitution. Very few of them do.

Edit: Re-reading that, I come off emotional, which isn't intended. I was put off by lysol's rhetoric, which is why I deliberately didn't respond to it, but I meant to basically agree with you, sans one point of clarification, and got carried away. Regards.

So apparently no one at Hacker News knows about EPIC:

http://epic.org/epic/about.html

which is, more or less, what the original poster is asking for. They're not militant, I suppose. They don't have the same level of anger that the NRA manages to harness, don't have talk radio hosts promoting them, that sort of thing. But they do exist and are focused on this one issue of electronic privacy, and yet apparently are failing at their job of self-promotion, because no one on HN knows they exist.

Are they failing to do enough outreach? Is a different organization really needed, or does EPIC just need to do a better job of marketing itself?

How politically powerful was the NRA back then?

Not very; in fact, a few years later it proposed to close their D.C. HQ, get out of politics altogether and return to its original marksmanship etc. role. Only a member revolt at the 1977 annual meeting in Cincinnati reversed that and e.g. established a formal 503(c)(4) lobbying and political arm, the Institute for Legislative Action, which rates politicians, sends out those orange postcards with scores before elections, etc. etc.

Then they are not going to be effective during election time.

https://supporters.eff.org/donate

Other ways you can help EFF, like using their Amazon referral link:

https://www.eff.org/helpout

The NRA & the gun industry have successfully marketed a product, and the NRA has successfully marketed itself as the means of protecting customer's rights to that product.

Note, the NRA doesn't have to be the one that markets gun ownership as a positive - that can come from any number of sources, inside and outside of the gun industry. The NRA just has to give the image of being the political outlet to protect that right. Thus the media and/or possibly the gun industry can throw gas on the fire to show that guns are a necessity of American life and in turn because of it's perceived credibility on the issue people vote according to what the NRA says.

Now, presently I don't think either the NRA or the industry really has to do much work marketing guns. All they have to do is hold back the tide whenever a tragic event happens and forestall action when the willpower to change is present. Then, when election season rolls around, they just remind their members how to vote.

In the case of privacy there is #1 no product, and #2 no clear "defender" of our right to privacy. Further, given the nature of privacy, I don't think there will ever be a clear product or defender for/of that right. Without that, there's never going to be the approach that markets the product as a necessity or a group people will pay attention to when voting.

Just think about the ACLU - part of their mission is privacy. But yet I'm sure half the people who care about internet privacy don't even like much less trust the ACLU. EFF - majority of the population hasn't heard of them. It's just too sensitive of an issue to have a blanket organization representing everyone's interest.

Finally, as a side note, I think I would pay for an email service like this: free email, with conditional payments. Whenever the service receives and refuses a government request, it charges a very small fee (couple cents or even a penny - will wait till x amount has accrued before charging card). Then in turn, the payment fee goes to the campaign of a pro-privacy candidate or organization like the EFF etc.

Allowed to have gun? C/D

Privacy is way more complicated, and an inherently psychological endeavor.

Free from government snooping? C/D

is a much more complicated question, because it is untenable for governments to know nothing about their citizens or companies (it is good that we license drivers, and that restaurants have health inspections).

Also, the NRA holds a special relationship with an industry. The NRA is the lightning rod for attention after fire arms tragedies. No one ever goes in for gun companies after something like Sandy Hook, instead they go raise money off of the NRA.

There is no similar (legal) industry on which privacy and/or secrecy is a prerequisite, and for which a lobbying proxy would be useful.

So, in the case of Privacy, you aren't fighting your Representatives who can be bought to change laws. You are fighting the Court. That fight is much more of a long game. And that long game would seem to be better won through broader Civil Rights which are already under attack. Read the First Amendment and think of Snowden and the media. Read the 4th and consider the broadness of "unreasonable" and where it extends to property seizure laws. Heck read the 8th and consider how broadly solitary confinement is used as punishment in our prisons. Or how anti-drug and anti-marriage laws restrict personal choice. To me, protection of our broad Rights against the Leviathan is the issue of our time.

That said, the 2nd Amendment is also an ally in this fight. In contrast to Privacy, the right of gun ownership is explicitly guaranteed and the NRA is a partner in questions of privacy. We just need to help them realize that the national security apparatus could easily be expanded inwards to target gun owners. We need to help them realize that the technology to do so is already trivial for the Big Bad Government.

Privacy, unfortunately, doesn't have that same focus within the Constitution. Where the 1st gives, the 4th takes away esp with respect to National Defense. So Privacy advocates are left to fight a broad argument based on the protections in the 1st and by narrowing the definition of reasonable searches. That's a much harder problem and a long game that requires many, complementary actors.

However.

I would argue that with all due respect to the EFF, they have not achieved the desired result (yet). Arguably this is because it has remained what mainstream american would call a fringe interest group.

I find it hard to believe that the general public, if in fact educated (albeit briefly, but effectively) about the issue of what's happened to personal privacy in the USA over the past 15 years, would care less about it than say the right to buy a military assault rifle at a private gun show.

We need an aggressive EFF. It starts with money. We need an EFF that way more aggressively pursues big big money and big big names, names that joe the plumber and soccer mom sally would "respect" (I'm talking about movie stars and celebrities, people).

The NRA has (had actually) Charleton Heston.

Why doesn't the EFF have ... Oprah? or Ashton Kutcher? or Will Smith? or Tom Cruise?? (oh never mind that one, actually)... or Katy Perry? you get the idea

Personally I feel that if you want to get it done you'll need both celebs and corporate backing.

//sigh... I feel dirty. I'll go shower.

The NRA does this and, like the ACLU, knows to defend the extremes. If we want the 4th amendment defended, then we need that type of organization.

Getting to your specifics, the NRA and I assume a large fraction of its membership know the government knows the latter are gun owners, it's very very hard to keep that secret, and most of us don't bother. Why bother when that's probably over half the nation's people?

Heck, if you subtract the states and localities where very few are allowed to own guns, just randomly picking people using a few simple profiling techniques would result in a very high hit rate.

I just don't see it as being a significant enough direct threat for the NRA to adopt it as a major issue like McCain-Feingold.

I never heard a single speech by Wayne LaPierre which would lead me to conclude that the NRA is interested in limiting itself to a single issue.

> I just don't see it as being a significant enough direct threat for the NRA to adopt it as a major issue like McCain-Feingold.

But you seem to understand that.

People only like privacy as an optional concept; what they really like is sharing their personal information with strangers on the internet.

In the past, naturally occurring inefficiencies helped to safeguard privacy. Privacy was free. However, now that the technology to collect, store, analyze, and distribute information is so cheap and readily available, we are seeing a massive loss of privacy.

As an economic externality, privacy can only be protected through deliberate effort. We will not get privacy unless we demand it from society. Therefore, political action is a prerequisite. Pro-privacy organizations will be essential in the years ahead.

If you think that the government defying the purpose of the Fourth will be fixed by pushing for another amendment to be passed and then returning to public passivity, you don't understand how the fourth has been "made a runaround".

The Constitution will continue to be treated as something to pay lip service to without substance as long as all the public cares about is having the right words in it rather than the right action (or right restraint of action) by the government. Adding, deleting, or rearranging words won't fix that -- holding people accountable will.

No, it doesn't matter what is explicit (which anyone who has observed the non-impact of the 27th Amendment would know.)

It matters what the public holds people in official positions accountable to.

Those who don't support following the 2nd Amendment as it was intended, or amending it, have absolutely no place in fighting for privacy in this fashion, and, really, if you support rule of men vs. the rule of law....

Just as the Rutherford Institute is more protective of individual rights than the ACLU is.

But you're right we need an organization for privacy.

The EPIC and EFF are not enough.

Google don't be evil? FAIL

We need a global charter for privacy rights.

Well, first of course there's a lot of us. Even having only a fraction, the NRA now has 5 million members. The EFF? I would be surprised to learn they had more than 50,000 (couldn't find a number in a quick search).

2nd, we vote, and many of us vote first and foremost on this issue. Especially since it's a good general touchstone, not that more than a tiny tiny fraction of national level politicians really give a damn about either issue no matter what they say most of the time.

3rd, there are many major elections where it's clear gunowners were a necessary if not necessarily sufficient part of the winning side. Gun control at the national level mostly disappeared in this century until Newtown after the Democrats suffered a string of catastrophic defeats from losing both houses of the Congress in 1994 to Al Gore losing by a whisker in 2000. That it was even close is telling, especially since Bush isn't much of a conservative or friend to gun owners, e.g. he officially supported renewal of the "assault weapons" ban.

(Note that it's in our cultural DNA to defy being told we can't or shouldn't have something, be it guns or e.g. drugs. But those are tangible, literally put your hands on them things, not like "privacy", the loss of which isn't immediately visible.)

On the side of the Stupid Party, every post-Reagan defeated Presidential candidate was, or appeared to be bad on gun ownership (Romney's actions were good, but his rhetoric was very bad). Again, the very narrow margins by which Bush won in 2000 and 2004 are probably also telling, bad rhetoric and very few good actions.

Now for some historical specifics that made a difference:

The biggest is how extreme gun grabbers are. While businessman Eric Schmidt is notorious for some creepy even if possibly true statements, I'm not aware of any national level politician who's willing to go on record saying we have no right whatsoever to privacy (whatever they actually believe).

Nothing compared to e.g. Dianne Feinstein's "If I could have gotten 51 votes in the Senate of the United States for an outright ban, picking up every one of them . . . Mr. and Mrs. America, turn 'em all in, I would have done it. I could not do that. The votes weren't here.", or Michael Dukakis' "I do not believe in people owning guns. Guns should be owned only by police and military. I am going to do everything I can to disarm this state."

Legislation stripping us of gun rights are much more in your face than e.g. FISA, and have much more concrete results (see below). Privacy is much more a Federal issue, although there have been a number of gun privacy atrocities at the state and local level. Whereas the nation frequently watches some state go crazy and e.g. tell you that you can load only 7 bullets in your 10 round magazines ("clips"), and arrest people on that basis. Plus hypocrisy, there are many many carve outs for the anointed, be they police or politicians, or the frequent discovery that a prominent gun grabber owns guns. And all the politicians with armed bodyguards telling the rest of us we don't deserve that level of protection.

Then there are specific atrocities, cases well known by gun owners of innocents brutalized or killed by abusive organs of the states. This became big a while after the national Gun Control Act of 1968 was passed, when the BATF had to find something to do for its Revenuers after sugar price supports killed the moonshine industry.

Our side can point to kittens killed ("I swear I am not making this up"), pregnant mothers who miscarried, people crippled for life, mothers shot dead while holding a baby (Ruby Ridge, in which the BATF was enlisted to try to force her husband to spy), and many many outright killed (Waco started out as a BATF "ricebowl" operation, they wanted some nice video for their first budget in the Clinton Administration). Plus a constant drumbeat of gun owners ensnared by "flypaper" laws in gun grabbing localities; even NYC has realized it's damaging their tourist industry.

And how could I forget Fast and Furious, just one of several Federal Government gun running operations that sent thousands of guns south of the border, resulting in 350 deaths and counting, just to generate better statistics for gun grabbing propaganda (that reason is now on record and any other explanation suffers an Underpants Gnomes logical error).

The very secrecy of our national security privacy problems makes the latter problematical. Ignoring that the targets of the DEA are seldom ones we can empathize with, that they launder the tips they get from the NSA means that as of now I don't think there's a single specific case we know of.

And one final general point: lots of public figures are willing if not happy to demonize gun owners of almost every sort, and gun organizations (we can see the latter in this discussion). That results in strong push-back from the targeted (again, it's not in our cultural DNA to take that lying down).

Practically, NFA registration is something that is not accessible to many citizens due to local roadblocks (requirements for local law enforcement to sign off who have no obligation to do so). It also takes well over 6 months with the relatively rare items it covers now. Adding millions of records to that would have overwhelmed the ATF, and instantly turned millions of people into felons for doing absolutely nothing.

That will get your attention.

California passed an "assault weapons" ban 1989, and in an act of amazing bureaucratic/political gymnastics first said a particular obsolete WWII rifle design, the SKS which has an integral 10 round magazine and a medium power round, was OK but you've got to register it, then reversed and decided they were illegal, and for anyone who registered one....

Keeping with the old gun designs issue, let's say you live in NY state and own a "Keep Off My Lawn" WWII era M1 Garand rifle, which has an integral magazine and is fed with an 8 round "en-bloc" clip. Well, now, outside of certain types of competitions you can no longer use those clips, you'd have to carefully bend sheet metal to reduce them to 7 rounds and likely suffer reliability problems. I carry a pre-WWI M1911 design handgun, with modern 8 round magazines; if I lived in NY state, I'd be a felon if I missed unloading one of them by one round.

There are many many other examples of these state and local "flypaper" laws and their enforcement.

Of course, since nothing they do comes without a trade-off, they will be making the trust route somewhat more painful (requiring fingerprints and background checks).

However, if an armed citizenry is supposed to keep the government in check, why not HEAT warhead anti-armor weapons? E.g. in the context of this discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6186569 which touches on the widespread police procurement of light armor.

In those states, so long as the NFA branch issues the stamp and you are (federally) legally allowed to possess the item under the NFA, it doesn't matter whether you or a trust owns it.

Of course, the trust must be valid under the trust law of the state you reside in or else it cannot legally own the items, but competent trust attorneys are not too hard to find.

It also fits with the published data showing that police officers commit violent crimes at a significantly higher rate than non-LEO concealed weapons permit holders.

I'd also be wary of pushing this NRA analogy too far, for fear of deterring anti-gun pro-privacy people (who do exist, and can be quite principled) from the pro-privacy cause. While most pro-gun people are pro their own personal privacy, and pro gun owner privacy (anti-registry), there's absolutely a large contingent who are fine with the government keeping watchful eyes on "those other people", within and without the US, so it's not as if NRA members are inherently anti-NSA/pro-privacy either.

I ultimately care about the tech/crypto/privacy issue a lot more than guns (which I also care about, along with low taxes, non-intrusive regulation, drug decriminalization, open immigration, etc). To the extent that being ardently pro gun turns people off from supporting privacy, I'd personally be more than willing to tone down/cut back on the pro gun message.

Plenty do, but every one of us feels threatened when we hear someone like DiFi say "Mr. and Mrs. America, turn 'em all in" (even if that was technically only about "assault weapons", a politically defined category, we know what her end game is, guns for her but not for us).

I think CISPA was an attempt to split the security/privacy crowd as well -- there certainly are those who care about infosec just to keep their corporate IP unrustled, vs. those who care about it from individual liberty grounds, the same way.

The membership drive page says around 20K: https://supporters.eff.org/donate/membership-drive

To me, this is shamefully low...it means that only tiny fraction of people who claim to have a strong interest in online freedom actually have joined.

The sad reality is that in modern politics, money talks, and the tech culture tends to strongly reject that ("the better idea should win"), and thus we don't participate in the political money game, and it's why we keep losing political battles.

Curiously, Reagan himself was quite successful as a Presidential candidate, despite pushing through one of the first strong gun-control laws during his term as Governor (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mulford_Act). I wonder when the GOP tide shifted on that; mid-'80s?

The 1994 assault weapons ban was a wakeup call, and probably contributed to the rapid sales growth of that type of rifle (it's the fastest growing segment in the industry today), which increases support for the NRA - you see how it goes. The more they try to ban the stronger the gun rights folks get. In 1994, AR15's were a niche product that even some gun owners scoffed at as useless. Today they are very much mainstream.

There also seems to be a rise in Libertarian-like thought across all parties these days that probably contributes to the NRA's cause.

But it is a mistake to paint the NRA as a Republican organization. It is far from it. That Republicans tend to support the NRA is a fact, but the NRA is non-partizan. If you look at successful lobbying groups, you'll see that they are for the most part non-partizan. The big unions are an exception, but I would argue they limit themselves by aligning with Democrats.

This is one issue on which my elderly conservative relatives almost entirely come down on the "liberal" side, though not enough to vote for Democrats. They tend to associate gun ownership with weird thugs and revolutionary communists and generally people who are up to no good. Admittedly, they are not from rural areas, where I assume views have always been quite different (the very conservative relatives I have live in suburban-conservative areas, e.g. some live in Orange County).

The move towards libertarian influence is a good point. I think of traditional conservative views being strongly pro-police (you don't find many liberals in friends-of-the-police type community organizations), but younger libertarians like Radley Balko tend to be very critical of police.

The nation is polarizing, e.g. too many Blue Dogs got sent home to spend more time with their families, too many never really on our side (re)turned against us like Harry Reid ... we'll see how it goes. Then again, ask ex-Senator Richard Lugar what he thinks of the NRA and gunowners.... What we really need, for both issues, is this bit of wisdom from Milton Friedman:

"I do not believe that the solution to our problem is simply to elect the right people. The important thing is to establish a political climate of opinion which will make it politically profitable for the wrong people to do the right thing. Unless it is politically profitable for the wrong people to do the right thing, the right people will not do the right thing either, or if they try, they will shortly be out of office."

Of course, for privacy, if everything is kept secret including the courts, how will we know...?

Echoing damoncali, a lot of Republican politicians who were sent home to spend more time with their families have discovered to their dismay that the NRA doesn't give a damn about the party they belong to.

There is of course no official memo, these people aren't that dumb, or rather know the MSM wouldn't get away with carrying their water if one came to light. But there's pretty clear testimony by a BATF whistle-blower of a supervisor's comments that laid it out. While I don't have much respect for anyone in the organization, the rank and file properly had drilled into them the principle that they weren't to let guns walk, it's a cardinal rule and a lot of them are very upset at what happened.

And it's clear to anyone capable of following a logical argument based on three undisputed facts about the Arizona operation (it looks likely there was also a Texas one, and we have some evidence for a Florida/Miami area one targeting Latin America below Mexico):

When gun stores called up the BATF about extremely suspicious buyers, it told them to allow the sales, around 2,000 guns in total.

Unlike the Bush era's Wide Receiver operation, which put radio transmitters in the stocks of rifles, no attempt whatsoever was made to follow the guns south of the boarder, including informing, let alone involving the Mexican government (they're not happy).

Top Cabinet level officials like Attorney General Eric Holder and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, plus many figures on down, made statements about how American gun stores and shows were supplying Mexican drug cartels despite a paucity of evidence.

E.g. you can't buy grenades or post-1986 manufactured automatic weapons in those venues, and for the usual reasons not really including effectiveness they prefer full auto M16s (originally supplied to the Mexican government by the US) and AK-47s (generally available on the black market, and much less bulky than drugs) to more expensive semi-auto US civilian versions. It should go without saying that the Mexican government doesn't ask the US government to trace weapons stolen from their armories.