13 ms·

We need an NRA for privacy

• deleted 13y ago
  [deleted]
• johnny22 13y ago
  it's called the EFF.. DONATE!
  • 7beersonthewall 13y ago
    ^^
  • plg 13y ago
    ABSOLUTELY. Everyone who cares about privacy should support the EFF. I 100% agree. 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
    • grumps 13y ago
      Beyond celebrities, who is the corporate America sponsor? 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.
    • dllthomas 13y ago
      The EFF has Bruce Schneier...
• k2enemy 13y ago
  The NRA is a powerhouse because millions of Americans (and manufacturers) care enough about guns and the 2nd amendment to be willing to donate and pay fees to the NRA. Privacy? Not so much. But we do have the EFF. So donate!
  • davexunit 13y ago
    and the FSF!
    • myhf 13y ago
      Except that the FSF doesn't care whether technology is used to erode civil liberties, as long as the source code is available.
      • privong 13y ago
        Not quite. https://www.fsf.org/campaigns/surveillance https://www.fsf.org/campaigns/surveillance
      • lucastx 13y ago
        My point of view about this is that if releasing the source code and allowing modifications and redistribution was the norm, technology that erode civil liberties would be naturally selected out or replaced.
      • ctb_mg 13y ago
        Sorry, I have to speak up for Mr. Stallman here; that is not correct. Free software is Free as in Freedom with the explicit goal of protecting the users' rights and liberties. FSM is NOT simply an "open source movement". This is why rms gets up in arms when people describe his views with the phrase "open source".
        • lukifer 13y ago
          I don't agree with Stallman's level of zealotry, but I understood his stance a lot better when I discovered that one of the core motivators for a full open-source stack is the ability to audit whether you are being spied on. I don't believe propietary software is evil, but neither can I argue with that logic.
• BgSpnnrs 13y ago
  I think the issue of privacy is being intentionally and collusively kept a series of domestic affairs by national state agencies. We need a global charter for privacy rights.
  • privong 13y ago
    I think such a thing would be unenforceable without the consent of those same nations which currently ignore privacy rights.
• jbaiter 13y ago
  How about the ACLU and the EFF?
• brador 13y ago
  The problem is encryption is useful for many things. Some good, some bad. It's great for underground humanitarian organizations in third world countries...it's also great for kiddy diddlers hiding their stash. But the tech is the same, so we pick both or non. Right now, government is leaning on none.
  • cji 13y ago
    That's not a problem unique to encryption. Firearms have good uses and bad uses - you can hunt and feed your family, or you could kill someone. With a powerful privacy advocacy group, as proposed by OP or like the EFF as mentioned by others, you can have the same voice like the NRA does to promote responsible "good" uses of firearms but for privacy technology.
• oinksoft 13y ago
  There's a reason the NRA can do what they do: Guns are a >$30B/year industry. http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2013-03-14/the-nras-corporate-donors http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2013-03-14/the-nras-cor...
  • mtgx 13y ago
    How big is the part of the tech industry that relies on user trust?
    • ihsw 13y ago
      That's different, people have to use Facebook because all of their friends and family are on it. 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.
      • hga 13y ago
        Very true, the network effects work in our favor when it comes to guns. E.g. if you're set on many designs you only have one company you can buy it from (but almost always many ammo companies), but the more popular ones out of patent protection have multiple companies making them, e.g. AR-15 and M1911 pattern rifles and handguns, dating from the '50s and, well, 1911 ^_^. 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).
  • hobs 13y ago
    That's the clearest response possible. I think the radical part is that we are going to have to convince the general populace that PAYING for privacy is going to be the way going forward. If we move into that realm because the government will not stop spying, then it might be a lot easier to have the privacy organizations band together with financial might. (The EFF is awesome, but they are not nearly big enough)
  • bcoates 13y ago
    Where most of the customers are governments. The gun industry donates less than 10% of the NRA's budget going from your link.
• danso 13y ago
  The NRA actually does stand up for privacy: of its members, anyway. You've probably heard of those stances being used against the NRA sometimes, for example, when they've fought to prevent the Feds to deny gun rights to people who have been placed on terrorism-related suspicions list (which, by some reports, was as inaccurate as the no-fly lists). 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)
• _pmf_ 13y ago
  The problem is that people really love guns. People only like privacy as an optional concept; what they really like is sharing their personal information with strangers on the internet.
• lambda 13y ago
  It's called the EFF. 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.
  • mtgx 13y ago
    In the sense that they're defending our rights, yes you could say it's EFF. 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.
    • protomyth 13y ago
      > I wouldn't want EFF to become a corrupted organization 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.
    • ImprovedSilence 13y ago
      This is politics, if you want to win you have to play the game.
  • mc32 13y ago
    Yes, but there is a big difference (at least in my mind). While the notion of the right to bear arms is conceptual, what it aims to protect is actually tangible (Iron and Lead) and people would feel impacted (can't go hunting, or could not 'protect themselves', the latter being less tangible.) 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.
  • 13y ago
• tippytop 13y ago
  We need a privacy amendment to the Constitution. It needs to shore up the legalese of the 4th which lawyers have made a runaround.
  • dragonwriter 13y ago
    I think what we need is a public that holds the government accountable to the Fourth. 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.
    • tippytop 13y ago
      Anyone who watches government in action understands quite well how laws are twisted and turned to meet objectives. It only matters what is explicit, and there is no mention anywhere in the Constitution about "privacy". If this is a value that we Americans wish to continue, then it needs to be codified. Any government action begins with words and the interpretation of said words.
      • dragonwriter 13y ago
        > Anyone who watches government in action understands quite well how laws are twisted and turned to meet objectives. It only matters what is explicit 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.
    • hga 13y ago
      Very clearly true. Compare to the very plain language of the 2nd Amendment, which 9 out of 9 Supreme Court justices agreed was an individual right, with of course 4 saying it then doesn't mean anything. 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....
• mattreaver 13y ago
  www.campaignforliberty.org
• jstalin 13y ago
  Go. Right now. Donate all you can to EFF. NOW. https://supporters.eff.org/donate https://supporters.eff.org/donate Other ways you can help EFF, like using their Amazon referral link: https://www.eff.org/helpout https://www.eff.org/helpout
• rayiner 13y ago
  Privacy advocates need to get their act together and form a single-issue organization. I need to be seeing teenagers coming to my house peddling privacy the way they do for churches and baby seals. The tech industry needs to sack up and realize that their business interests are at stake, and put some serious money in PACs behind the whole effort. It needs to have a focused mission, no getting distracted in related issues (e.g. copyright reform or reform of hacking laws), but be a big tent (don't care what else your other viewpoints are). There needs to be a diversity of messages, targeted at different demographics. There has to be something in it not just for techie yuppies in San Francisco, but also church-going grandmothers in small-town Iowa (any political movement that can't capture at least some old people is dead on arrival). That's a key strength of the NRA: it has vigorous support across a wide diversity of voting demographics. 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 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 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."
  • danso 13y ago
    I upvoted you for the general sentiment and the not-common-enough use of "effecting" as a verb...but I think privacy is too big for any single organization. Keep in mind that the hardest hitters...such as Google, who was instrumental in pushing back against SOPA, are themselves pushing the commercial boundaries of what people are comfortable with in regards to privacy. 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.
• tomphoolery 13y ago
  I would join this, and be as militant as the NRA.
• VandyILL 13y ago
  I don't think it'll work. 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.
  • knowtheory 13y ago
    More to the point the NRA's mission statement is really freaking clear. 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.
• hga 13y ago
  What has made "the NRA"---really, gunowners, the NRA has but a fraction of them as members---so powerful? 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).
• aubergene 13y ago
  Systems like PRISM should be a lobbying issue for the NRA. Background checks and gun ownership registration become moot when the government has copies of all your web browsing history, purchasing activity and correspondence. PRISM is the biggest threat to the second amendment, the NRA needs to wake up to this.
  • hga 13y ago
    Unless it directly impinges on what they're doing, like McCain-Feingold's suppression of its political speech, the NRA is resolutely single issue, which is one of the things that makes it so powerful, they don't give gun owners unrelated reasons to keep them away or oppose them. Compare to the 2nd largest, but very very small Gun Owners of America and e.g. their up front and continuing opposition to Obamacare. 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.
    • justin66 13y ago
      > the NRA is resolutely single issue, 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.
• jellicle 13y ago
  Currently 59 comments on this post, 2 hours old, I did a ctrl-F "epic" and get no results. So apparently no one at Hacker News knows about EPIC: http://epic.org/epic/about.html 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?
  • protomyth 13y ago
    > 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. Then they are not going to be effective during election time.
  • stfu 13y ago
    Just look at their website. It feels like they just made the transition from having been a newsgroup.
  • hga 13y ago
    Put this in historical context: I'd say we're in the early '70s period, after the passage of the Gun Control Act of 1968 but before the BATF a bit later starting to abusively enforcing it and word of that got out; critically we don't have specific examples of national security privacy violations, let alone atrocities. 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.
• protomyth 13y ago
  It comes down to this, Does the EFF scare Senators and Representatives at election time? If the organization that defends your rights doesn't scare the hell out of a campaign (to the point opponents demonize the organization and its members) then they are worthless for advocacy in this era. 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.
• RRRA 13y ago
  It's called the EFF, and please don't compare it to the NRA :P
• readme 13y ago
  We already have the EFF.
• jydarche 13y ago
  We can't expect such association when the biggest internet companies in America (Google, Facebook, Yahoo...) clearly don't care about privacy. It's all about money. Google don't be evil? FAIL
• wes-exp 13y ago
  Privacy is what economists call an "externality" - i.e., the full cost of harming privacy is not accounted for in conventional business activity (like pollution). 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.
• robg 13y ago
  Privacy isn't explicitly guaranteed in the Constitution. So the Court has tended to side with the Government on matters of National Security vs. Privacy. In fact, the Constitution guarantees searches for the Government, so long as they are reasonable. On matters of national security versus a database, national security readily wins. The Court finds those searches reasonable. 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.
  • hga 13y ago
    We realize it, but one of the secrets to the NRA's success is it's single issue focus, it doesn't give people unrelated reasons to not join it, as what you recommend would do. Unless it directly impinges on it or gun owners, like McCain-Feingold's suppression of political speech, it's not going to get a major push, although I'd expect it'll be added to "reasons we can't trust the good will of those in government".
    • robg 13y ago
      You say single issue, but really the NRA is single Amendment. They fight for a strong, individual right within the 2nd. 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.
• dreamdu5t 13y ago
  The problem is there's no big business in protecting privacy, and therefor no lobbying money. The NRA is driven and funded by gun manufacturers.
• pcvarmint 13y ago
  The NRA is not the most gun-friendly organization. The JPFO and Gun Owners of America are better. The NRA is a sellout, compromising on principles in order to maintain political power. 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.