We need an NRA for privacy

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.

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

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?

The threat is certainly more direct and concrete. A lot of people don't know that the recent assault weapons ban that was proposed would make millions of people felons and punishable by 10 years in prison if they did not register their rifles under the NFA (which is currently used for machine gun collectors - it's a painful bureaucratic process that takes months, but allows the ownership of machine guns, suppressors, and other items deemed dangerous by the government).

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.

Hard to have the tech industry back it when most of it is taking part in the surveillance.

> 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.

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!"