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
We need an NRA for privacy
81–90 of 170 posts
Re: We need an NRA for privacy
#82Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's a myth. The NRA is not among the big spenders in the lobbying world, and money has little to do with their power. Michael Bloomberg pretty much proved that when he dropped $12 million and came up with nothing to show for it. 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... .…
Indeed, it's as much as a cult of personality as Apple is. 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.
Heston was an amazing spokesperson. Love that speech. The perfect emotional appeal combined with giving a higher purpose and sending for the audience.
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.
Re: We need an NRA for privacy
#83Currently 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…
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.
Re: We need an NRA for privacy
#84Earlier quoted context omitted.
I suppose you think the Constitution is a "living and breathing" document too, right?
Instead of calling lysol out for spouting non-factual rhetoric, I'll address this point as well. 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 v…
You are correct and my remark was a bit crass. I agree with you completely: instead of sidestepping the Constitution and fending off claims of Constitutional violations with secrecy, we should be amending it.
Re: We need an NRA for privacy
#85Privacy 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 is…
The problem I see with the ACLU and EFF is exactly what you mention - you've got to get older people involved. Fairly or unfairly (generally unfairly, in my opinion), both of those organizations have pretty negative connotations with the church going grandmother you reference. The ACLU's sometimes mindless pursuit of "civil rights" (which I think they do a good job of generally, but it does grate when everything is c…
That sounds right for EFF, but I'd be interested if there are any numbers for the age distribution of ACLU members. I'd always gotten the impression that their core supporters are baby boomers, generally >50 y/o.
Re: We need an NRA for privacy
#86Privacy 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 is…
Prohibition succeeded because they formed an alliance with the Women's Suffrage movement.
This is brilliant: The gay rights movement should align with the privacy movement.
Re: We need an NRA for privacy
#87Systems 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.
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.
Re: We need an NRA for privacy
#88Privacy 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.
Re: We need an NRA for privacy
#89What 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 g…
Wait, can you get me the source for your claim that Fast and Furious was to boost gun death stats? There is no way I'm going to be able to convince anyone else of that without some official memo. I'd assumed it was to generate traces of the flow of guns to various gangs and thereby collect data on suppliers.
Re: We need an NRA for privacy
#90What 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 g…
> every post-Reagan defeated Presidential candidate was, or appeared to be bad on gun ownership
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?