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We need an NRA for privacy

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Re: We need an NRA for privacy

#71

Post by stfu »

jellicle wrote: post #63

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…

Just look at their website. It feels like they just made the transition from having been a newsgroup.

Re: We need an NRA for privacy

#73

Post by lukifer »

ctb_mg wrote: post #51
myhf wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except that the FSF doesn't care whether technology is used to erode civil liberties, as long as the source code is available.

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".

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.

Re: We need an NRA for privacy

#74

Post by stfu »

jstalin wrote: post #37
oinksoft wrote: post #10

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-cor...

According to the NRA's 2010 form 990[1], total revenue in that year was $227 million. According to your link, only one corporate donor gave the NRA between $5 million and $10 million and four gave between $1 million and $4.9 million, etc. $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…

$11 million from sales of goods

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.

Re: We need an NRA for privacy

#75

Post by jivatmanx »

rayiner wrote: post #48

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 is…

Prohibition succeeded because they formed an alliance with the Women's Suffrage movement.

Re: We need an NRA for privacy

#76

Post by fnordfnordfnord »

rayiner wrote: post #48

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 is…

Some of these aren't single issue, but still relevant IMO. Please reply with other groups. Maybe we can decide which is the most suitable. Some groups may need vetting, and I can't think of a better place than HN for critical commentary regarding the activities of any particular group. I personally give to the EFF, and EPIC.

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.

Re: We need an NRA for privacy

#77

Post by hga »

damoncali wrote: post #65
hga wrote: post #58

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 g…

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,…

At the state level we have many examples of this actually happening.

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.

Re: We need an NRA for privacy

#78

Post by the_watcher »

rayiner wrote: post #48

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 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 compared to the plight of African Americans, something that is almost becoming the Goodwin's Law of civil rights). The EFF trying to save "hackers" and "pirates" - which is completely unfair, but it's what the small town older people without computers hear and fear. A new organization that could start from scratch would make a huge difference, and could focus on educating people that this is seriously the equivalent of the government reading snail mail.

Re: We need an NRA for privacy

#79

Post by rayiner »

the_watcher wrote: post #78
rayiner wrote: post #48

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 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…

Note that you rarely see the NRA coming to the defense of hardened inner-city thugs getting railroaded with felon-in-possession type charges. It's careful to craft an image, and that image is centered on one set of people who use guns and not the other sets of people who use guns.
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