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.PrivacyCoalition.org
https://www.privacyinternational.org/
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.
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."