Probably nothing, because the actual people at NSA have remained pretty focused on their mission even absent any real technical or legislative-oversight controls. I suspect that will be the case until the hired-in-2001 people leave the agency and are replaced mainly with people trained by those post-2001 people. In the most junior roles at NSA, that's probably already happened.

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.

None, because apparently the people who the specific incidents happen to are either never aware of it or are told they can't talk about it.

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.

The NRA doesn't have "specific, actual, real gun rights atrocities" and they do just fine. How about people who won't give up their privacy until it is pried from their cold dead fingers just getting an address to send a check to in order to feel like they have agents working on their behalf?

Do the NAR or the Chamber of Commerce need atrocities?

You are GROSSLY ignorant of the history of gun grabbing atrocities, and they critically proceed the NRA's rise in political power. Read up on '70s BATF abuses of the GCA of '68 and get back to us before continuing to spout counterfactuals.

This is exactly what got me started on this issue in the early '70s.

On what planet does the seizure of guns count as an atrocity? I support gun rights absolutely, but you're looking at what I said through single-issue glasses.

When it's not following the Constitution and in the BATF's case frequently the law, and the gun owner gets "seized" and imprisoned as well, it's definitely in that direction. And they have regularly and often explicitly decreased the number of legal, licensed gun sellers, that's a pretty big thing, along with a multitude of abusive prosecutions of them.

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.

Those seem like more "weird American law enforcement" things than inherent to gun control. Europe has largely [1] phased out guns in the past 50 years in a much more orderly way. It might not be a good idea that they did so, but it did happen in a pretty sane, non-cowboy, non-BATF sort of way, that I don't think would count as an "atrocity" in the regular sense of the term.

[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).

Perhaps, I don't pay that close attention to the countries my ancestors left, although I do know there a lot more legal guns owned than you realize, check Wikipedia, plus Germans for some inexplicable reason are thought to have keep possession of ... 26 million? illegal guns. Start e.g. here and note France and Austria as well: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Number_of_guns_per_capita_by_co... ; dig around in Wikipedia or the sources for official legal vs. estimated illegal.

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.

WRT of your additions on Switzerland: it's much less universal now, post-Cold War. They only manufactured a bit over 600,000 SIG 550s/Stgw [19]90s for a current population of 8 million. Per Wikipedia the size of the official army is now "about 200,000 personnel, 120,000 receiving periodic military training and 80,000 reservists who have completed their total military training requirements." With a 15 year normal term of service, if they're still following the old pattern of allowing you to buy a converted to semi-auto version of your service rifle when you muster out, quite a few of those have been removed from service.

Seizure of the property of a law-abiding citizen by the government without any just cause is certainly an atrocity, even more - when this property is related to the right specifically mentioned in the Bill of Rights, so important it is.

Indeed, the usual suspects would be up in arms if printing presses (e.g. "high capacity" "assault" fast laser printers) were being seized.

IMHO: Seizure of property is a far greater atrocity than looking through some peoples' emails.

Not atrocities, but the threat is definitely personal. The message is basically "the government will take YOUR guns if you don't stand with the NRA."

It is true. When I read the laws that are being proposed nationally and locally in the state I live in, I realized there's a real chance that my right to own a firearm is under a real threat. And to illustrate that, I have before my eyes a number of localities where this right is already destroyed. So my choice of giving the money to the NRA was obvious and easy to make.

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.

Well, there's this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ruby_Ridge

True, but the NRA was powerful before Ruby Ridge or the Davidians.