On Wed, Feb 4, 2015 at 10:15 PM, Max Bond <max.o.bond@gmail.com> wrote:

What are you proposing we do?

As before, take these issues to the realworld political front. If you're a coder, you can write all the code you want. If you're a user, you can use whatever code you want. If you're EFF/ACLU, you can publish all the press releases and fight all the cases under already written laws you want. Yet politicians generally ignore the above groups because they don't have much if any direct political action component that affects them. What's needed is a permanent political fixture and operation similar to the American NRA. These guys have a real, ongoing, political agenda and impact. Candidates are actually afraid of and responsive to the NRA's political clout... before they get elected, and before laws get enacted... not after. The NRA email, fax, letter and call trees, and their members who visit their legislators and stage in public view... are very effective. Look at the banner scroller in the upper right half of their homepage... they have a broad and deep approach to issue outreach/embedding, even a lifestyle. Labor unions and others are common examples of such organization. They all do it by leveraging large monoculture bases to politics. The NRA is 3.5M - 5.0M members strong. They turn $250M/yr from that base (manufacturers too). They have little difference of opinion in their ranks. They are good at crafting and pitching political rhetoric, framing the conversation, and rendering complex issues into simple forms that resonate with their entire base. The EFF/ACLU representing the internet are tiny in comparison. Yet the internet has a household penetration rate of 70%, more than firearms rate of 35%... so a big untapped culture there. Finding 5 million (or 2% of population) internet users should be simple task. Unfortunately, right now there are many tens of flag groups [1] mostly doing their own thing on the net. That's not good enough, and is confusingly diverse to both users and politicians. They need to join together to craft and coordinate the users under a single general banner they've been subconsciously waiting to fall in line behind, and then start firing out actionable political things for them to do. Internet users could demonstrate solidarity on issues with a typical Million User March [1]. They need to start raking in money for their war chest and to fund ongoing operations, etc. Just like the NRA... doing everything needed to become, and be, a strong integrated ongoing political force to be reckoned with. [1] Carrying the various colored flags of privacy, anonymity, free speech, freedom, copyright/filesharing, no data collecting, mining, retention or sharing, user brokered data management, surveillance, crypto, etc. The whole spectrum of related issues. https://www.nraila.org/ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Rifle_Association#Political_activity https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gun_politics_in_the_United_States#Advocacy_gro... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gun_politics_in_the_United_States#Rights-based... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Lobbying_organizations_in_the_United_... https://www.opensecrets.org/ https://www.nra.org/ https://www.nrablog.com/ https://www.youtube.com/user/TriggerTheVote https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fight_for_the_Future https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_Defense_League [ FftF/IDL are relatively dormant and reactionary than being ongoing political action ]