Wouldn't you know: The very gun-centric organization that rails against any law allowing the government to keep gun ownership records keeps its own secret gun ownership records on many millions of Americans. True, NRA, there might be a difference between a government database and your own private database ... in theory. But in practice? The National Security Agency probably has copied your data by now.
In a piece at Buzzfeed entitled "How The NRA Built A Massive Secret Database Of Gun Owners," Steve Friess reports that even as the National Rifle Association publicly pursues its campaign against a national gun registry, the organization has compiled massive information on “tens of millions” of gun owners — without their consent. He writes:
That database has been built through years of acquiring gun permit registration lists from state and county offices, gathering names of new owners from the thousands of gun-safety classes taught by NRA-certified instructors and by buying lists of attendees of gun shows, subscribers to gun magazines and more, BuzzFeed has learned.
Much more can be read at
http://www.buzzfeed.com/...
Upshot: The NRA and its backers on the political right don't want the FBI to know which Americans have firearms, but it's not an issue to them if the NRA secretly compiles such a registry of its own. Because, hey, it's the NRA. No doubt some Americans indeed would find the NRA more trustworthy than the FBI. No doubt, too, the NRA's massive database -- which goes well beyond its actual membership -- is a tool the organization uses for fundraising and membership drives. In other words, it's a critical supply line for the mammoth, ground-thumping interest group.
While acknowledging that, "It's probably partially true that people don't know the information is being collected," former NRA lobbyist Richard Feldman added, "but even if they don't know it, they probably won't care because the NRA is not part of the government."
One little problem with that, which Friess didn't cover in his original piece: Based on the last few months of revelations about secret domestic government spying on Americans, we're all arguably part of government, now.
Click past the little orange data cloud for more.
How much would anyone like to bet that the NRA's vast, secret, data-rich list of American gun owners has long since fallen into the hands of the NSA, the FBI and other government intelligence-gathering agencies? Or, that it inevitably will, absent any change in current federal policies and laws? But even if the US government were squeaky clean on this point, what's the bet that some outfit like Anonymous or WikiLeaks can't (if they already haven't) come up with the NRA's data?
The problem here is that everyone wants openness, except when they don't. Information is, after all, power, and those like the NRA and NSA who control information obtain more power.
President Dwight Eisenhower had in idea during the Cold War of the '50s to ease war tensions by proposing an "Open Skies" mandate that would let all countries inspect everyone's nuclear facilities. It was meant as a preventative against mistrust and global thermonuclear war. The plan failed, but echoes of it were later implemented -- for example, the Reagan administration's "trust but verify" standard for the US-USSR deal to reduce their respective nuclear stockpiles under mutual supervision.
Arguably, the entire world now basks under nominally open skies -- thanks to spy satellites, surveillance drones, spy networks, data gathering bots and more. That doesn't mean every single individual in the whole world knows everything, only that, collectively, the whole world more and more knows more and more about itself. Fundamentally that's a good thing. Implementation-wise, though, it's been a bad thing, because a lot of information collected by governments and, yes, private interests has been kept secret.
Corporations, for example, have extremely valuable economic and technical data on their networks that must look like salad bars to hungry Chinese agents. But companies spy on one another, too. And then there's the political animus among modern Republicans as seen in the Citizens United case to hide as much information about conservative interests and operations as possible.
The supreme irony is that far-right-wing groups depending on heavy secrecy worry aloud that the government they seek to control depends on ... heavy secrecy! If such entities ever do manage a political or hostile takeover of government someday, what could possibly go wrong? Ask the literally open-minded hackers of conscience who are becoming increasingly adept at breaking into the toughest of secure networks and sharing secrets with the rest of us.