Well, when socially networked narcissism is the order of the day in general, why expect anything else? I'm not particularly concerned about the Black Chamber doing what the Black Chamber does, but if I were, I'd certainly hope to see those who shared that concern aiming a little higher than merely to say "I'm agin' it!"
The banners appear to be able to let you put in your zip code and then help you contact your relevant representatives in congress. If enough high-traffic sites participate, like what happened with the SOPA blackout, I could see this actually having an affect on policy.
However, there probably needs to some kind of bill to support or other action to be urging representatives to do, other than contacting them saying that "spying is bad". The Open Letter to HN from EFF, Demand Progress, and Cory Doctorow [1] mentions some of these, but the campaign site here doesn't seem to contain any mention of them.
> If enough high-traffic sites participate, like what happened with the SOPA blackout, I could see this actually having an affect on policy.
The policy didn't change with SOPA or CISPA or whatever name they've snuck some of the same shit in by now. The policy is: more surveillance, more police state, less liberty.
Well, it's a start. However, I agree that it's far more of a branding exercise than an agenda, not dissimilar to professional activists organizing a crowd and then handing out a bunch of preprinted signs to the people that arrive. I don't blame the organizers for this; it's symptomatic of how internet culture works (bootstrap a meme, leverage resulting audience attention) and of the difficulties of organizing in a representative democracy context.
The ideal would be some model legislative proposals or some sort of nominally nonpartisan congressional committee with teeth along the lines of the Church committee in the 1970s (but even that ran into significant opposition at the time, being accused of treason and so on by the usual self-appointed superpatriots.
The basic problem is threefold.
1. The United States has a strong economic and strategic interest in preserving the international status quo or moving it in a more liberal direction (qua trade, promulgation of legal mutualism and so forth). Naturally, maintaining this position is going to involve extensive intelligence-gathering activities.
2. While this is often denigrated as a form of neo-colonialism, there's a fair degree of evidence that it results in better overall outcomes globally; were it to withdraw and leave a power vacuum, that space would be occupied by less scrupulous actors. Although the EU is second to the US in economic power (or even first by some measures) the EU is ineffective at projecting power and less able to provide security to its allies, both practically and politically (consider the rather milquetoast response to the protests in Ukraine, for example). For examples of the alternative, consider the autocratic and cynically populist governance of the Russian Federation or the relative opacity of Chinese jurisprudence.
3. Given the ever-lower barriers to collection and aggregation of data resulting from technology, private actors are able to accumulate and leverage huge pools of data, from Facebook to credit bureaux and consumer intelligence brokers such as Axciom. Until people are willing tolerate limits on private sector activity (and thus financial opportunity) similar to those resulting from EU data protection laws or the like, it's simply not realistic to expect that government should limit itself to technological capabilities that are less than the private sector or even abstain from aggregating publicly available data. This would just result in a a different kind of power vacuum. For all its faults, government is procedurally accountable to the citizenry, whereas private entities are accountable only to shareholders, and shareholdings are fungible in a way that citizenship is not.
As I've said a few times before, I think the US needs a movement for a privacy amendment to the constitution that spells out the scope and limitations of individual's control over their personal information, as opposed to the hand-wavey and contentious judicial interpretations we operate under at present. Putting this in place is a decade-long project, at minimum.
