The NRA is a good model for EFF in that the EFF really needs to grow their rank and file membership. Right now, not enough non-techie people care, or even know what EFF is. It is why what Snowden did was important (agree with it or not), because it pushed the tech privacy issues into mainstream awareness.
The reason for that lag is not some campaign which loses to the mainstream media, but a market driver. Think of all the people who were shocked after it was discovered that Samsung TVs could arbitrarily send background voice data back to a C&C. EFF done a good job there, but they always make it some rare thing. Parker Higgins' tweet about that seeped into the consumer space and Samsung probably suffered greatly, and the public were better off.
Now there are stories of Intel chipsets having all kinds of weirdness in them, and it is not sufficient to sit on the fence here. Things are changing
