Is Free Speech Spam?

From: Brad Jensen <brad_at_elstore.com>
Date: Tue 28 Nov 2000 14:35:48 -0500

I wrote several commentaries on the Florida 'recounts'
based on my experiences with punched cards and the card
reader they are using in Florida. (They are at
www.eufrates.com/plan.htm , www.eufrates.com/chad.htm,
and for a laugh, www.eufrates.com/chadlist.jpg )

I posted them on the moderated egroup
florida-recount-annouce. I also sent them to some
friends and to my employees (I have 24 of these, and I
eexplained I dod not expect them to support or agree
with my views, but I thought they might be interested
in what I was thinking.)

A number of people read them on the egroups and started
emailing the articles around to their friends.
Unfortunately at least one of the people they emailed
them to was not pleased, and turned the email in with
my address as the source, to one of the spamilantes,
spam-cop. This is a site that recklessly and
maliciously reflects whatever lynch-mob impression is
sent to it, and reports it very officioiusly to your
postmaster and other people up and down the line. Since
my postmaster is no rookie (and by the way has worked
for me for 8 years) he is not very impressed with this
report.

Please note: I did not even send the email to the
person who reported me as the origin of the email.
www.spamcop.net didn't check this, they just libelled
me in automated fashion. Who knows how many people they
libelled me to?

Meanwhile they are generating advertising revenue on
their site. This isn't a disinterested public servant,
it is a money-making scheme. They are taking absolutely
no care in what they are doing, it is just an automatic
shotgun going off in all directions.

Can anyone say 'RICO?'

This wasn't a commerical email in the first place, it
is explicitly a political free-speech item. And I
didn't send it to the person in question, as far as I
know. If I did send it to that individual, it would
only have been as an individual email in response to a
previous email I had received from them, since I did
not mass-distribute this in any way.

Does anyone see the chilling effect on free speech
here? If you want to shut up some one whose opinions
irritate you, just turn them in to the spamilantes,
since they are a careless, reckless amplifier of bad
intent. That person will think twice about posting an
independant opinion on the internet again, by golly, if
they don't lose their email privileges entirely.

So this is what the internet has become - an automated
mechanism for inhibiting free expression of opinions.

And please don't tell me I should spend hours or days
of my life begging the self-authorized and
self-important spamilantes of the net not to interfere
with my free-speech rights. I'm not the one breaking
the US law aginst interfering with the wire transfer of
communications - they are.

I know the opinions expressed in my articles will be
unpopular with about 48% of you, if you match the US
averages. I would hope that the fact of my HAVING an
opinion and expressing it would not be so unpopular.

In any case I did not spam the guy who reported me, and
he knows it. He (or she) was just being malicious and
taking advantage of the cyberkneejerk response of the
ebot at the spamcop.net site.

It would be relatively trivial to write a program to
set up several hundred yahoo and email.com email
adresses and use them to spam-report everyone who has
posted on this list in the last year, for example. Does
the thought of the possibilities of inconvenience and
annoyance, not to mention the threat of your customers
and clients blocking your emails for a while or
forever, bring you a sense of the outrage I feel? I
would not do anything like this, of course. My point is
that these vigilantes create an opportunity for abuse.

The ORBS people have certainly cost me a thousand times
the cost of all spam emails we have received since the
beginning of our sue of the internet. How? By declaring
that the standrd email servers we used (Imail and BSD
free pine) that followed all current RFCs, were 'open
relay available'. Some of the new email servers rely on
ORBS lists (and thier sysadmins may not even know this)
so overnight, without warning, a significant percentage
of our email traffice was rejected. This cost us time
and moeny in reconfiguration, and lost commerical deals
that totalled tens of thousands of dollars (we do about
$200K a month in business) while we sorted out the
mess.

ORBS are such outlaws they had to move their servers to
the third world. I am amazed that the internet
RFC-granting bodies haven't thrown these people off the
net. It would be simple to add an RFC for password
protection of the SMTP servers. Apparently the ORBS
people didn't want to suggest that, or wait for it. I
wonder how many other commercial and non-commercial
entities have suffered at the hands of ORBS and the
spamilantes.

My guess is that ORBS has cost the net BILLIONS of
dollars. Certainly the number is in
themulti-multi-millions. Most of this cost has fallen
on people who have nothing to do with spam. The real
costs of dealing with these cyberterrorists is far
higher than anything spam has ever cost. "Thank you for
financing our ego trip." Those costs continue today,
and exist only because the internet community allows
this sort of manipulation to continue. I say hunt down
the principles in what ever countries they actually
live in, and throw them off the internet for a year.
Make them take a remedial course in the RFC process.
Find their employers or stockholders and ask if they
sanction and will assume financial responsibility for
their damages.

And what a great way to throw your competitors
communicatins into havoc. Knock them right off the
internet for a couple of weeks.

In any case, I wanted to share this example of
anti-spam abuse with you.

It wasn't commercial. I didn't broadcast it. The spam
reporting service didn't take the least effort in
checking the content before libeling it (and me) as
spam. The reporting service had no reason to believe
that it WAS spam, since they had an individual report
from one person, and no evidence of mass distribution.
They also had no evidence that the content was
commercial.

And yes, I think my free speech right outweighs your
desire to be protected from seeing a message that might
annoy you. I think yours does too.

I'm mad as hell.

Have a nice Thanskgiving, everyone.

Brad Jensen





Received on Tue Nov 28 2000 - 13:35:48 CST