-Caveat Lector- "I pledge Allegiance to the Flag of the United States of America and to the REPUBLIC for which it stands, one Nation under God,indivisible,with liberty and justice for all."
visit my web site at http://www.voicenet.com/~wbacon My ICQ# is 79071904 for a precise list of the powers of the Federal Government linkto: http://www.voicenet.com/~wbacon/Enumerated.html ---------- Forwarded message ---------- Date: Sun, 28 Mar 2004 18:57:30 PST From: carl william spitzer iv <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Reply-To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Cc: [EMAIL PROTECTED], [EMAIL PROTECTED], [EMAIL PROTECTED], [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: [JBirch] WS>>From an AOL Detractor IMO likely yes AOL / Time Warmer are corporate members of the CFR and likely a test bed for censorship in furtherance of the global communist conspiracy. CWSIV Special Report Banned by AOL By Kathy Shaidle For more than three years, I've run a weblog about religion, politics -- the usual non-dinner-table topics. And each December, regular as Rudolph, I diss Kwanzaa. The fake "African harvest festival" (invented by a Marxist black supremacist ex-con in 1972) is now celebrated by school kids in place of Hanukah and Christmas. Call me crazy, but I don't like that one bit. So earlier this month, I knocked off a bit of doggerel about Kwanzaa and posted it to my site. That's when the spam hit the filter. Or something. I'm still trying to figure out exactly how my poem and I became two of America Online's most wanted. A few days after I posted the poem, a site called Bressler.org promoted it on the front page. I was flattered, then troubled by an anonymous message in the comments sec- tion: Very odd. I tried to forward this link to an AOL subscriber, but I got a 'Delivery Status Notifica- tion' message from [EMAIL PROTECTED] s aying that the link was reported as offensive and automatically blocked. Does A OL really censor email? A string of number-heavy headers follows, but one phrase stands out in plain English: The URL contained in your email to AOL members has generated a high volume of complaints. Wow! -- my stupid poem, my puny blog, deemed "offen- sive" by a colossal corporation. My first reaction was that "Banned by AOL" would look great on my homepage. Then I started to wonder, as the anonymous commenter had: Does AOL censor email? And if so how? When and why? Come to think of it, Is that even legal? What constitutes "a high volume of complaints" and who is doing the whining? IRONICALLY, MY E-MAIL INQUIRIES to AOL bounced back. Their online Customer Service form didn't work, either. While waiting for a media contact to return my call (she never did) I made like a professional journalist and Goo- gled, "AOL + sucks." That led me to David Cassell. "AOL has a reputation for censorship," says Cassell, who should know. He's run the AOL Watch Newsletter since 1996. "AOL uses [its Parental Controls feature] as a market- ing device, touting their ability to restrict children' s level of internet access. There's just one problem with that. In any attempt to censor, there's 'collateral damage.'" Cassell reels off a list of infamous incidents: In 1994 AOL made the New York Times for prohibit- ing chat rooms for feminist punk rockers known as "riot girls." AOL's spokeswoman told the Times they were afraid young girls would "go in there looking for information about their Barbies." Nine years later, that word ["girl"] is still off limits. "Girl Scout Cookies," "The Girl From Ipanema" -- forget it. A woman wrote a book of online dating tips called You've Got Male. She filed a lawsuit in 2000 alleging that AOL was blocking their members from accessing her web site, Youve-Got-Male.com Reuters reported that AOL had earlier demanded she stop selling the book and to never re-print it. In 2000, CNET News reported that AOL's "youth filters" were preventing youn g surfers from accessing liberal web- sites; "your children can easily view the site of the Repub- lican National Committee," Brian Livingston reported at th e time, "but the Democratic National Committee is blocked." But those are chat rooms and websites. Cassell has fewer documented examples of email "censorship" -- which may in fact simply be nothing more than an overly sensitive spam filter in action. Then again, he says, "AOL blocked delivery of my AOL Watch newsletter to its 25,000 subscribers on AOL. That particular edition had included the phone number for canceling your AOL accounts." Cassell explains that "AOL's privacy policy also speci- fies that AOL can read your e-mail 'to protect the company's rights and property.' Whether they do or don't -- they can." IN OUR E-BUSINESS AGE, this is no laughing matter. A bounced contract or RFP could cost a company business and its good name, not to mention hefty attorney fees in the event of a lawsuit. That's why the Electronic Frontier Foundati on argues vigorously that "all nonspam email should be delivered." The EFF's Lee Tien says, "We've received many questions of this type over the years regarding AOL; we've never found any evidence that AOL practices any sort of institutional censorship." But there's institutional and then there's institution- al, and the EFF itself hasn't entirely avoided AOL's heavy hand. According to a recent Wired News story, EFF's newslet- ter was blocked "because it contained the word 'rape,' used when talking about EFF's advocacy on behalf of an online group, Stop Prisoner Rape." AOL also blocked emails from another EFF client, the liberal pressure group MoveOn.org, possibly because its mailing list grew so quickly during the Iraq war. So, is AOL, intentionally or otherwise, censoring political speech? And if so, can anything be done to stop them? Tien admits that as a private company, AOL is "general- ly not affected" by the First Amendment when it makes its own "content based decisions." A federal statute also pro- tects AOL and other Internet Service Providers against lawsuits if they remove content for being "offensive." As for my own experience, Tien says his "technical expert, who in a past life worked on spam control code, says it's highly likely this is occurring because of spam filter- ing, but it's hard to know. And if there is a bigger issue here, it's the effect of efforts to control spam on Internet information flow." Right now, the EFF is concerned that well-meaning anti-spam legislation may criminalize everyone who tries to "spoof" or disguise their identity in an email FROM line: penalizing not only spammers, but whistleblowers at home and political dissidents abroad. Cassell concurs: "Because of AOL's reputation as a heavy-handed censor, people assume their email is being censored. AOL policies -- and their unresponsiveness -- make it hard to determine whether this is the case. The best thing you can say is: Cheer up. They may just be incompe- tent." ________________________________________________________________ The best thing to hit the Internet in years - Juno SpeedBand! Surf the Web up to FIVE TIMES FASTER! Only $14.95/ month - visit www.juno.com to sign up today! The opinions expressed on this forum are those of the authors of the articles posted. The John Birch Society has no responsibility for anything that is posted on this forum. The OFFICIAL John Birch Society web page is a www.jbs.org "Look alike" clone pages, run by others, violate JBS policy. Visit The New American at www.thenewamerican.com "The only thing necessary for evil to triumph is for good men to do nothing." 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