Spam & Congress

[Dave Farber <dave () farber net>]

------ Forwarded Message
From: Barry Frankel <bfrankel () PrincetonCapital com>
Date: Fri, 13 Jun 2003 12:41:58 -0400
To: Dave Farber <farber () cis upenn edu>
Subject: Spam & Congress

Dave,

I was watching MSNBC's Hardball with Chris Matthews' for June 12
http://www.msnbc.com/news/926220.asp
and they started talking about the problem with Spam and the need for
legislation to stop it.

The good news that both liberals and conservatives realize that this is
a problem. The bad news is that at least one former congressman thinks
that this is not a problem since his firewall stops most spam from
getting to him. Should a former Congressman know the difference between
a firewall and a spam filter? I don't know but it sure made me question
his ability to offer an opinion on this subject.

Below are two out of context parts of the show. For the full text, use
the link above.

Barry


MATTHEWS: Politics. Who is together and trying to stop this?
O'DONNELL: This is a cool story today upon Capitol Hill, is that there's
a political odd couple. It's the liberal Senator, Chuck Schumer, and the
conservative Roberta Holmes who is head of the powerful Christian
Coalition. Schumer introduced this Bill to impose tough new criminal
penalties against spammers.
But because he's a Democrat, it's not getting much traction up on
Capitol Hill. So what did he do? He called up the Christian Coalition
who does have some political clout on Capitol Hill, and boom! A
political alliance is formed today.


BOB BARR ®, FORMER U.S. CONGRESSMAN-GEORGIA: Well, you know, it's
irritating for me and it is irritating for our kids as well, Chris, but
my god. I mean, we're going to get to the point where we're going to
have everybody living in an electronic cocoon. We don't want anybody
bothering anybody for any reason and by god, if they do, we are going to
criminalize it and throw them in jail. There's so little freedom left...


BARR: I check my e-mail all the time and I get very little spam because
we pay extra money to set up fire walls to keep it out. And that's one
way that any individual can, on their own, without the heavy hand of the
government coming in, take care of 95 percent of the problem.



------ End of Forwarded Message

-------------------------------------
You are subscribed as interesting-people () lists elistx com
To manage your subscription, go to
  http://v2.listbox.com/member/?listname=ip

Archives at: http://www.interesting-people.org/archives/interesting-people/