Re: AOL/Microsoft-Hotmail Preventing Delivery of Truthout

[David Farber <dave () farber net>]

Begin forwarded message:

From: Brett Glass <brett () lariat net>
Date: September 17, 2007 1:51:12 PM EDT
To: dave () farber net, ip () v2 listbox com
Subject: Re: AOL/Microsoft-Hotmail Preventing Delivery of Truthout

At 07:05 PM 9/16/2007, Joe Melloy wrote:

> Truthout is a biased ultra-liberal website that does not deserve to
> be a participant in the IP community.

I must express my strong disagreement with this statement. While
Truthout does "lean left" in some respects (especially if one reduces
politics to a one dimensional spectrum), it also embraces many
principles which are, or should be, near and dear to conservatives --
for example, that the Executive Branch should not be allowed to abrogate
those portions of the Constitution that it finds inconvenient.

But what is more disturbing by far about the above statement is that
anyone should be excluded from a forum or prohibited from distributing
material via e-mail due to its political views. To justify the
suppression of Truthout's messages purely because one does not agree
with them is, again, inconsistent with the principles upon which our
country was founded.

As an ISP, I monitor the flow of electronic "junk mail" and selectively
block sources of SPAM, either via reputable DNS blacklists or via
locally maintained ones. I have observed that some left-leaning
organizations such as MoveOn.org do indeed police their mailing lists
poorly, either failing to implement procedures such as subscription
confirmation (also called "double opt-in") or failing to stop mailing
when requested. They have thus been blocked by some blacklists. But I
have seen no evidence that TruthOut has the same problems. It therefore
appears that the complaints which caused TruthOut's mail to be blocked
may have been politically motivated and were fabricated in an attempt to
suppress its political message -- in much the same way that phone banks
were blocked during the 2004 and 2006 elections. In this age of  
cutthroat,
polarized politics, such dirty tricks are, alas, becoming increasingly
common and cannot be discounted as the cause of disrupted  
communications.

--Brett Glass



"Rules? This is the Internet." -- Dan Gillmor


-------------------------------------------
Archives: http://v2.listbox.com/member/archive/247/=now
RSS Feed: http://v2.listbox.com/member/archive/rss/247/
Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com