Cindy Cohn, the EFF's Legal Director, spoke at the FTC's spam conference last week on the ways that over-broad spam filtering is turning into censorship of First-Amendment-protected political speech.
1. I'm here because EFF was approached by a subscriber to a large e-mail
list, Moveon.org, who was having trouble receiving wanted e-mails from
them. I asked Moveon.org about this and learned that it is an ongoing
problem for them. Since it is also an ongoing problem for EFF with our
newsletter, the EFFector, I decided to conduct an informal survey by
sending a note to the EFFector asking if any other nonprofit e-mail lists
recipients or senders had experienced any problems. I received a large
number of responses, including lists as large as Moveon.org's 2 million
members to those as small as a Berkeley High School parents' list.I concluded that when e-mail becomes unavailable as a tool for broad
political organizing and informal mailing lists, we've broken something
fundamental and it's time to try to fix it.2. At the same time, I'm sympathetic to what many in the anti-spam movement
are trying to do. Most of them care deeply about the health of the Internet
and are sincerely trying to do the right thing. EFF is very supportive of
tools that give users the ability to filter and control their mail. We're
supportive of tools used by ISPs that don't tread into censorship.
Personally I care about this issue too. Before joining EFF I sued a spammer
and won a $65,000 settlement based upon California and federal false
advertising, anti-hacking and unfair business practices law, so I am
supportive of litigation where appropriate (BTW, the spammer paid every
penny). It seems that many of the problems arise when a third party, be it
your ISP or some entity used by your ISP, tries to determine which of your
mail you want to receive and which you do not.
