A link to this very disturbing open letter was posted to my newsroom-l journalism discussion list by Gary Williams. The full text is at
http://www.labournet.net/world/0505/spam1.html. The author, Moshé Machover, explains how he tested the spam filtering system to determine that messages from political and humanitarian organizations were being banned, and then confirmed this in a meeting with his ISP.
--Begin forwarded text--
Spambusters hidden agenda
Political censorship via spam filtering
Letter to friends by Moshé Machover
Published: 04/05/05
Dear Friend,
The issue I am writing to you about is of the utmost importance and seriousness: it involves a grave threat to our freedom of expression and communication. In brief, it concerns a sinister imposition of US-based, but world-wide, political censorship in the guise of "filtering of spam".
[
Adding the following at 8:41 pm in response to one of the comments below. --JS]
The most outrageous instance of this was a message sent to me by Amnesty International, to whose newsletter I subscribe. The message, whose subject line was "One year after Abu Ghraib, torture continues" and was dated 29 April 2005, was quarantined by Spam Manager as "suspected spam"!!! Other cases included newsletters sent to me by Israeli peace/human-rights groups, and by a journalists' club based in London (established in 2003 to support those journalists, cameramen and photographers throughout the world who risk their lives in the course of their work).
I then noticed another strange thing. I often send to my friends material concerning human rights, especially in connection with the Middle East. In particular, I forwarded to these friends some newsletters from the human rights and peace groups mentioned above--messages I released from the Spam Manager quarantine. I soon received a "bounce" notice from AOL, telling me that those of my friends who have AOL as their ISP had not received my messages, as they were classified as "spam". (These friends were told nothing by AOL; they did not know my messages to them were blocked until I informed them of this.)
It appeared that these human rights and peace groups--or something included in their messages--had been put on a black list used by both Spam Manager and AOL. Moreover, the reason for blacklisting was evidently political.
--snip--
After some frustrating email exchanges with the person in charge of my ISP, I had a face-to-face meeting with two of the very senior people in that unit.
They confirmed that not only Spam Manager and AOL, but other ISP spam filters world-wide, use the same black list, which is US-based. It also transpired that the whole drive for this had come from the US administration. (I understand that the US has applied pressure on all concerned to use that US-based black list.) This black list is fed into a program that automatically filters and defines as "spam" message containing blacklisted item.
Apparently, the black list consists of "offensive" email addresses, URLs (addresses of websites), words and phrases. Of course, most of these are really politically neutral and their presence on the black list quite legitimate, or at least acceptable.
But the black list evidently also contains items whose presence there is politically motivated. The two senior people whom I met were unable to tell me what exact criteria are used for blacklisting: apparently this is a Great Commercial Secret, which is a sealed book even to them.
But they confirmed that it would be possible for some malicious person (or, more likely, group of persons), motivated by political hostility, to complain to their ISP that, say, some website contains "offensive" material, thereby causing the URL of this website to be blacklisted.
Or -- even more disturbing -- Big Bushy Brother Himself can order an item to be blacklisted. Undoubtedly, this is used to stifle and muzzle "inconvenient" political discourse, mainly concerned with the violation of human rights and displaying disrespect to BBB.
--End forwarded text--