Date: Fri, 1 Mar 2002 11:11:39 -0800 To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] From: Jim Warren <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Subject: FOOTNOTE: Bulk, unsolicited political email isn't spam -- right? Cc: Dave Farber <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>, Matthew Gaylor <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>,[EMAIL PROTECTED]
At 11:47 PM -0500 02/28/02, Declan McCullagh wrote: >It seems to me there are two different questions: (1) Should the law >prohibit bulk, unsolicited political email? and (2) Should Internet >society discourage bulk, unsolicited political email? > >I believe the answers are "no," and "yes," respectively. ... Well ... let's be very careful about this: When California's freshman state legislator Debra Bowen introduced AB1624 in 1994, to make public legislative records to free Internet access, it was essentially d.o.a. The legislature had been selling the digital form for lots of loot, and to make matters worse, only weeks earlier, Bowen had already outraged the all-powerful Speaker, Willie Brown. AB1624 was gonna DIE! Someone sent me a copy, and I began advocating for it -- *mostly* by sending [brief] "unsolicited political email" about it to every eaddress I could find that *might* possibly have an interest in it. Initially, NONE of them had solicited it. None of them knew anything about it. It's the crucial chicken-and-egg problem of politics, and it's at the HEART of citizen participation in MOST of the process of our own governance! Hundreds of those who *were* interested in my "unsolicited political email," in turn, sent it -- as "unsolicited political email" -- to thousands of other individuals online and listservs they thought might be interested. Bowen's AB1624 suddenly had support ... LOTS of support! Were it not for that "unsolicited political email," it is CERTAIN that AB1624 would have died an early death in legislative darkness. However, that grassroots effort -- that began with massive "unsolicited political email" -- ended by making California the first state in the nation to offer free online legislative-information access (and the same weird wording describing the then-"unknown" Internet, I drafted for Bowen to use in maturing versions of AB1624, has appeared in look-alike legislation in at least a dozen-or-so other states). Additionally, almost everyone howls bloody murder about broadcast and direct-mail political ads, and more importantly, about the billions of dollars that are "donated" to fund these ads. But, "unsolicited political email" provides a low-cost alternative for the ill-funded (e.g., Libertarians and Greens use it extensively!). And it doesn't pollute the airwaves nor the landfill. Do we REALLY want to "discourage" this alternative to big-bucks politics-as-usual? And finally ... there have been similar uses of "unsolicited political email" to organize political action to halt the fed's efforts to block public access to strong encryption, impose censorship on electronic press and electronic speech, radically expand the government's freedom to snoop and peep ... and about numerous other political issues. Let's be a bit careful about wanting to discourage bulk, unsolicited political email. In my estimation, Calif guv-candidate Bill Jones' spam-piece was a poor effort at alternative campaigning; it's designer clearly didn't understand netiquette. But that's okay -- he's being "rewarded" for his failure to "dress properly" for this community. And other campaigners will learn how to use this "new" medium to get their message out *positively* ... just as earlier generations of activists learned how to use the "new" radio medium, and later the "new" television medium. --jim Jim Warren; [EMAIL PROTECTED], technology & public policy columnist & advocate 345 Swett, Woodside CA 94062 U.S.A.; 650-851-7075; fax/off due to spam-glut [self-inflating puffery: Playboy Foundation Hugh Hefner First-Amendment Award; Soc.of Prof.Journalists-Nor.Calif. James Madison Freedom-of-Information Award; founded InfoWorld, DataCast Magazine, and Computers, Freedom & Privacy Confs.; Electronic Frontier Foundation's Pioneer Award (in its first year), blah blah] ************************************************************************** Subscribe to Freematt's Alerts: Pro-Individual Rights Issues Send a blank message to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the words subscribe FA on the subject line. List is private and moderated (7-30 messages per week) Matthew Gaylor, (614) 313-5722 ICQ: 106212065 Archived at http://groups.yahoo.com/group/fa/ **************************************************************************
