3 Comments:

Sister says:

This is the first case I have ever heard of where a spam blocking measure was not based on the email address or IP address of the suspected spammer, or a phrase in the subject line.

This is nonsense. There are a number of spam-blocking techniques that are more sophisticated than that. For example, read this article, and you'll see that the people writing these filters look at everything.

I'd guess that these emails were probably blocked as a result of feedback from Comcast users. Enough of them clicked the "spam" button to make Brightmail's filter kick in automatically. Brightmail has since adjusted their filters to unblock these messages.

Nothing to see here. Move along.

By  Joseph Thvedt, at 1:36 PM  

You're right on the quoted part. Any decent spam/porn filter will look at the header information, the subject line, and the text of the email. And, per the Brad Blog Bright Mail has amended their filter.

These points, while important, don't relate to the larger point of the lack of control over speech we take for granted. There is no transparency regarding how Comcast/Bight Mail made its decision. 46,000 people could've clicked "This is spam", or one person at Bright Mail could've made the decision. We don't know. There was no notice of the blockage. Neither the sender nor the receipient knew the email was being vaporized. (In true spam cases, of course, this is more or less a good thing: there's no sense bouncing messages back to a spammer's phoney email account and it doesn't do much good to replace spam-filtered emails within an announcement that a message has been deleted.)

Imagine, if you will, that this problem arose on November 1 and that the domain was not afterdowningstreet, but johnkerry.com or georgebush.com. What if MoveOn asked its members to sign up for a bunch of GOP newsletters, then "This is spam" them?

It seems to me that there is a great possibility for abuse of the Internt, and that everyone does, indeed, need to be ever more watchful of attempts to strangle our discourse.

By  Hammer, at 1:58 PM  

One more thing. Here's a statement from AfterDowningStreet's ISP: "Targeting the inclusion of a website url can only have one outcome: that communications about that website and the issue it is presenting will be blocked from large numbers of people and that the communications from that site's administrators and the campaign's organizers will not reach their full constituency.

Whether comcast's intention or not, this is effectively political and unconstitutional."

I think the statement is exactly wrong -- even if the blocking is political, it is NOT unconstitutional. "Congress shall make no law..." does not apply to the spam filter/political censor in this case.

By  Hammer, at 2:03 PM  

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