Oh, sure. the members of NAMBLA (The North American Man/Boy Love>
Association, an organization of homosexual child-molesters), are entitled>
to freedom of speech and association and due process under the law, while I>
am not. Where is your concern for freedom of speech when you and your>
friends keep trying to get my service providers to terminate me when I>
denounce NAMBLA? You and your friends have already succeeded in getting twoI know exactly what you are talking about, Fred. This kind of garbage takes place on the net all of the time. Mailbombings, threats and personal attacks taking the place of counterargument. To say nothing of gutless providers who, showing even less respect for the rights of their paying subscribers to express and argue their points of view freely, cooperate with those on the net who would censor those they disagree with. Provide a coherent rebuttal ? Why, when you can just try to pressure or threaten the provider into silencing whoever it is that you disagree with?
After I posted something critical of this crowd in alt.support.boy-lovers and alt.sex.pedophilia, a few would-be net-terrorists replied with some very feeble mailbombing attempts. No risk to the system. I had 3 Megs of disk space available. One of them, some idiot calling himself "ABUSERGOD@aol.com", sent me and my system operator 27 copies of a post entitled "please censor this "person"", threatening to mailbomb my provider at the time (suba.com) if he did not honor abusergod's demand that my account be revoked. He followed this with 100 copies of a 1 line post saying something like "This account mailbombed with moxie".
Utterly laughable. 2 minutes of holding down the "d" key wiped out all signs that abusergod had ever been there. He was orders of magnitude short of flooding anything. He was followed up by a few similar idiots who tried sending copies of binary files, apparently forgetting that the lines connecting various points on the net have limited baud rates, as does the the bit of hardware in the computer that the file must travel through on the way out, meaning that large files can't be sent as quickly as small ones (duh!). Only a few copies of those managed to get out, before the person on the other end gave up, or flooded his own "saved mail" file, and had to go back and clear it out.
My provider at Suba (suba.com, please remember that name) freaked out. A complete, pitiful, loss of nerve. He immediately locked my account, and indicated that he'd have to revoke it if I was mailbombed again, because he couldn't handle it.
There is, as I have since noted, a technique for dealing with this nonsense (see, how to deal with flamers), but the cowards at Suba refused to help out. I found out how to deal with this sort of thing by talking to a computer science grad student at U.Illinois - Urbana. Suba's position was that I should simply refrain from making any posts that someone might disagree with! At first, they had simply said that they liked my idea of posting through an anon account in order to shield them from hassle, but when I got to the point of asking how to keep mail through the anon account from arriving in my box (the main issue during a mailbombing), someone calling himself "petrol@suba.com" actually tried to argue, in suba.general, that I was depriving a flamer of his right to self-expression by trying to make it harder for one of them to engage in harassment by e-mail. He cited the "heckler's veto", the "right" to shout down someone that one disagrees with, and tried to argue that it was a "fundamental principle of free speech".
By keeping him from shouting me down, I'd be denying him HIS freedom of speech? Follow that logic? Suba did. Rolling over on me a second time, they immediately sided with petrol. Anything to avoid controversy, even within their own group. Like petrol was going to mailbomb his own home site. I was at this point that they reversed their previous position by 180 degrees, and announced, almost mimicking petrol, that one shouldn't try to "escape responsibility" for "inappropriate posts" (meaning, one that someone wishes to censor). At this point, they fell into the standard "don't make a wave" philosophy my gen-x agemates have become justly notorious for. "Just don't say anything that'll get you mailbombed, what's the problem?". So, gee, what is the big deal about free speech?
I observed that there were some religious sects that would be opposed to the free practice of other religions, so that by petrol's logic, the government would be practicing religious oppression by not allowing them to violently suppress the infidels. "So, I guess to you, the Ayatollah Khomeini was a freedom fighter?" I wrote. Suba immediately sent me a note warning me to not pick fights on their system. Which, translated in English, meant that I'd better not stick up for myself too vigorously.