PHILOSOPHY - ACCOUNTABILITY AND ANONYMITY

     This is my philosophy and it will guide my actions on spam.
 
     Justice is a fair chosen balance of duties and rights.
 
     For every duty there is a right.

     For every right there is a duty.

     You have a right to have duties, and you have a duty to have
rights.
 
     Rights are fair chosen exchange for fair chosen duties.
 
     Fair chosen means you choose and are repsonsible for both.

     This applies to children as well as adults, to the degree that
each can understand the concepts involved.

     Freedom of speech is balanced by freedom to not listen.

     There is a time and place for everything and a time and place for
not everything.

     When the rights of two different people come into conflict, then
compromises must be made which form an exquilibrium that both parties
can accept and be happy with.

     If this is not done, the result is war.

     Short term selfishness leads to long term devastation.

     Society is the uneasy tug and flow where everyone's rights strive
to find their time and place amongst everyone else's rights.

     Just as we wish to have our rights prosper and flourish, so too
do we have a duty to allow other's rights to prosper and flourish.
 
     Duties and rights must balance for there to be justice.

     We do not wish to walk the abyss's edge of content filtering,
suppression or censorship.  We do wish to maintain the social order
where everyone is free to assert their own rights to not listen in
response to other's rights to speak freely.

     For example, there is a place and time to put up your
advertisement.  Nailing them to the trees in the park, or the walls of
my house is not it.  Putting them on a public bulletin board in the
city square may be.

     There is a time and place to stand on a soap box and yell your
philosophy to the world.  2 am in the morning when everyone is trying
to sleep is not it.

     Just so with spam.  There is a time and place to post your
advertisement.  Usenet newsgroups and people's private e-mail boxes
are not it.
 
     We do not wish to control or remove spam because of its content.
We *LIKE* spam, as long as it is relevant to us, and we want to know
what others are offering for sale that will enhance our life and our
future.

     We do find it untenable however that one person can flood the
mailboxes of everyone on the planet at no cost to himself, leaving the
spammees flodded and incapacitated to carry on their own business,
with no recourse *AT ALL* to not receive it.

     In this case the right to speak is not balanced with the right to
not listen.

     In this case the freedom to speak in fact drowns out the
communications of others and prevents their freedom of speech, and
their freedom to listen to others.

     We believe everyone should have the right to put up a radio
station and say what they please.  We do not believe everyone has the
right to jam the radio signals of others with either volume or noise.

     Particularly when it costs people to *RECEIVE* the signals and
costs people nothing to send them!

     Based then upon the above tenents, it is clear to me that some
action needs to be taken to bring the freedom of free speech and the
freedom to not listen into peaceful equilibrium again.

     There are two basic rights that people can exercise that come
into conflict, and they are anonymity and accountability.

     Anonymity is the right to express your feelings and ideas without
fear of repercussion.  Accountability is the right of others to make
sure you don't hurt them with your anonymity.

     The bad use anonymity to hurt the good, and the good use
anonymity to expose the bad.  Without some measure of accountability,
the bad run rife with anonymity causing a back flash where the good
try to get anonymity shut down for good.

     A world without anonymity would quickly turn into a police state,
as it would take a police state to shut it down for good!

     A world without accountability would quickly turn into a
criminal's empire.

     So a social balance of anonymity and accountability is required.

     At present it is my opinion that the spammers have too much
anonymity and not enough accountability.  This allows them to get away
with egregious violations of rights that can not be effectively
balanced by the spammees without serious and detrimental declaration
of war.
 
     Such wars can and have been declared on the net over spam, and as
a result innocent people have been hurt.  In particular entire
backbones have been blockaded and 'blackholed' by the anti spam
forces, and thus innocent people on these backbones have had their
internet access denied.  Their 'internet experience' becomes limited
to a smaller beseiged island of connectivity.

     This is not acceptable.
 
     Normally we consider it better to let a few murderers go if we
can avoid executing one innocent person.  During a time of war, this
reverses and it becomes more important to get the bad guys even if we
have to sacrifice a couple of the good guys.

     When things get really bad, we don't care how many good guys we
burn, just as long as the damn bad guy ends up in a grave.
 
     Presently the internet is in a state of near war, breaking out
into serious shooting and bombing skirmishes interlaced with uneasy
moments of peace.

     I believe that by bringing back into balance the forces of
anonymity and accountability for spammers, an equitable solution can
be reached for all involved.  The goal here is not to end spam
completely, but to make it more relevant and productive to our lives,
and get it into its own proper time, place and forum.

     Homer