[Sosfbay-discuss] Lofgren

[Cameron L. Spitzer]

Before the "second" Gulf War I had only ever asked Lofgren for
one thing.

In 1997, spam was just beginning to damage the public email
system.  But it was growing exponentially.  Unchecked, it
would destroy the system within a decade.  Everyone involved
with running the system could see that unsolicited broadcast
email was theft of service and illegal conversion of assets.
One popular analogy compared spammers to vandals pasting their
advertisements on other people's billboards, or even spraypainting
them on your front door.

A bill was offered in the House, which would amend the very
successful anti junk fax law of 1991 so that email storage
systems would be treated the same as fax machines.  It could have
nipped the problem in the bud.  (I don't remember who wrote it now.)

But there was a fake "technology expert" at the ACLU, who clearly
didn't have a clue how the system worked much less how the threat
worked, and his bosses were closely aligned with the junk mail
business, both representing them and funding their operations
through junk mail.  The junk mail business was beginning to worry
about where they'd be when email replaced paper, and they were
determined to ruin the email system the way they'd taken over
the Postal Service under Reagan.

He convinced Zoe "The Idiot" Lofgren (Dummy-CA) that
spamming was "free speech" and she locked the real experts out
of her committee's hearings, and let the spammers testify as
"internet entrepreneurs" and killed the bill.  It was the only
rational spam bill ever offered in the US Congress.  In '04,
about the time the EU and Australia got around to outlawing
email spamming, the US *legalized* it!  It created a legal
situation where ISPs are afraid to enforce their own terms of
service against spammers and ensured the eventual destruction
of the public email system.  That destruction is happening in
phases.  We're currently in the phase where nobody can afford
to run their own, so it's all being outsourced to a handful
of untrustworthy corporations.  So much for the decentralization
that had made email essentially impossible to wiretap.
And the ACLU is *still* carrying water for the junk mailers
and email thieves.

The only thing worse than a corrupt congresscritter is a
moron pretending to be an expert accomplishing the same.  
Lofgren's too stupid to be corrupt *or* honest.  More plausibly,
her staff or relatives are taking the money on her behalf
and she's oblivious.


-Cameron in San Jose.