[ale] NSA & AT&T spying on U.S. citizens

[Michael B. Trausch]

On Fri, 2007-06-29 at 20:03 -0400, Jim Popovitch wrote:

> I remember when the EFF was fighting to allow un-restricted access to
> pornography on the Internet.  Respected?  Who's circles? 


Well, perhaps you'll take back taking back your comment regarding my
HTML mails... but the EFF's fight are to increase the rights of the
people it defends.  I should certainly be free to put smut on the the
'net.  People are also free to self-regulate and avoid said smut?or
block it by whatever technical means they wish.

Personally, I would be entirely in favor of mandating that all
pornographic web sites be moved to their own top-level.  Why?  It makes
technical blocking pretty easy?block *.xxx web sites from being browsed
at the very first router that is inside the network, or require a pass
word/phrase/key to get past said block if desired.  I would see such an
action as both increasing the freedoms of pornography publishers and
increasing the freedom of individuals to censor such content locally.  I
don't believe in mandated censorship, or censorship by law, or
censorship of customers, or any such nonsense.  I think that if a family
wants to filter/censor their connection for the best interests of their
own family, that they should be free to do so?but Comcast, the City of
Decatur, the State of Georgia, and the United States of America
certainly do not have the right to make such value judgments for me or
for my family.

I deeply respect any organization that is willing to fight the extremely
invasive problems of censorship.  Censorship belongs at the "immediate
family" level, not any level above it.  There are some times when it is
certainly appropriate to censor at a group level?for example, it is
entirely possible that this list could be closed to all discussion of
Windows, electronics, the Internet, non-Linux specific userland
programs, GNU software, etc. since all such things could be argued that
they are, strictly speaking, off of the direct topic of Linux.  However,
they are implicitly part of the topic of Linux, much as the topics of
freedom and censorship are related (granted, not as closely related as
GNU software used in the userland, but related nonetheless).

    ? Mike

--
Michael B. Trausch
           michael.trausch at gmail.com
Phone: (404) 592-5746
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