If a customer receives email that is illegal, the customer should forward it to the FBI, the Postal Service, or the appropriate law enforcement agency.
Plain Aviation will cooperate with any and all law enforcement agencies investigating customers which may be engaging in illegal activity. Such cooperation may include, but is not limited to packet traces and access to files and email belonging to the customer. Such access will be restricted to law enforcement personnel and use.
Plain Aviation is not responsible for monitoring the contents of its customers activity and/or evaluating the legality of such activity.
Should packet traces, email, files, or other information be required for diagnostic purposes, such intrusion will be minimized and any information inadvertantly revealed will be kept strictly confidential and not discussed with or revealed to anyone, including other employees. Such information will only be accessed when required for diagnostic purposes.
Plain Aviation, Inc reserves the right to disconnect or terminate service to any customer without notice at our discretion.
Plain Aviation promises that it will not blame service problems on spam to avoid taking responsibility for the problem.
Plain Aviation promises that it will always have adequate resources available before signing up new users or clients.
Plain Aviation promises that it will not sell our customer list to third party advertisers, or require users to view third party advertisements.
All of our policies and efforts are geared to improving our services, and getting the best network service possible to our clients. That requires honesty about what we can and cannot do for our clients.
Care must be taken, as we have recieved threats from people for not taking an anti-spam position. This is not to say we are pro-spam, either. But we operate on principles and morals, not on coercion.
It is really quite extraordinary that, as a private enterprise, one must go to such effort to adopt and justify a policy.
Title 18, Section 1030 imposes penalties of fines and up to ten years in
prison for
(a)(5) intentionally accesses a Federal interest computer without authorization,
and by means of one or more instances of such conduct alters, damages, or destroys
information in any such Federal interest computer, or prevents authorized use
of any such computer or information
The term "Federal interest computer" has been redefined
in several amendments, and currently defines any computer engaged in interstate
commerce.
Title 18, Section 2701:
(a) Offense. - Except as provided in subsection (c) of this section whoever -
(1) intentionally accesses without authorization a facility
through which an electronic communication service is provided;
or
(2) intentionally exceeds an authorization to access that facility;
and thereby obtains, alters, or prevents authorized access
to a wire or electronic communication while it is in electronic
storage in such system shall be punished as provided in
subsection (b) of this section.
This makes it illegal to access communications or prevent authorized access without proper authorization.
(1) Except as otherwise specifically provided in this chapter any person who -
(a) intentionally intercepts, endeavors to intercept, or procures any other person
to intercept or endeavor to intercept, any wire, oral, or electronic communication;
...
(2)(a)(i) It shall not be unlawful under this chapter for an operator of a switchboard,
or an officer, employee, or agent of a provider of wire or electronic communication
service, whose facilities are used in the transmission of a wire or electronic
communication, to intercept, disclose, or use that communication in the normal
course of his employment while engaged in any activity which is a necessary incident
to the rendition of his service or to the protection of the rights or property of the
provider of that service, except that a provider of wire communication service to
the public shall not utilize service observing or random monitoring except for mechanical
or service quality control checks.
(ii) Notwithstanding any other law, providers of wire or electronic communication service,
their officers, employees, and agents, landlords, custodians, or other persons, are authorized
to provide information, facilities, or technical assistance to persons authorized by law
to intercept wire, oral, or electronic communications or to conduct electronic surveillance
Note that a system administrator performing duties related to system
administration is exempted, but a system administrator looking for spam
would not be authorized to do so.
These laws are usually referenced in computer and network security policies. See "Unix System Security" by Curry for an example of the Purdue University security policy. It specifically includes the above two laws.
In "Firewalls and Internet Security" by Cheswick and Bellovin in a chapter entitled "Legal Considerations" there is a section called "Is Monitoring Legal", which discusses these two laws. Essentially, unless you are a party to the communication, monitoring is not legal. On page 205 they say "Computing and electronic communications service providers are more limited in their right to monitor user activity. Just as the phone company personnel may not, in general, listen to your calls, employees of a public electronic mail service may not read your messages, whether in transit or stored."
If two or more persons conspire to injure, oppress, threaten, or intimidate any person in any State, Territory, or District in the free exercise or enjoyment of any right or privilege secured to him by the Constitution or laws of the United States, or because of his having so exercised the same; or If two or more persons go in disguise on the highway, or on the premises of another, with intent to prevent or hinder his free exercise or enjoyment of any right or privilege so secured - They shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than ten years, or both; and if death results from the acts committed in violation of this section or if such acts include kidnapping or an attempt to kidnap, aggravated sexual abuse or an attempt to commit aggravated sexual abuse, or an attempt to kill, they shall be fined under this title or imprisoned for any term of years or for life, or both, or may be sentenced to death.One is guaranteed the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Engaging in business is usually characterized as "pursuit of happiness" One should not violate the rights of others to engage in a lawful business in the pursuit of happiness.
Selling legitimate products via email is a lawful business activity until such time as the Congress of the United States, given the authority under the Constitution to regulate Interstate Commerce determines otherwise. Plain Aviation certainly respects the right to advocate that this activity be outlawed, but until it is, it is legal.
Plain Aviation cannot unlawfully conspire with others to deny service to lawfully operating business concerns, identified only by business area.
Plain Aviation, Inc cannot adopt a policy which denies services to certain lawful activities, while permitting other activities, and subsequently hypocritically pretend that it offers a globally connected internet service to the general public.
Furthermore, we think it is unfair to permit some spam services such as Hotmail.com and others, while denying others the opportunity to connect to the internet. It is plainly unfair, and while humans are prone to such unfairness, the inclination should be resisted.
Many of the loudest complainers are themselves the worse offenders; forcing their users to be subjected to unwanted advertising that benefits the online provider, while complaining about advertising that doesn't offer financial benefits to the provider. Allowing commercial email breaks the monopoly hold that online providers have over advertising to their customers.
Many of the loudest complainers are those such as AOL who signed up many more users than they had resources to handle. Instead of admitting their problems, they blamed spam for slowing computers and 'mailbox full' errors, when in fact, they simply didn't have enough resources to handle all the users who were sold accounts. The real theft is between the insufficiently provisioned online provider and the unwary, misled user who is paying for services the online provider isn't provisioned to provide.
Many of our competitors have bowed to the stiff coercion applied by some of their peers. If such activities were in the business interests of internet providers such extreme coercion would not be necessary. Take the case of AGIS.NET for example. AGIS was threatened with loss of major backbone peering agreements if it did not adopt anti-spam policies. Coercion is unfair and illegal.
In summary, much of the anti-spam effort is merely a way to engage in unfair competition, or to mislead the public about their real service problems. It's not that these providers want to have advertising free environments. Indeed, they are often forcing their customers to view advertising. They merely want to establish unfair monopolies on electronic advertising. Plain Aviation cannot adopt a policy assisting this unfair competitive behavior.
Some have established user service facilities which routinely read their customers private emails to check that they are not commercial, or obscene. In doing this, they routinely read private emails as well, and do this without permission from their clients. Often clients are not told that such activity is going on, or are intentionally misled to believe their emails are private.
The staff employed by online providers to read their clients private emails are often labeled as being "additional staff required to handle spam". Not only is this false, customers are sometimes told they must pay more for their privacy rights to be violated.
We feel that these practices are morally and ethically wrong. Further, we feel that our customers do not want us reading their email.
In the words of one anti-spam leader: "exactly! it is MORE ANNOYING now. that was my GOAL."
We cannot imagine that this is an improvement.
Some anti-spammers see this activity as justification of further anti-spam activity. They defend their own provocative and illegal activities, saying their goal is to make the problem bad enough so that everyone is forced to do what they want and support banning spam. This is usually the rationalization used by terrorists to justify further terrorist activity. We believe that most people can see through such transparent aggravations and provocative behavior.
Plain Aviation, Inc deplores the terrorist tactics used by anti-spammers, and cannot associate ourselves with any terrorist group that violates federal criminal statutes when it suits their purposes.
It seems that the anti-spam effort has created immoral people and
deceptive tactics:
From a competitors anti-spam policy:
(They start by denying any spammer service), but then add this:
"Depending on other circumstances (such as, but not limited to: the visibility and scale of the spam, visibility and scale of the client company, and nature of xxx's relationship with the client company), xxx may also decline other work for such companies in the future."
Translation: As long as no one finds out, and it's really worth our while, we may work with spammers, but we are anti-spam in name. And if someone finds out, we may not work with them anymore.
This is almost hillariously dishonest. But I give it credit for its deceptiveness.
Certainly not an example of social responsibility.
It seems then that blocking spam is not a legal, or socially responsible activity. It cannot be implemented, and it represents an unfair business practice.
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