Blocking email, the complaint

[Peter Murray]

Earlier this month, Dan Lester posted a series of messages about how he 
was pursued by a Washington, MO, company for including the company's 
web-based e-mail server in his list of chat, webemail, and game playing 
sites.  We had a discussion about the implications of this on libraries.

Well, I was searching THOMAS for something else, and ran across the 
"Who Is E-Mailing Our Kids Act", introduced to the U.S. House of 
Representatives in May:

  <http://thomas.loc.gov/cgi-bin/query/z?c107:H.R.1846.IH:>

It seems to propose that schools and libraries who receive universal 
service assistance must create policies to block sending anonymous 
e-mail and anonymous web access.  I am not a lawyer (I don't even play 
one at work), but I wonder if one would consider web-based e-mail 
systems (like Yahoo) to be "annonymous" since anyone can create a 
pseudonym using these services.  In which case, a subset of Dan's list 
covering web-based e-mail systems might be very important.

In any case, it has been referred to a subcommittee and there doesn't 
look to be any action on it.  As with most legislation, it'll probably 
never make it out of subcommittee.  But you never know...


Peter
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Peter Murray, Computer Services Librarian              W: 860-570-5233
University of Connecticut Law School             Hartford, Connecticut