RESTRICTED CONTENT: EMAIL QUARANTINED You wouldn’t have thought that Equinet’s last newsletter, containing the final statement of the World Social Forum held recently in Porto Allegre, Brazil, could be considered pornographic or indecent. But that’s exactly what one Internet Service Provider decided when their email blocking software prevented the newsletter from being delivered to one of our subscribers because it contained the word “sex”. The offending section of the newsletter appeared to be the following: “We are social movements that are fighting all around the world against neo-liberal globalization, war, racism, castism, poverty, patriarchy and all the forms of economical, ethnical, social, political, cultural, sexual and gender discriminations and exclusions. We are all fighting for social justice, citizenship, participatory democracy, universal rights and for the right of peoples to decide their own future.” It is difficult to imagine how this could be construed as an offensive message of a sexual nature, but the automatically generated message from the Tanzanian ISP SimbaNET read as follows: "The following email you sent was not delivered to the intended recipients as it had restricted contents in it! The restricted content present was "sex". Action taken: The email was Quarantined." Internet freedom of expression groups have long been concerned about the surreptitious blocking of emails and web sites. While many ISPs may block emails to protect their users against spam, the argument against this is that it can limit freedom of expression and represent a form of censorship. Complaints have also been raised that ISP users often don’t know that their ISP is blocking the delivery of email to their inboxes. An email to SimbaNET’s support desk explaining the context in which sex was mentioned and asking for their policy with regards the blocking of incoming content, whether their users were aware that emails were being blocked and whether the company considered their content control to be a form of censorship, was returned with the following message: "The following email you sent was not delivered to the intended recipients as it had restricted contents in it! The restricted content present was "sex". Action taken: The email was Quarantined." “Yes, we have content filtering,” said SimbaNET technical manager Mansoor Sameja when a second email with the word “sex” removed got through, “We are aware that we have this service since we have put it up. We are not doing censoring and blocking important mails for people and it is the facility that the customer is paying for.” He said customers were happy with the service as it stopped spam and junk mail. Sameja said users were sent blocked mail notifications and not a single customer had been asked to be removed from the filtering service. If you’re concerned about this issue contact your ISP for their policy on email blocking or visit the links below to find out more. * The Threat to Free Speech http://www.robertstech.com/spam1.htm * Blocked! email vs. spam blocking http://www.etidebooks.com/blocked.html * Public Interest Position on Junk Email: Protect Innocent Users http://www.eff.org/Spam_cybersquatting_abuse/Spam/position_on_junk_email.html * Joint Statement Opposing Legislative Requirements http://www.eff.org/Censorship/Censorware/20010117_joint_censorware_statement.html Organisations: * Electronic Privacy Information Centre http://www.epic.org/ * Electronic Frontier Foundation http://www.eff.org/ ENDS