VERIZON BEGINS SCANNING AND CENSORING CUSTOMER EMAILS

[humble3d]

VERIZON BEGINS SCANNING AND CENSORING CUSTOMER EMAILS

Telecom giant known for trying to block news on the internet

Verizon Begins Scanning and Censoring Customer Emails Photo: Jon Fingas

A news radio station in New York reports that the broadband and telecommunications company Verizon is now scanning

customer email.

If email contains a hyperlink to a website, the email is rejected and not sent to the recipient, according to 95.1

FM in New York City.

After a customer complained about the policy the corporation told him there isn’t a way to op-put of the program.

“Verizon scans the digital signatures of all inbound and outbound email messages to reduce the overall volume of

spam on our network” and all email containing a hyperlink will be considered spam.

“So if a business person needs to get information to a colleague, or a student needs to get research to a fellow

student, or if a wife wants to share an interesting recipe with a friend . . . all those emails will be rejected

by Verizon!” the radio station website explains.

In October Matt Drudge told the Alex Jones Show the very foundation of the free internet is under severe threat

from copyright laws that could ban independent media outlets. Drudge said he was told directly by a Supreme Court

Justice, “It’s over for me.”

The move by Verizon follows a previous effort by the broadband giant to dictate news on the internet.

In a 2012 legal brief to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit Verizon argued the Constitution gives the

phone company the right to control everyone’s online information.

“Just as a newspaper is entitled to decide which content to publish and where, broadband providers may feature some

content over others.”

In other words, Verizon believes it has “editorial discretion” over what news and information its customers may

access.

The following year the company went before the appeals court and said it has the right to block content that cannot

or will not pay a toll.

In 2007 Verizon Wireless blocked text messages it deemed “controversial or unsavory.”

“This is right at the heart of the problem,” said Susan Crawford, a visiting professor at theUniversity of Michigan

law school, told The New York Times. “The fact that wireless companies can choose to discriminate is very

troubling.”

Additionally, Verizon works with the NSA to monitor and collect the metadata of tens of millions of phone users.

http://www.infowars.com/verizon-begins-scanning-and-censoring-customer-emails/

[Ballistic Gelatin]

"A news radio station in New York reports that the broadband and telecommunications company Verizon is now scanning customer email."

​Where is the radio station's proof that this is occurring?

Until this can be independently verified, this is a non-story and more likely just another rumor.

As for Infowars being the source of this 'news'...well, don't get me started.

[straycat19]

A few minutes research shows there is no factual basis for this report. The original post includes an example of a returned email with a link to spamfaq at verizon and there is the following statement which basically denies everything written in the article.

Scanning is an automated filtering process that compares the digital signatures of inbound and outbound email messages against the digital signatures of known spam messages. When a match is found, our filters block the message from being delivered to the intended recipient(s). Other than an automated scan against the spam signatures, the scanning process does not involve reading or accessing the content of any inbound or outbound email messages.

So these rejected messages may have links in them but that isn't why they were rejected, they were rejected because they met the digital signature of spam.

It is also interesting to note that all the followup reports that are spreading across the internet reference the radio station or infowars as their source, neither of which I would call reliable.

[vitorio]

As a consumer then I have the right not to promote then. In the short run If they see that people begin changing to other companies they will understand the message sent and change the policy without excuses for not doing so.