If it is simply to give people a physical address to send letters to, you could just give them their university address. They have mailboxes on campus.

Instead you are giving out their home addresses.

So what is your purpose?

2) It should be noted that: The livelihood that Ed mentions comes from other websites we manage that are hosted on the same webserver. Vegan Soapbox earns barely anything (currently VO earns under $20 a month). The income generated by this website goes directly to pay for web hosting or to fund the vegan cookbook giveaways (cost of book and/or shipping). This website is a labor of love, not a money-maker.

3) I am sympathetic to privacy issues. I have been the receiver of harassment and intimidation myself. So when someone tells me that they are being harassed and that information on one of my websites is enabling harassers, I’ve removed the information.

In this case, the information has been on Vegan Soapbox for over a year, no harm has come to the individuals listed, and no one contacted me directly. There is no reason to believe that my decision to leave the comment up will result in any harm to anyone.

Because I am sympathetic to privacy issues, I might support legislation that protects individuals from having their home addresses published on the web. However, I do not support legislation that protects one group of powerful people, but not other groups of less powerful people. And I’m especially repulsed by the idea that animal experimenters deserve special protection… when no true harm has ever come to any of them.

As a child of a rapist, I am more concerned by the real violence happening everyday to real women by their harassers, stalkers, rapists, and abusers than by any of this imaginary violence directed at animal experimenters. If anyone is truly concerned about harassment, intimidation, and violence, let’s get real and focus our energy on the real victims of these crimes, not on those who wear lab coats and cry wolf.

Their first communication about this should have been an email to the Vegan Soapbox admin saying,

“We’ve found a comment on your site we’d like you to remove please.”

Instead, they sent a ham-fisted legalish threat directly to the web host saying, “Take this down or else.”

I say legalish because the legal basis they cited to demand the takedown is ridiculously thin. They cited a California state law (Vegan Soapbox and admins are not in California) that protects public officials (i.e., politicians, law enforcement, judicial people, and NOT University professors), and even beyond that there are reasons the law wouldn’t apply to the comment in question.

In other words, Berkeley has made an illegitimate demand to a web host implying that they have a legal standing they simply don’t have. Instead they should have opened with a more reasonable request written directly to the admin of Vegan Soapbox.

The problem is that these legalish threats often work. Web hosts get feverish and make rash decisions to take down sites without warning. This costs people part of their livelihoods. Indeed, our livelihood is directly tied to our websites. If our host were to shut down our webserver today over this, it would be expensive.

In general organizations are given far too much leeway to issue baseless takedown threats with no repercussions and no consequences for the damages they sometimes cause.

I also think that we as a society need to get straight that publishing contact info is not at all equivalent to harassment or intimidation. The context is key. When the post is, “Go vandalize these houses,” then fine. But when the post is, “Please send these people a letter,” well, that needs to be PROTECTED because it is the essence of FREE SPEECH. Laws that prohibit the publishing of contact information are, IMO, directly in violation of the 1st Amendment.

I’m sorry some people are having their lives disrupted by activists, but Vegan Soapbox has had NOTHING WHATSOEVER to do with that, and to even think to draw that connection is UTTERLY FALLACIOUS.

If someone from Berkeley reads this… please discontinue the empty legal threats. They could hurt the livelihoods of decent people. Instead, in the future, please submit a respectful request to admins of your targeted websites.

~ Recent blog post: Small Stakes No-Limit Hold’em Release in One Week ~

More reminders of what and who is at stake:

I’m still in favor of replacing the info with “art”… but then again, Warwak certainly had a time with free speech in art too…

Matt’s right – you don’t want to go the way of Shac7 – And these are very strange times…

~ Recent blog post: Turkeys Die in Fire * Inhumane Animal Agriculture – Go Vegan ~