Keep It Like A Secret

Got this in an email. It's from back in July in case some of the time frames seem wrong:

How Comcast Censors Political Content, Or Why My Comcast Horror Story Is Better Than Yours
By David Swanson

I'm working on a campaign headquartered at www.afterdowningstreet.org that seeks to draw attention to the Downing Street Minutes and to lobby Congress to open an investigation into whether the President has committed impeachable offenses.

July 23rd is the three-year anniversary of the meeting on Downing Street that produced the now infamous minutes, and we are organizing events all over the country on that day. Or, we're trying to. We noticed about a week ago that everyone working on this campaign was having strange Email problems. Some people would get Emails and some wouldn't, or they'd receive some but not others. Conference calls were worse than usual (I can't stand the things anyway) because half the people wouldn't get the info and know where to call in. Organizing by internet is super easy, but when you have to follow up every Email with a phone call to see if someone got it, it becomes super frustrating. Volunteers have been complaining all over the country - especially now that we've figured out what the problem was and they know what to complain about.

We didn't know it, but for the past week, anyone using Comcast has been unable to receive any Email with "www.afterdowningstreet.org" in the body of the Email. That has included every Email from me, since that was in my signature at the bottom of every Email I sent. And it included any Email linking people to any information about the upcoming events.

Disturbingly, Comcast did not notify us of this block. It took us a number of days to nail down Comcast as the cause of the problems, and then more days, working with Comcast's abuse department to identify exactly what was going on. We'd reached that point by Thursday, but Comcast was slow to fix the problem.

Comcast said that Symantec's Bright Mail filter was blocking the Emails, and that Symantec refused to lift the block, because they had supposedly received 46,000 complaints about Emails with our URL in them. Forty-six thousand!... Could we see two or three, or even one, of those 46,000 complaints? No, and Comcast claimed that Symantec wouldn't share them with Comcast either.

By the time Comcast had passed the buck to the company that it was paying to filter its customers Emails, Brad Blog had posted an article about the situation and urged people to complain to Comcast.

Brad quickly added Symantec phone numbers to the story on his website, and we called Symantec's communications department, which fixed the problem in a matter of minutes.

Shh... hopefully this post will be seen by Comcast users, as "After Downing Street" is now in the body of it...

This happened a little while ago, but it's the first I've heard of it. Basically a major media conglomerate (one who, at one time, signed my paychecks, disturbingly) decided to censor emails for very sketchy reasons. How are 46,000 complaints generated when the group never spammed anybody (a fact admitted by Comcast)? Was this a coordinated effort from certain people to mute protests and communication? Was it corporations falling in line behind their President? This raises some very big issues about free speech and the possibility of a military-media complex. This is not pie-in-the-sky "far left" conspiracy-mongering. This really happened. What does it say about our country that these types of things can go on?