Censorship can only be considered in light of First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution for U.S. citizens. There are many organizations and many web sites on the Internet dedicated to preserving our rights to free speech.

    It has been said that evil triumphs when good people do nothing to stop it. The corollary is that bad legislation becomes law when citizens no longer care or speak out against what their government wants to do to them. February 8, 1996 was "Black Thursday" in the U.S. This was the day the President signed the Telecommunications Reform Bill into law and included with it was the Communications Decency Act. It is an unconstitutional ban on free speech guaranteed by the U.S. Constitution. Not only does it have a chilling effect on communications by U.S. citizens but it limits the content of conversations around the world.

    On June 19, 1995 USA Today carried an interesting story, Challenges to Cyberporn Bill Could Clog Courts, which discusses freedom of speech rights and the need to restrict access to adult materials by children. After February 8, 1996 we will get to see how accurate that prediction was. Discover more about the latest efforts by the government to censor people from:

• Content Restrictions on the Net
• Electronic Privacy Information Center
• ACLU Freedom Network
• Computer Professionals for Social Responsibility
• Voters Telecomm Watch
  • VTW Focus on Internet Censorship Legislation
• The latest news from the Center for Democracy and Technology
  • Citizens Internet Empowerment Coalition
• Information on current EFF activities and online activism alerts!
  • EFF statement on the 1996 Telcom Bill
• CyberRights Under Attack!
• The Digital Freedom Network
• Thomas Legislative Information on the Internet

    We at Patches' Place have our own response to this new censorship law. Since Congress passed a law early in 1995 under the "Contract with America" requiring that Congress abide by the same laws that apply to the rest of Americans, we believe that all elected officials in Washington should have to submit to "piss testing" just like employees who work for government contractors are required to do. Our elected officials are our employees so let's make them all take random piss tests! Remind your elected representatives that they must follow the law and if they don't, the American people will petition the Supreme Court for a judgment against them!

Your Right to Privacy

While Surfing on the Net. . .

    In 1997, the big issue concerning your privacy rights will be electronic commerce. You will be reading about secure credit card transactions, banking, investing, and other secure ways to transfer money on the Internet in all the major computer and Internet magazines in the first half of 1997.

    What most of the magazines won't tell you is that secure transactions are only part of the story. The other part is the amount of personal data Web sites and businesses will gather about you in addition to your purchasing transaction. Right now advertisers are tracking your surfing habits. They know what sites you visit regularly and they even have your e-mail address and possibly your name even if you did not give it to them.

    In short, your privacy is being compromised at many of the sites you visit and many of the banners you click on to get there. Are we being paranoid? Well, yes, we are paranoid but that is not the point. All of this is true! Even Andy Grove, the CEO of Intel, has a book out with the title "Only the Paranoid Survive."

    An organization called eTRUST has a goal of extablishing trust and confidence in electronic transactions by addressing the issues of privacy, security and authentication. We encourage their efforts since cyberspace will be a lot worse if everyone's personal information is for sale.

    However, we do not plan to add any of their "trustmarks" promising privacy and security as an on-line merchant to our own site. The simple reason is we want to maintain our own privacy and if we subscribe to their program, we would lose it ourselves to guarantee it to you.

    Even without their "trustmark" displayed on our site, we certify to you that we do not buy or sell any personal information we may have about you when you make a purchase from us. We do not track information about you with the use of cookies like other sites do.

    This is one of the reasons we use SafeOrder to process Visa, MasterCard, American Express and Diners Club orders. Even secure servers and secure Web browsers with RSA certificates can track personal information about you that you may not want to reveal to others. We believe you should have a right to privacy as well as security when you make purchases on the Web with your browser.

    One of the principles of eTRUST is for merchants to disclose what personal infomation is shared with third parties. We think that is a good idea. We will tell you exactly who gets information you send to us:

• If you send us an order for any of our Patches or Watersports for Lovers series of videos and you pay with cash, check, or money order, absolutely no one else sees any information about you except that bank tellers see your check or money order.
• If you purchase any items with a credit card, that information is shared with Wet Set Magazine since all transactions are processed through their merchant account unless the items purchased are from Raysco since they use their own merchant account.
• If you order any of Nissy's videos, she also gets to see your name and address since she is the one who ships your order.
• If you order any of the videos from IJLR, then Joe also sees your name and address since he ships your order.
• If you order any items from Wet Set Magazine or any videos in PAL format, Wet Set sees your name and address even if you are not using a credit card since they ship your order.

    Want to find out what others know about you just by visiting their Web site? Here are the details you reveal to others about yourself every time you visit a site. Another service provides even more info about what others know about you and how they do it. Have you ever wondered who has your cookies and what they are going to do with them once they get them?

There are a variety of ways to defend yourself against cookies and regain your privacy. You may have noticed that we don't send cookies to your computer. You may have also noticed that we block attempts by Webbots to "harvest" any HTML "mailto" e-mail addresses on our site.

    Want to put a stop to revealing such information about yourself as you surf the Net? The Anonymizer used to be the best way to block this information from being sent to sites that want to snoop into your personal activities. Unfortunately, the Anonymiser service now has 60 second delay unless one purchases a subscription and some sites disallow access from the Anonymizer. Fortunately, Lucent Technologies has begun offering a similar service without charge called the Lucent Personalized Web Assistant. It is actually better than the Anonymizer because it has no banner ads in the header and footer plus it's faster and will enter consistent fake names and passwords for the sites you visit.

While Using your E-mail. . .

    We support e-mail privacy rights. How would you react if every piece of mail you received from the United States Postal Service had been opened and inspected prior to delivering it to you? Would you be upset? Or would you thank the government for protecting you from the possibility of receiving something that might hurt you or be bad for you?

    If you would thank the government for protecting you, then find a way to emmigrate to a nice country which will gladly perform this service for you! Places like Cuba, Iran, Iraq, and North Korea and Communist China come to mind!

    Most Americans would not only be upset, they would file a lawsuit and call 60 Minutes, Primetime Live, or DayOne to do an investigative report. So why aren't most Americans equally upset about the government's efforts to intercept our e-mail and read it? Probably because they do not know the government has the ability and determination to do it.

You can stop the government and anyone else from reading your private e-mail with an encryption program called Pretty Good Privacy or PGP for short. This program is not only "pretty good," it is so good that the US government has restricted its export and brought criminal charges against its author because the government computers can't break it. It is superior to the DES encryption often used in commercial software and the RSA protocols that are being implemented for secure transmissions over the Internet.

    The best part about PGP is that you can get PGP free and use it for private, secure communications on the Internet. It probably won't happen right away but just imagine how frustrated government spies would be if everyone used encrypted messages all the time. At least it would send one message to the government: People have a right to privacy and they are willing to exercise that right!

    More information about privacy issues is available. Everyone should be aware of the issues that are involved and the governmental actions that could restrict the rights of every American.

    My public PGP key is available for anyone who needs it for completely private e-mail messages.

    If you run Windows on a PC, you may be interested in a program which can automate using PGP with many of the mailer programs such as Eudora, Pegasus, and others. The program is called Private Idaho and the latest version can even be used with Netscape Navigator mail. In addition to automating the encryption and decryption processes, it can automate the use of a variety of remailers to further increase your privacy.

    You can get Private Idaho from Joel McNamara's home page plus a lot of other information about privacy and security. The best part about this program is that it is freeware. Here is a condensed description of its features:

    Private Idaho is a PGP/anonymous remailer utility for Windows e-mail software. It simplifies using PGP and anonymous remailers with your e-mail application, providing you with more electronic privacy. The utility requires VBRUN300.DLL as well as PGP. Private Idaho features include:

• point and click ease of use
• works with most popular commercial and freeware Windows e-mail packages
• supports PGP message encryption, decryption, and signing
• advanced PGP options such as multiple keys and encrypt to self
• supports Anon.penet.fi, Cypherpunk, and Soda anonymous remailers
• advanced remailer options such as encryption, chaining, latent time, and cutmarks
• Key management
• File encryption/decryption
• "Eyes only" encryption option
• ViaCrypt for Windows and OS/2 support