Patches Place - Know Your Rights!

Do you think it can't happen?
Do you think it's somebody elses' problem?
Do you have faith in the government to protect your rights?
Have you ever REALLY thought about your rights, and what they mean in your life?

Educate yourself so you can protect yourself and your family.

Government Censorship

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 got to see how accurate that prediction was. Discover more about the latest efforts by the government to censor people from:

We at Patches' Place have our own response to censorship laws. 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. . . Back in 1997, the big issue concerning your privacy rights was electronic commerce. You may remember 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 didn'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 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 former 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. 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 Blue Ice DVDs which we make 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 Zampala-Online which is a third party biller that provides accounting to Wet Set for all transactions. If you order any DVDs from video producers who ship orders directly to customers like Pissy Galore, Sneaky Pee, or X-Streams, they see your name and address since they ship your order to you. Hightide also sees your name and address since they ship PAL DVDs directly to customers plus they get a full record of all NTSC sales. Other video producers only get a record of your last name along with what you ordered. They do not get your full name or your address. Wet Set Magazine is our business partner and they get complete information about you and what you order as part of our accounting process. The only exception to this is any Patches or Blue Ice DVDs that you order by sending payment directly to us. They do get information about any Patches or Blue Ice DVDs in PAL format since they ship PAL format for us. That is it! We keep any information about you as private and confidential as possible and it is only shared on a "need to know" basis. We don't sell or trade any information with anyone and we even try to keep others from discovering that you visited our site by avoiding cookies. Want to find out what others know about you just by visiting their Web site? Find out what details you reveal to others about yourself every time you visit a site. Want to put a stop to revealing such information about yourself as you surf the Net? Anonymizer Universal is one way to protect your privacy. It costs money but they do all the work to keep you anonymous on the web. A free alternative is Tor but you have to do all the configuration yourself to set up anonymous surfing.

	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, North Korea and Communist China come to mind! Most Americans would not only be upset, they would file a lawsuit and call TV network 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 used 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! Then after all your efforts to protect your privacy, if some government official doesn't like what you are saying on the Internet, your next best hope (besides a lot of money to buy your justice) is the Fully Informed Jury Association which publicizes the right of juries to pass judgment on the laws as well as on you!