Patrick O’Bryan’s opinion, “Remove My Name From Your List,” was interesting and informative to read. The overflow of e-mailed trickery into inboxes of my personal e-mail accounts is similar to the worrisome situation O’Bryan describes. And Mr. O’Bryan is not the only person who is concerned about this recent problem. Most of my friends see the problem of spam e-mail as having been bred by a present-day society in which it is now acceptable for any business enterprise to attempt in every imaginable way to suppress all information about how they made their money.

A June 16 article in The Des Moines Register addressed the same basic concern as expressed by O’Bryan and a number of my friends regarding unwanted e-mails clogging our in-boxes. This article cites corporate unaccountability as a contributing factor – a factor that in O’Bryan’s fine commentary was left merely implied. The problem of Spam e-mails, caused in part by a mentality of the acceptability of corporate unaccountability, is widespread, the Register suggested.

I have been victimized at least two times by some sort of electronic impersonation. How I became aware of such violations is that the Spam e-mails I received during the last couple of years displayed two acute spikes of heightened activity. During these times the received e-mails came from a collection of similar, obscure and extremely rude sorts of Web sites or message boards.

After the first of these two flurries of Spam e-mails (most of which expressed some appreciation for previous impostor purchases or attempted purchases along with an additional solicitation and none of which I ever personally `clicked’ my way further into), the Spam activity slowed significantly for a time. What was so striking to me was how specific these Spam e-mails had been about the date and time at which I supposedly had been on their Web site or message board giving them my name and information. After a few months came the second flurry of Spam e-mails from another collection of Web sites, these stemming from a different sort of highly rude and unconscionable business practice that exists out there in cyberspace.

My tip for any concerned citizen is to pay close attention to a general increase in spam e-mails, but also to safeguard yourself as much as possible against any misguided individual, whether prankster friend or defaming opposition, who might be tinkering with the practice of logging into Web sites and even trying to purchase from these Web sites under pretense of your name and information. If such a criminal impersonation takes place to a point that you can prove damages and establish the specific infracting party, then legal recourse may be pursued.

O’Bryan’s words in the Iowa State Daily about completely giving up all Internet and e-mail activity might not be a bad idea.

I implore the people in Durham Center to please do like other universities are doing and construct a Spam e-mail filter for the ISU e-mail systems, even if such a filter might entail paying some trivial penalty for breaking the language of some one or more prior contracts made to sell student e-mail addresses. More pressing still is the bigger picture of not knowing what specific actions by any public corporation we at ISU are forced into silent complicity with by our merely using any particular campus facility.

The only available route toward Iowa State allowing for volitional moral decision-making in this regard by ISU students, staff, and faculty is to allow full and open disclosure of accounting books on all matters of money making.

In a quick series, now, here are some players in the new world that ISU, by its corporate money-seeking efforts, desires to be a full participant in. It is a world appearing to be full of Enrons, a world of offshore tax havens, a presidential pardon for Marc Rich, university presidents with gross conflicts of interest, seemingly racist re-naming boards for renovated campus buildings, secret investment portfolios that enable universities to double their investment in 18 months or 24 months, universities trying to arrange exclusive Pepsi contracts for an entire campus, trying to sell or lease a beautiful old railway hub in central campus to a fast food joint and selling student e-mail addresses.

This is a selling away of each of our likelihood of having any firm basis for recourse if an unexpected event transpires such as when some unknown party acts on its anonymous, but free, volition to play an illegal game of computerized identity theft, whether by logging in on a Web site under a false but pre-existing name, or by sending Spam e-mail to a recipient who is the same person identified as the supposed sender of the Spam e-mail.

Whenever you receive a Spam e-mail of the latter sort, a federal crime has been committed. It is your legal responsibility to report it to the ISU administration and the administration’s Department of Public Safety. It is the DPS’s legal obligation to prosecute senders of all e-mails based on such criminal impersonation.

I end with Mr. O’Bryan’s closing message: “Please remove me from your e-mail list.” But I add a plea. To Iowa State University: please allow me and all of us just a smidgen of an opportunity to have our freedom of will and choice about what types of corporate business activities we select to support through our on-campus action of using campus buildings and facilities, including the university e-mail system, as is required for my teaching job.

David Seim

Graduate student

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