Why I Stopped Using Yahoo!
Last week I hit the uninstall button on my Yahoo instant message account and on my email account. It was my teeny weeny little protest over Yahoo deciding to cooperate with the government in its war against porn. I already was miffed that Yahoo helped turn in a Chinese dissident.
Plus in the back of my mind is former Attorney General John Ashcroft’s team covering the breasts of the semi-nude ‘Spirit of Justice’ statue.
I don’t want those sanctimonious holier-than-thou prudes looking into the search engines I use every day. There is a good article in the New York Times about a woman, who wanted to look up the term rent-boy and then realized, bingo, the Big Eye of government could focus on her. Yes, I know they claim that individuals were not being targeted; not yet, but this is a slippery slop, with Yahoo being a willing partner.
Of course, there is the bigger NSA snooping without warrants. They say they are only after foreign operatives. So I say get permission from FISA.
Here is my practical thinking on this. Jack Abramoff is a partner with Adam Kidan and both are going to go to jail. They fraudulently bought the SunCruz casino boat from owner Gus Boulis.
After the deal went bad, Boulis was bumped off gangland style and subsequently three wise guys with Mafia ties were indicted. Kidan, Abramoff’s partner, who has not been charged in the murder, had paid one of them $250,000 for catering and security services.
Now Abramoff as we all know has strong ties with the Republican government now in power and special financial ties to Tom Delay, Grover Norquist, and Ralph Reed. All of whom have had various ties to the present administration. Should I or should you or should Yahoo trust anyone in this or any other government to do anything without the proper checks and balances.
Ralph Reed believes, as he said to a group in Atlanta the other day, he is being targeted by the liberal press because of guilt by association. So how would you like to be targeted by the likes of Abramoff and his buddies because your links some how touched something they thought could be used against you. Like the word rent-boy and like the words “Spirit of Justice” breasts or like the words Palestinians and Hamas.
And if you think it is far-fetched, then turn back the clock to August, 2003, when ChristianityToday ran this headline:
Harassment, Porn Charges Derail Approval of Gay Bishop
Allegations of sexual harassment and pornography have sideline–at least temporaril–the approval of a New Hampshire priest who was elected the first openly gay bishop in the Episcopal Church.
The story starts:
The Rev. V. Gene Robinson, who won approval from lay and clergy delegates on Sunday, had been scheduled to face a confirmation vote by the church’s House of Bishops on Monday. That vote was put on hold while a church committee investigates two separate allegations.
The last-minute accusations, aired just hours before Robinson’s vote by the bishops, immediately raised charges of a last-ditch effort by conservatives to torpedo Robinson’s election, which they have warned will split the church…
Robinson came under fire for his association with a gay youth group he co-founded in Concord, N.H. The group’s website allegedly contained secondary links to pornographic material on other websites.
The link in question was two links away from a site of a group that Robinson had founded years earlier. Talk about guilt by association. It was a smear campaign plan and simple.
Any how, the last thing I did before I disengaged from Yahoo! was to email them that I was no longer using their services. Will it make a difference to Yahoo!, MSN or AOL? Maybe not to them, but it will to me. Each of us has to take a stand because I fear it may only get worse.
