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Well, now it appears that they are coming for the bbs's also. Well
they'll get mine when they pry the keyboard from my cold dead
fingers.
Communication Is Your Right
The growing national and international outreach of computer bulletin
board systems (BBSs) and their effectiveness in reaching the masses
outside of the Establishment media were discussed on the October 7
broadcast of The SPOTLIGHT's nightly call-in talk forum, Radio Free
America, with host Tom Valentine.
The guest was veteran Washington-based investigative journalist
Patrick M. Clawson. He has worked for Cable News Network (CNN) and
NBC News and is now becoming active in the BBS industry, which, he
noted, is under fire from the gouernment. The SPOTLIGHT is also
involved in this new medium, through the LogoPlex BBS based in
Richmond, Virginia.
An edited transcript of the interview follows. Valentine's questions
are in boldface. Clawson's comments are in regular text. [Clawson's
comments are in square brackets for this file]
You've recently entered into a new communications endeavor. Could you
discuss that?
[ I've been helping to organize a trade association, the National
On-Line Media Association. That is an organization of people who are
running computer bulletin boards around the country. The computer
bulletin boards have become quite a force. It's a great way of
getting your news outside of the traditional stream. Frankly, a lot
of the news you get through the BBS is a lot more accurate than the
stuff you read in the mainstream press. ]
[ Many people around the country are getting onto BBSs. ]
[ What's happening with this on-line media is quite exciting. It
really is going to upset the balance of media power in America. Lots
of people are very discouraged with the way the conventional news
media reports the news. I am, too, and I've been a member of the
Washington press corps for a long time. ]
[ The thing that's interesting about this bulletin board
technology as it is proliferating across the country is that for the
first time in the history of the world any person can be a publisher
and can have their voice heard worldwide, on these computer networks.]
[ Any person can report the news and put the word out worldwide to
any person who wants to read it. That's a tremendous change in the
balance of media power. It's going to liberate people. It's going
to give them a chance to report things and to dig out government
corruption in a way like they've never been able to do it before. ]
Is the Establishment getting leery of the development of the computer
bulletin boards?
[ What's happening to a computer bulletin board system based in
Boston is a very interesting story, and it has gotten no press play.
This is a clear sign of how the media industry is changing. ]
[ There's a gentleman in Boston named Brian Miller. He and his
wife run a bulletin board, Channel 1 BBS. This is one of the largest
bulletin board systems in the country. They have built this system
up through hard work to the point that it's quite well known. ]
[ The state of Massachusetts, in its infinite wisdom, has now
decided to reinterpret the state's tax laws on telecommunications to
try to make it retroactively fit this company. The state is using
this as a test case. The state has hit this company with a tax lien
of more than $150,000. This is a small business, and this lien could
shut this company down. ]
[ Here you have a media voice in Boston that is being threatened
with silence, and it has gotten no national publicity at all. If the
U.S. government or the District of Columbia government moved against
the Washington Post with a major tax assessment in a clear effort to
shut them down, we would be hearing about it.]
[ There have been several cases across the country where the FBI
and/or the local police have gone in and raided bulletin boards under
the pretext that the board may have transmitted pornography or
somebody might have posted somebody's credit card number on the
board. ]
[ However, instead of taking some kind of carefully defined legal
action to deal with those issues, the law en-forcement people have
broken down doors and grabbed equipment and shut down these media
operations. ]