He craves attention, so he shall remain unnamed here.

But his behavior is abominable, so it requires some attention.

Were our community to contain an individual so willfully obnoxious that he would daily stop 60 people, individually, in the street, to berate them with his view, free of any credible evidence, that they are evil and vile, and that the reasoned causes for which they work are destructive and self-serving... such an individual would soon be avoided.  He would be shunned.  Most of those five dozen victims would soon learn to walk away.  Were he to persist, he might eventually be discouraged officially.

There are those who argue that his activities would fall in the realm of protected free speech, and those advocates would be right in such an evaluation of the first occurrence – perhaps even the second.

But the troublesome fellow's right to free expression would soon crash most dramatically into others' right to be let alone.  Call it privacy, or a right to freedom from fear, or simply the privilege of controlling the way you use your own time.

If the behavior continued, soon enough some of those 60 would seek some sort of protection.  The greater the persistence, the more likely some extreme remedy might be invoked.  People have been known to be committed to one institution or another for unceasing harassment of others.

Now, transplant all that into the 21st Century world of electronic communications and e-mail.  Translate harassment in the street to harassment via repeated annoying electronic letters, a deliberate wasting of great gobs of time of other people, and you have a similar problem personality who, by wasting minutes of his own time, can steal the collective hours of others.

With e-mail, harassment and annoyance has become substantially more efficient.  Dealing with it may be more efficient, too, but it still requires time.  And even a glance at the offender's messages may ignite feelings of annoyance before deletion.

Fortunately, there are defenses available.  Most e-mail programs provide a way of auto-deleting communications from a specific source.  Even failing that, many allow deletion without reading.

There remains, however, the problem of group mail – communications sent to a single address, then "reflected" or relayed to dozens or hundreds of subscribers who have joined together in an interest group.  Such cases can be a bit more difficult to handle.  Some members of the group, for example, may actually want the harassing e-mail.  Some may feel a need to monitor the offender's verbiage for slanders that could mislead the naive.  Some may worry that determined efforts to be inclusive will be damaged by exclusion of a single individual.

So there are natural restraints that might prevent one from cutting off the group e-mail privileges of a persistently annoying person.  But it is not an encumbrance upon free speech to do so, because the determined miscreant can easily direct his electronic annoyances at a list of victims.  They, in turn, can auto-delete incoming mail from that source.

So it becomes a relatively easy matter – even comfortable – to exercise sensible control over a "reflector" or any form of master e-mail list.  When the behavior steps over the line repeatedly, privileges can be suspended.  Let the troublemaker harass individuals, much as he would be required to do by telephone (where hanging up is an option) or on the street... and let those individuals then make their own individual choices to read or auto- discard.

DL