From In God We Trust to In Freedom We Spam#
In God We Trust is widely considered a religious phrase. Although the definition of God can be widened to other monotheistic religions, and an overwhelming majority of Americans are Christians, many still believe it violated the establish clause of the constitution, preferring monotheism over polytheism and atheism.
On a far less base, some groups are spamming Chinese in the name of human rights. Since 2000, some congressional funded groups such as VOA and Radio Free Asia and followers of Chinese dissent movements such as Falun Gong keep sending their daily China civil right news to my email boxes. No, don’t tell me I need to set up a filter. I have been using email since 1997 and all of my email service providers have anti-spam filters, and many of those are served inside the Great Firewall. I had even set up some filters myself to filter spams with sibling recipients on the same domain. Since I had never given them my email addresses, it is only natural to assume that they obtained them from web pages or guessed them out from using common Chinese names and domains.
Getting spam is now part my daily life. But last week I got a messaging spam when I was using skype, one of the less used instant messaging software in China. The sender tried to persuade me to quit the Communist Party of China (which I never joined) by signing on an Epoch Times website. As I did hundreds of times before, I blocked the sender as soon as I found out the message was sent by a chat bot software. But this time, I started to wander. I just started using Skype a month ago for making telephone calls and did give my account out in any public way. I also did nothing to indicate my ability of Chinese reading (I was using a Japanese pseudonym and my location was set to U.S.). How can they START a conversation in CHINESE?
The only logical answer is that the spammers are spamming indiscriminately. To do this to a Japanese American is equal to call everybody on a phone book in Spanish to ask them to resign from a party in Spain. In Freedom We Spam!