It figures! No more free E-mail! Bill 602P will permit the Federal Government to charge a 5-cent charge on every delivered E-mail. Please read

the following carefully if you intend to stay online and continue using E-mail.

The last few months have revealed an alarming trend in the Government of the United States attempting to quietly push through legislation that will affect our use of the Internet.

Under proposed legislation, the US Postal Service will be attempting to bill E-mail users out of alternative postage fees.

Bill 602P will permit the Federal Government to charge a 5-cent surcharge on every e-mail delivered, by billing Internet Service Providers at source. The consumer would then be billed in turn by the ISP.

-- Rachel Gibson (rgibson@hotmail.com), April 24, 2001

Answers

This is bullshit.

There are numerous debunkings of this floating around -- it's tiring to see this exact same alert year after year.

While I'm sure that the feds are upset about the uses of e-mail (and glad in many ways too), bill 602P was written by a successful hoaxer. Congressional Legislation does not use that type of nomenclature.

Spend your activist energies trying to get civilian control over Echelon and Carnivore and similar efforts. see http://cryptome.org for more

-- mark (mrobinowitz@igc.org), April 24, 2001.

Rachel, with respect, this fairy tale has been floating around the Web since at least 1998. Please visit urbanmyth.com or any of the other debunking boards for the scoop.

-- Cash (Cash@andcarry.com), April 24, 2001.

When in doubt visit; the Thomas search engine.
http://www.senate.gov/search/index.html

-- (perry@ofuzzy1.com), April 24, 2001.

Oops, sorry, now that you mention it I do remember the discussion of the P label on this bill long ago. I slipped on it because the source seemed quite reputable. I'll try to be more careful in future. :)

-- Rachel Gibson (rgibson@hotmail.com), April 25, 2001.

Rachel, don't feel too bad about perpetuating this particular fraudulent message. Among the many stupid "urban hoaxes" that sensible people ought to recognize immediately as questionable (usually involving odd diseases, misspelled organizations, and sex or certain body parts--my personal favorite being the URGENT WARNINGS about a spider that kills people while they sit on the toilet) this particular hoax seems vaguely in keeping with the way government works. I think that's one reason it has such longevity on the Web. A tax of this sort would be technically impossible to impose, but it's not the kind of thing the tax bureaucrats wouldn't like to do if they could.

-- Andre Weltman (aweltman@state.pa.us), April 30, 2001.

I resemble that!

-- spider (spider0@usa.net), April 30, 2001.