E-mail message upsets student group

An e-mail consisting mostly of a repeated swear word that was sent last week to the Chinese Students and Scholars Association has prompted emotional reactions from members of the group.

The message, sent from a Hotmail account, went out in response to an e-mail car advertisement. It included five printed pages of the phrase "fuck you" and warned the sender "you better stop using this means as an advertising agency or you'll be sorry."

The original car advertisement was sent to more than 30 groups, but CSSA is the only group that has reported receiving the angry response.

Because the reply was sent only to CSSA, some members of the group said they feel it unfairly targets their ethnicity.

"I was very upset because from the message it is very clear they are targeting our group, the Chinese," said Jun Cao, an Engineering fourth-year graduate student.

The e-mail, however, does not mention any ethnic groups.

"Just because he didn't use the word 'Chinese' doesn't mean he isn't targeting our group," Cao said.

The obscene response prompted a flood of concerned e-mails between CSSA members. Qiping Zhang, an Information fourth-year student, said "My impression is that this is an intentional response not only just an angry message."

But Virginia Rezmierski, a representative from the Information Technology Division, points out that because the e-mail makes no specific mention of the group, it does not appear that it was intended to target CSSA as an ethnic group. Rather, it was a just an angry reaction to a mass mailing of an advertisement.

Attempts to contact the sender of the response via e-mail were unsuccessful.

According to ITD policy, e-mail sent to more than one or two groups is an inappropriate use of computing resources. Mei Lu, a communications graduate student, said that many of the members of CSSA "are new to this community. We don't fully know the norms using e-mail."

Qi Ding, a Rackham student on the CSSA e-mail list, said he didn't see the message as discriminatory at first until he read e-mails from members of the group who saw the message as targeting the Chinese people.

If the message was just sent to deter e-mail advertisers, he said, then he doesn't think it should be classified as discriminatory.

First Amendment rights, Rezmierski said, make it difficult to regulate e-mail that is sent from an external source to an internal University e-mail account.

Cao said many of his colleagues are "very angry about the message because it is not sent from an account in the University, (and) it cannot be tracked down."

Rezmierski also said ITD is involved in working on policy and educational programs to educate the University on the proper uses of telnet.

Evan Caminker, a visiting law professor from the University of California at Los Angeles, pointed out that freedom of speech laws apply to any form of speech, including electronic mail.

"Messages of speech, even if it might be viewed as hateful, (are) generally protected by the First Amendment," Caminker said. "Most statutes against it have been shot down."

Caminker added that speech cannot be punished or censored by its content only.

If there is an immediate threat sent to a group or to an individual, ITD contacts the Department of Public Safety to investigate, Rezmierski said.

12-11-98