As chairman of the board at the Electronic Frontier Foundation , Brad Templeton knows a thing or two about spam. Email is speech. We've got to protect it. The problem is, there are three fundamental rights that come into collision here. The first is freedom of speech.
Email is speech.
It will probably be the most important form of interpersonal communication in the future, so we've got to protect it. At the same time we have private-property rights. You own the computer that you read your email on. In addition, you've got privacy rights. You want that right to be left alone, but you also want the right to go out in public and put your email address on a webpage and not have it mean you're going to be swamped with useless offers.