The large color photograph that greets visitors to a National Archives exhibit celebrating the centennial of women’s suffrage shows a massive crowd filling Pennsylvania Avenue NW for the Women’s March on Jan. 21, 2017, the day after President Trump’s inauguration.
The 49-by-69-inch photograph is a powerful display. Viewed from one perspective, it shows the 2017 march. Viewed from another angle, it shifts to show a 1913 black-and-white image of a women’s suffrage march also on Pennsylvania Avenue. The display links momentous demonstrations for women’s rights more than a century apart on the same stretch of pavement.
But a closer look reveals a different story.
The Archives acknowledged in a statement this week that it made multiple alterations to the photo of the 2017 Women’s March showcased at the museum, blurring signs held by marchers that were critical of Trump. Words on signs that referenced women’s anatomy were also blurred.
In the original version of the 2017 photograph, taken by Getty Images photographer Mario Tama, the street is packed with marchers carrying a variety of signs, with the Capitol in the background. In the Archives version, at least four of those signs are altered.
A placard that proclaims “God Hates Trump” has “Trump” blotted out so that it reads “God Hates.” A sign that reads “Trump & GOP — Hands Off Women” has the word Trump blurred out.
Signs with messages that referenced women’s anatomy — which were prevalent at the march — are also digitally altered. One that reads “If my vagina could shoot bullets, it’d be less REGULATED” has “vagina” blurred out. And another that says “This Pussy Grabs Back” has the word “Pussy” erased.
The Archives said the decision to obscure the words was made as the exhibit was being developed by agency managers and museum staff members. It said David S. Ferriero, the archivist of the United States who was appointed by President Barack Obama in 2009, participated in talks regarding the exhibit and supports the decision to edit the photo.
“As a non-partisan, non-political federal agency, we blurred references to the President’s name on some posters, so as not to engage in current political controversy,” Archives spokeswoman Miriam Kleiman said in an emailed statement. “Our mission is to safeguard and provide access to the nation’s most important federal records, and our exhibits are one way in which we connect the American people to those records. Modifying the image was an attempt on our part to keep the focus on the records.”
Archive officials did not respond to a request to provide examples of previous instances in which the Archives altered a document or photograph so as not to engage in political controversy.
Kleiman said the images from the 2017 and 1913 marches were presented together “to illustrate the ongoing struggles of women fighting for their interests.”
The decision to blur references to women’s genitals was made because the museum hosts many groups of students and young people and the words could be perceived as inappropriate, Kleiman said in the statement.
Kleiman said the National Archives “only alters images in exhibits when they are used as graphic design components.”
“We do not alter images or documents that are displayed as artifacts in exhibitions,” she said. “In this case, the image is part of a promotional display, not an artifact.”
When told about the action taken by the Archives, prominent historians expressed dismay.
"There's no reason for the National Archives to ever digitally alter a historic photograph," Rice University historian Douglas Brinkley said. "If they don't want to use a specific image, then don't use it. But to confuse the public is reprehensible. The head of the Archives has to very quickly fix this damage. A lot of history is messy, and there's zero reason why the Archives can't be upfront about a photo from a women's march."
Wendy Kline, a history professor at Purdue University, said it was disturbing that the Archives chose to edit out the words "vagina" and "pussy" from an image of the Women's March, especially when it was part of an exhibit about the suffragist movement. Hundreds of thousands of people took part in the 2017 march in the District, which was widely seen as a protest of Trump's victory.
"Doctoring a commemorative photograph buys right into the notion that it's okay to silence women's voice and actions," Kline said in an email. "It is literally erasing something that was accurately captured on camera. That's an attempt to erase a powerful message."
The altered photograph greets visitors to "Rightfully Hers: American Women and the Vote," an exhibit that opened in May celebrating the centennial of women's suffrage. The 19th Amendment to the Constitution, which was ratified in 1920, prohibits the federal government and states from denying the right to vote on the basis of sex.
"This landmark voting rights victory was made possible by decades of suffragists' persistent political engagement, and yet it is just one critical milestone in women's battle for the vote," reads a news release announcing the exhibit on the Archives website.
Archives spokesman John Valceanu said the proposed edits were sent to Getty for approval, and Getty "then licensed our use of the image."
A Getty spokeswoman, Anne Flanagan, confirmed that the image was licensed by the National Archives Foundation but said in an email Friday evening that Getty was still determining whether it approved alterations to the image.
Karin Wulf, a history professor at the College of William & Mary and executive director of the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture, said that to ensure transparency, the Archives at the very least should have noted prominently that the photo had been altered.
"The Archives has always been self-conscious about its responsibility to educate about source material, and in this case they could have said, or should have said, 'We edited this image in the following way for the following reasons,'?" she said. "If you don't have transparency and integrity in government documents, democracy doesn't function."
SUMMARY:iTunes, Facebook, Spotify, and YouTube, have all removed conspiracy theorist Alex Jones’ audio and video content from their platforms, saying he violated their hate-speech policies. P.J. Tobia takes a closer look at his media operation, and William Brangham examines the pushback and legal questions with Lyrissa Lidsky, dean of the University of Missouri School of Law.
Claiming overreach by a new publisher, the journal’s editorial board asks for disciplinary action from the National Library of Medicine.
For much of its 22-year existence, few outside the corner of science devoted to toxic chemicals paid much attention to the International Journal of Occupational and Environmental Health.
But now, a feud has erupted over the small academic publication, as its editorial board — the scientists who advise the journal’s direction and handle article submissions — has accused the journal’s new owner of suppressing a paper and promoting “corporate interests over independent science in the public interest.”
More is at stake than just the journal’s direction.
IJOEH is best known for exposing so-called “product defense science” — industry-linked studies that defend the safety of products made by their funders. At a time when the Trump administration is advancing policies and nominees sympathetic to the chemical industry, the journal seems to be veering in the same direction.
“There are many scientists who work for corporations who are honest scientists,” said David Michaels, the former head of the federal Occupational Safety and Health Administration under President Obama. “What we’re concerned about here is the ‘mercenary science’ … that’s published purely to influence regulation or litigation, and doesn’t contribute to public health.”
“I think the IJOEH articles were threatening to that whole industry,” said Michaels, now an environmental and occupational health professor at George Washington University. While Michaels has never served on the journal’s editorial board, he has published an article in the journal and peer-reviewed others.
The journal was one of the relatively few places that provided an outlet for “scientists whose work is independent of the corporations that manufacture chemicals,” he said. “The silencing of that voice would be a real loss to the field.”
Last Thursday, the journal’s 22-member editorial board, along with eight former board members and the journal’s founding editor-in-chief, wrote a letter to the National Library of Medicine requesting disciplinary action against the academic journal’s new publisher, Taylor & Francis Group. In particular, they asked the Library of Medicine to rescind the journal’s listing in the Medline index, which could drastically reduce its scientific influence.
Academic journals are often judged by the reputations of those on their editorial boards, and this list includes a Columbia University dean, the president of the International Commission on Occupational Health and a scientist who helped establish the cancer classification system used by the International Agency for Research on Cancer.
UK-based Taylor & Francis, one of the largest publishers of academic journals, acquired IJOEH and 169 other journals in 2015 by purchasing the journal’s original owner and publisher, Maney Publishing. According to the board’s letter, Taylor & Francis has done the following since taking over:
Selected a new editor-in-chief, Andrew Maier, without consulting the editorial board. Board members said it’s “highly unlikely” that they would have approved of Maier. Their letter said he had a tendency to reach scientific conclusions “highly sympathetic to parties with an economic interest in favorable outcomes,” which is at odds with the journal’s mission.
Withdrew a peer-reviewed article by the journal’s former editor-in-chief David Egilman that criticized Union Carbide Corporation’s efforts to oppose workers’ claims of asbestos exposure. “Suppression of an accepted paper is a direct assault on academic freedom,” the board members wrote to the Library of Medicine.
Flagged three additional studies approved for publication under Egilman as “raising potential concerns,” according to a May 8 email the publisher sent to the board.
A Library of Medicine representative said they’re reviewing the board’s appeal.
Officials at Taylor & Francis declined to speak with ProPublica about the accusations in the letter and did not answer most of the questions we submitted in writing, referring us instead to two emails the publisher sent to the board in May.
In one, Ian Bannerman, manager director of Taylor & Francis Journals, insisted the company had no obligation to consult the board in choosing the journal’s new editor. “The responsibility for selecting and appointing an Editor-in-Chief lies with Taylor & Francis as the owner of the journal,” he wrote.
In the other, Bannerman responded to a question from the board about the publisher’s plans for “repositioning” the journal by saying Taylor & Francis would aim to boost its online readership, citation levels and “rapidity of publication.”
“We do not see this as ‘repositioning’ the journal as such,” Bannerman wrote, “but we do see it as a change of tack — putting in place long-term plans and goals for the journal’s future development, enhanced by our expertise in marketing, online publishing, and bibliometric analysis.”
A Struggling Endeavor
Joseph LaDou, the founding editor-in-chief of IJOEH, launched the journal in 1995 after years of struggling to publish his own research. While studying the health hazards of workers making microelectronics for Silicon Valley in the 1980s, he couldn’t find a single U.S. journal to take his paper, he said, and ended up publishing in a Scandinavian public health journal. So when a Philadelphia-based publisher offered him a chance to start a journal for similar types of studies, he jumped on board.
The journal’s financial situation was always precarious. LaDou said he put $50,000 to $75,000 of his own money into IJOEH each year. Egilman, who became editor-in-chief in 2007, said he also paid out of pocket to keep the publication going. (Both editors worked on the journal part time and earned their income from university positions or from private practice as occupational health experts).
One of the biggest expenses was paying for help writing and editing manuscripts from developing countries, LaDou said. Among the international studies IJOEH published were a paper on how cooking fuel smoke affects respiratory health for women in Cameroon and another on a worker safety program for stevedores working in Cuba’s Port of Havana.
“I can’t think offhand of [another] pro-worker occupational safety and health journal,” LaDou said. “Some are better than others — less controlled — but there’s nothing to replace what IJOEH was doing, particularly on an international scale.”
Most occupational health experts work for industry in some way because there’s little independent funding, said Celeste Monforton, an environmental and occupational health lecturer at Texas State University. There are few academic positions, and the collapse of workers’ unions over the past few decades further decimated the number of labor-related jobs.
“There’s very little investment in occupational health research or looking at exposure to toxics,” said Monforton, who has never published in IJOEH or served on its board. Most of what’s known about toxics comes from original research funded by the federal government in the 1970s and 1980s, when scientists could coordinate with unions to study large groups of workers, she said.
Those studies focused on long-known hazards such as benzene, asbestos or beryllium, setting the stage for stronger workplace regulations. The results prompted a backlash from scientists working in “product defense,” who re-analyzed individual studies to conclude the product was less harmful than the government determined, Monforton said.
If journals are judged by the size of their readership, LaDou’s was a perpetual underdog. “It was never a large subscription,” he said. “You’re up against such a powerful machine in the industry-supported journals … I think the reputation of the journal was that of a non-industry publication that was widely respected, but only by a small segment of the readership community.”
Taylor & Francis has finally figured out a way for this journal to make money, he alleged. “By selling its soul.”
‘A Change of Tack’
In the first months after Taylor & Francis purchased the journal in June 2015, neither the editorial board nor its editor-in-chief noted a major change.
Then, in early 2016, former board member Barry Castleman learned the publisher hadn’t renewed Egilman’s editing contract, which expired in December 2016.
Taylor & Francis hired Maier in early 2017 without consulting board members for their input, as is customary for scientific journals.
Maier is an environmental health professor at the University of Cincinnati and runs a program for research fellows at TERA (Toxicology Excellence for Risk Assessment), a consulting firm that analyzes chemical safety. TERA often works for industry clients such as the American Chemistry Council. Concerns about its conflicts of interest gained national attention after President Trump nominated Michael Dourson, TERA’s founder, to lead the Environmental Protection Agency’s chemical safety program.
In 2010, Maier co-authored a study on the risks of diacetyl, a butter flavoring that can cause lung damage in workers. Maier’s paper recommended an exposure limit of 200 parts per billion — up to 40 times higher than federal guidelines recommend. Egilman criticized Maier’s results in a 2011 IJOEH paper for not being protective enough. Maier has said that he has a research partnership with the federal scientists who suggested the lower limit. “This ongoing close relationship …does not suggest that government parties find my work lacks scientific credibility,” Maier said in a letter to the board.
Egilman said he didn’t expect to continue as editor-in-chief once his contract expired, but he and the board should have helped choose the new editor.
The publisher disagrees. Bannerman said Taylor & Francis sought advice from “a number of people we know in the field,” including one member of the IJOEH board. Bannerman explained the conversation with the board member occurred before the publisher began considering Maier.
The dispute over Maier’s hiring was first reported by Retraction Watch, a publication that tracks retractions in the academic publishing world, which went on to publish several items about unrest at the journal this spring.
Maier didn’t respond to a request for comment, but he wrote to the editorial board in May to address their concerns. He said more than 80 percent of his research funding comes from his university and the government.
“As for the future, I do not suggest any major changes in mission or scope of the journal,” he wrote. “The same types of scientific articles should continue to find a home in IJOEH.”
‘In-House Review’
Taylor & Francis’ decision in March 2017 to withdraw Egilman’s paper, published about a year earlier, was just as controversial as appointing Maier — possibly more.
Journal publishers rarely interfere in editorial decisions, said Arthur Frank, an IJOEH board member and professor at Drexel University’s School of Public Health.
“I have never, ever been in a setting where the publisher, without engaging the editorial board, made a decision unilaterally to appoint a new editor, and also made decisions to retract an article,” he said. “Publishers are in the business of printing the journal. They’re not in the business of deciding what goes into the journal.”
Egilman’s paper critiqued consulting firms that conduct research that attempts to re-create historical worker exposure data for use in toxic tort litigation. Such studies are expensive and are typically commissioned by companies to defend themselves in court, said Michaels, the former OSHA administrator.
Part of Egilman’s article examined a 2005 study co-authored by consultant Dennis Paustenbach, which simulated historical exposures to conclude that the workers who manufactured Bakelite (an asbestos-containing plastic) for Union Carbide would not have been exposed to asbestos levels that violated health guidelines. Egilman also focused on Paustenbach’s role in promoting similar types of studies, pointing to a conference speech in which Paustenbach said they often made the difference between winning and losing court cases.
“My point was that OFTEN, litigation in the United States is scientifically unwarranted,” Paustenbach wrote in regards to his speech. “When anyone is inappropriately accused of a wrongdoing, they deserve a defense … We are only hired in cases that border on being ‘almost without foundation.’ So it is not surprising that most of our results show that the plaintiff claims are incorrect.”
While Egilman has served as an expert witness for plaintiffs injured by asbestos products — and is well-known for having leaked pharmaceutical company documents to a lawyer representing plaintiffs who alleged an antipsychotic drug gave them diabetes — he has also worked on the defense side. In his paper’s disclosure, he said he consulted for Union Carbide in the company’s 1984 toxic gas leak that killed thousands of residents in Bhopal, India.
It’s unclear what prompted Taylor & Francis to withdraw Egilman’s paper.
Egilman provided ProPublica with a copy of an August 2016 email a Taylor & Francis employee sent to a third party that said Paustenbach “has been in touch to request that we retract Egilman’s critique article.” It was part of a longer email chain that discussed Paustenbach’s 2005 paper and Egilman’s 2016 paper.
In an email to ProPublica, however, Paustenbach denied requesting the retraction, and copied a Taylor & Francis manager in his response. Paustenbach said the publisher began considering a withdrawal months before that August 2016 email, and that he had been primarily concerned with correcting falsehoods in Egilman’s paper.
“I have no axe to grind with Dr. Egilman,” Paustenbach said. “I believe in the importance of a lively discussion of legitimate scientific facts or beliefs. At times, I find that Dr. Egilman doesn’t deal in facts … Egilman’s article was so flawed as to be an embarrassment to any scientist; and perhaps that is why they did not publish it.”
ProPublica reached Sara Shuman, the journal’s former deputy editor who handled the paper’s submission process. She said Egilman’s paper was peer reviewed by at least two scientists. The journal uses a double-blind system to ensure that the author and peer reviewers don’t know each others’ identities, and Shuman acted as the intermediary.
Egilman was informed about the decision to withdraw his article in a March 2017 email from the publisher: “Due to an omission of oversight, the manuscript was not subject to our in-house review prior to its publication. Subsequently we have reviewed the content, and decided to withdraw it from publication.”
In a May 25 email to the board, Bannerman, the Taylor & Francis director, said the paper “was inadvertently published before the review process was completed, and was subsequently decided to be unsuitable for publication.”
The publisher declined to define “in-house review” or comment further.
“We have said all that we can about our reasons for withdrawing this article,” a company spokesperson said. The company publishes more than 2,500 journals, and our “role is to give the communities these journals serve a voice and a space to engage in debate about their research fields. We do not have any strategy to align our titles to be for or against any particular agenda.”
Egilman said the publisher never contacted him to discuss their concerns.
Maier, the new editor-in-chief, told the board he wasn’t involved with the decision. “I have no involvement or decision authority on any manuscripts that were accepted or published prior to my tenure with IJOEH,” he wrote in a letter.
Board members said the incident, compounded by what they considered the unsatisfying explanations for it, had spurred them to action.
“The idea of summarily withdrawing a paper that’s already been reviewed and published without any explanation is outrageous,” said Castleman, the former board member. “The implication is there was some kind of horrible scientific conduct that must have happened.”
Pressing On
In addition to its complaint to the National Library of Medicine, the board has appealed to the Committee on Publication Ethics, a UK-based charity that sets journal ethics guidelines.
The board’s letter alleged instances in which Taylor & Francis violated COPE guidelines, including one that states, the “relationship of editors to publishers … should be based firmly on the principle of editorial independence.”
COPE’s co-chairman Chris Graf, director of research integrity and publishing ethics at a large journal publisher called Wiley, said COPE doesn’t comment on individual cases. COPE has no regulatory authority and doesn’t conduct investigations, but can advise publications facing ethical issues.
On Thursday, the president of the Collegium Ramazzini, an international academy of occupational and environmental health experts, said his organization “strongly supports” the board’s letter to the Library of Medicine. The academy is an invitation-only group of 180 scientists who work to bring public health research to policymakers. Nearly half of the IJOEH board members are part of the academy, as are Michaels and Monforton. The group also includes Linda Birnbaum, director of the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences and former OSHA administrator Eula Bingham. The organization is named after Bernardino Ramazzini, a 17th-century physician who’s often called the “father of occupational medicine.”
Taylor & Francis has offered to hold a teleconference with the editorial board, but Castleman said the board first wants more answers in writing.
“Had they been more forthcoming, we would have certainly been willing to talk to them,” he said. “It’s very cumbersome trying to find a convenient time for so many people all over the world to agree to be available for such a conference. I felt that they were just fobbing us off, stonewalling our plain questions.”
When ProPublica inquired about the status of the three other articles Taylor & Francis had considered withdrawing, the publisher said those studies “are no longer on hold and the authors are aware of their status” — but didn’t explain whether that meant the articles had been withdrawn. Egilman said one of them was a separate article he wrote on Union Carbide, and that he withdrew that paper from IJOEH two months ago so he could submit it to another journal. He said something similar had happened to another paper, about cigarette filters that contained asbestos.
Through the tumult, the journal has continued to publish, though the rate has slowed considerably this year. The IJOEH website shows the journal publishes four issues a year, with 10 to 12 articles per issue. Yet only five papers have been published in all of 2017. Three of the five were approved by Egilman and the other two by Maier. Both are about how employees’ mental health affects stress and well-being.
The journal’s “first full issue of 2017 will be published before the end of the year,” said a Taylor & Francis spokesperson, “with other issues to follow in early 2018.”
SUMMARY: As the relationship between Cuba and America improves, what will a potential end to the embargo mean for the two countries? Reporting from Havana, Jeffrey Brown looks at how closer ties to America could change Cuba, and the Cuban way of life. This is part one of the series, "Cuban Evolution."
HARI SREENIVASAN (NewsHour): More than five decades after the U.S. and Cuba severed ties, Cuba is poised for some big changes in its relations with the United States, and the way business is done there.
In just a matter of weeks, the Obama administration is expected to announce that both countries will open embassies in each other’s capital. Last month, the U.S. removed Cuba from its terrorism list. At the same time, the Cuban government is allowing more private enterprise.
It’s a moment when Cuba is preparing for a very different relationship with its American neighbors.
Jeffrey Brown has the story, the first in a special weeklong series about the Cuban evolution, focusing on significant shifts in its politics, business, arts and culture.
JEFFREY BROWN (NewsHour): A second-floor bed and breakfast on a Caribbean island, home to Tatiana Zuniga her extended family.
From here, you can sit at breakfast?
TATIANA ZUNIGA, Airbnb Host (through translator): Yes. Enjoy your breakfast.
JEFFREY BROWN: But this is the island of Cuba. And Tatiana’s rooms are now available through Airbnb, the San Francisco-based online service, a bit of fledgling capitalism in the home of the hemisphere’s socialist revolution.
SUMMARY: Havana is known as a city frozen in time -- and much of that is attributed to its architecture. However, many old buildings lack plumbing, electricity and infrastructure. Now, with Cuban-American relations improving, will these buildings be renovated, or will an inflow of global businesses ruin the country’s unique atmosphere?
SUMMARY: Cuba has one of the lowest rates of Internet connectivity in the Western Hemisphere. In this installment of our continuing series “Cuban Evolution,” Jeffrey Brown looks at Cuban access to the Internet, the effect it has on people’s lives and whether access will change with improved Cuban-American relations.
SUMMARY: In the latest installment of our series “Cuban Evolution,” Jeffrey Brown explores the world of art in the country. He takes a look at the booming and vibrant art market that exists, as well as the limits on free expression that remain.
SUMMARY: Many people in America are proponents of the organic food movement, and worried about the potentially harmful effects of pesticides on their health or the environment. In Cuba, farmers have gone organic for a very different reason – they had to. In this final installment of our series “The Cuban ” Jeffrey Brown looks at food and farming.
GWEN IFILL (NewsHour): There are protests again tonight in suburban Denver in Colorado’s second largest school district, where students have been battling over what should be taught in Advanced Placement history classes.
Nationally, some standards have already changed. But in recent weeks, Colorado has been the central focus, as the local school board responded with its own plan, and students and teachers are pushing back.
Hari Sreenivasan has the story.
HARI SREENIVASAN (NewsHour): The conflict over curriculum that’s sparked nearly two weeks of protests has now come to a head. It’s the prime topic at tonight’s school board meeting in Jefferson County, Colorado, just outside Denver.
Board president Ken Witt:
KEN WITT, President, Jefferson County Board of Education: I hope we come to a — to good dialogue and get to a good plan for how to execute the board’s obligation to oversee curriculum and to make certain that we’re doing the right thing for our students to ensure that we’re offering balanced, thorough curriculum and that we’re fulfilling our responsibility as a board.
HARI SREENIVASAN: The battle began when the College Board set out new national standards for Advanced Placement U.S. history courses. They’re used by college-bound students to earn college credits. But a number of conservatives argued the standards depict the United States in a negative light and distort key events.
In Jefferson County, the school board’s conservative majority called for naming a committee to make changes. One member offered a plan that said classroom materials should — quote — “promote citizenship, patriotism, essentials and benefits of the free enterprise system, respect for authority and respect for individual rights.”
At the same time, it said the course shouldn’t “encourage or condone civil disorder, social strife or disregard of the law.”
That language set off waves of students leaving class to march with signs and flags.
SCOTT ROMANO, Student: If we allow them to censor AP U.S., what’s going the stop them from censoring other classes? And that — and I feel that it’s our duty or our right as Americans to learn our full history, because it’s from that full history that we can grow into a better country. And we have to learn from those dark pasts in our history. And that’s what creates a better country. And that’s what we all need the learn from.
Earlier this weekend I was asked by a journalist friend of mine if I would mind answering a few questions for an article he was writing about the draft Data Protection Regulation and Safe Harbour. The comments were for a feature article in the first 2014 print edition of Infosecurity Magazine. Needless to say, I was happy to comment on the issue which, I know well and have worked on for the better part of the last 4 years; so this morning I sent my response - a little wordy but relevant none the less and hopefully useful for his article.
To my surprise, just seconds after hitting the send button, I received the following email back from Google's Gmail servers:
Our system has detected that this 550-5.7.1 message is likely unsolicited mail. To reduce the amount of spam sent 550-5.7.1 to Gmail, this message has been blocked. Please visit 550-5.7.1 http://support.google.com/mail/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=188131 for 550 5.7.1 more information. c2si3563013wie.0 - gsmtp (in reply to end of DATA command)
Obviously, the first thing I did was visit the link which provided me with the following information:
Why has Gmail blocked my messages?
Here at Gmail, we work very hard to fight spam. While in some cases we may classify a message as spam and deliver it to the spam folder, we also try to find ways to reduce the amount of spam being sent to Gmail in general. If we detect that a message has a strong likelihood of being spam, we’ll block the message from being sent to Gmail.
A message might be blocked if it contains suspicious-looking or spammy text or if the sending IP has had a history of sending unsolicited messages.
Is all of the mail I’m sending being blocked?
It’s likely that only a subset of the messages which have a strong likelihood of being spam are being blocked and not all of your messages. However, to help improve your deliverability, we recommend reviewing our Bulk Sender Guidelines.
If you’re forwarding mail to Gmail and your domain also forwards spam, we recommend reviewing our mail forwarding best practices.
As you can see there is no information on how to have your emails removed from Google's filters. Thinking that maybe the IPv4 address of my mail server was perhaps caught in some sort of RBL from the past (before I was provisioned with it for my server) I pointed my browser to http://mxtoolbox.com to check. Neither my domain or my IP address were included in any blacklists on the site (which granted is not a definitive list but is pretty well populated).
This leads me to believe that the only reason the email was rejected by Google's Gmail servers was based on the content of the email and I have a couple of issues with this.
1. I am deeply opposed to Google's scanning of emails - I have argued for a number of years that this is a breach of privacy and probably illegal - although trying to get a regulator to take action has been impossible.
2. Even if we accept scanning of email content for the purpose of preventing spam, there were a number of key elements to my email which should have made it clear the email was not spam as listed below:
a. The email was a reply to an email with my response inline. The previous email I was responding too was indicated with ">" in the left margin next to each original line. It should have been clear to any automated scanning system that this was a reply and therefore probably not unsolicited.
b. The email requested both a delivery receipt and read receipt (I wanted to make sure the journalist received and read the email before their indicated deadline so I could phone them before that time if it was clear they hadn't). Most spammers do not request delivery/read receipts as it uses up technical resources to process them as well as significantly increases their bandwidth usage - imagine if a spammer received two receipts for every single mail they sent to a list of millions. So again any automated scanning system should have been configured to "understand" this.
c. My email was signed with my PGP key. Now granted this might not seem like an obvious reason not to mark something as spam, but have you ever received spam which is signed with a PGP key? I certainly haven't.
d. Neither my domain or my mail server's IP address are listed on any blacklist that I could find, so really it was unlikely that my server had suddenly started sending out bulk spam emails.
Google's filtering system for spam is completely arbitrary and quite simply doesn't work. All four of the individual points above should have indicated to Google's systems that the email was probably not spam but for all four of those points to have existed together and yet the email was still marked as spam, illustrates a complete failure of Google's filters, which seem to be acting more as a form of censorship that anything else.
What makes this even more ironic, is the email content was all about an EU Regulation of which Google would be one of the corporations it impacts most - an email about privacy, scanned by a filter which goes against privacy and run by a company that has declared war on privacy because this single, fundamental right interferes with their illegitimate and unethical revenue model.
JUDY WOODRUFF (Newshour): Now we turn to China, where there were more demonstrations today over government censorship of a newspaper.
Ray Suarez has the story.
RAY SUAREZ (Newshour): Protests over press freedom in China turned into scuffles today in the southern city of Guangzhou. Supporters of the Southern Weekly newspaper, known for its relatively freewheeling style, faced off with Communist Party supporters.
The showdown has been brewing since New Year's Day. Staffers say censors force them to run this tribute to the party, instead of a planned editorial calling for political reforms.
The journalists went on strike and they quickly drew support from local people, who laid chrysanthemums at the paper's headquarters to symbolize the death of free speech.
MAN (through translator): This act of suppressing the freedom of the press should be changed. Otherwise, it's going to be detrimental to the public interests of knowing the facts.
WOMAN (through translator): I'm here to say the Southern Weekly is not alone. There are lots of people supporting them.
RAY SUAREZ: In response, the communist-run Global Times newspaper warned no media outlet can occupy a political special zone. But the protests quickly drew support from scholars, celebrities and micro-blogs across China.
And late today came reports the local Communist Party chief has offered to let Southern Weekly's journalists avoid punishment if they call off the strike. In addition, censors would lengthen their leash on the paper's content.
The dispute has played out as Xi Jinping is ascending to the leadership of the party and the government, amid hopes he might allow some political reforms.
Despite those hopes, Chinese officials have lately ruled that Internet users must give their real names to Internet service providers and Internet companies in China are now under orders to delete and report any posts deemed offensive to authorities.
SUMMARY: Ray Suarez talks to James Fallows of the Atlantic and Ming Wan of George Mason University about China's new leadership may approach government oversight of Chinese print and digital media.
JUDY WOODRUFF (Newshour): Three women from the Russian punk rock band called Pussy Riot were sentenced to jail time today for their protest in a church against President Vladimir Putin. It's a case that has sparked worldwide attention.
Jonathan Rugman of Independent Television News reports from Moscow.
JONATHAN RUGMAN: This afternoon, the three punk band protesters were led in handcuffs into a glass box in court. They'd already been detained for five months, and after a two-week trial, the judge had set today for her verdict.
The Pussy Riot three didn't look remorseful. In fact, they frequently smiled, especially when the judge read out the text of their offending song.
It was a song five members of Pussy Riot had performed for no more than two minutes in this Moscow cathedral back in February, though only three were arrested.
The judge said the three were guilty of hooliganism driven by religious hatred, the sentence, two years in jail, a year less than the prosecutor asked for.
But the women smiled again, as if freedom of expression was really on trial here, and not them, all this being broadcast live by Russian state media, nevertheless.
And as Masha, Katya and Nadya were led back to jail, it seemed that pressure from Paul McCartney and protest groups around the world had no discernible effect. The judge said the three women had crudely undermined social order with a disrespectful and unpleasant performance which had offended Orthodox believers. But in the court of world public opinion, it seems that the regime of Vladimir Putin was also in the dock here.
The husband of Nadya, the lead singer, told me two years was apparently Mr. Putin's definition of leniency. The father of Katya said that every Russian generation had gone to prison, and that the country was now turning into Saudi Arabia or Iran.
Hundreds of protesters for and against the punk band were kept back by police. A few dozen were rounded up, including the former world chess champion Garry Kasparov, who could still be heard shouting after the door to the police van closed with him inside.
This evening, the Russian Orthodox Church said in a statement the verdict was lawful, but it asked for mercy, though it didn't spell out what mercy meant.
"The women's action slapped Christians in the face," this priest said. But he added that God had already punished them by taking away their common sense.
The Kremlin hasn't commented, though President Putin said two weeks ago that the women shouldn't be judged too harshly.
SUMMARY: The political context of the Pussy Riot trial extends far beyond the walls of the courthouse, where three members of a Russian punk band were each sentenced to two years in prison. Margaret Warner talks to Columbia University's Stephen Sestanovich about the broader implications for opposition to Russian President Vladimir Putin.
I am Retired U.S. Navy (22yrs) and a Vietnam Veteran. After my Navy retirement I was in the computer related industry, now retired. In 2000 I was a registered Republican and voted for George W. Bush. Six months of having Bush in the Whitehouse forced me to re-evaluate my political stance. I had always thought of myself as a Moderate Republican, but was a Republican by "default" NOT because of close examination of the GOP. Due to what has happened in America since 2000, I now consider myself a progressive, and registered as a Non-Affiliated voter.
*Anti-First Amendment policies that attempt to turn America into a theocracy by enshrining ANY religious belief as law.
* Any attempt to suppress human or Constitutional rights.
* Any law or policy that supports discrimination based on religion, ethnicity, race/color, gender, sexual orientation, or any law that does NOT support Equal Treatment under the law.
*Any law or policy that attempts to suppress Freedom of the Press or Free Speech.
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