Comment a bizarre flashback (Score 3) 236
It was rather disturbing for me to read this article.
For a number of reasons. The predominant one being that I knew everyone involved. I attended the same classes that were mentioned and as those 4 were pulled off to work on profiles I went on to the CAT team.
Let me quickly clarify some misconceptions that I saw in some of the postings.
Monitoring - If you spent some time to think about it you would recognize the impossiblity of that. The sheer number of IM's and chatroom conversations that occur would overwhelm anybody trying to actually monitor what was going on. They were referring to other departments that dealt with reports of violations. nothing more.
Civil Liberties, 1st amendment and others - I took it as a good sign when, in a course of a week, I was accused of being a neo-nazi and a liberal left winger the same number of times. I will neither defend nor condemn AOL's policies but I can tell you that I never once saw an account being actioned for a viewpoint, rather for how that viewpoint was expressed. If you are unable to express your viewpoint without the use of vulgarities, slurs, or personal attacks then AOL was not the service for you.
the last call -
It actually hurts sometimes to remember the things that we had to deal with. Sure it would be easy and convenient for us to label all of the stories that we heard to a socially engineered hack and I know very well that some of the people that I talked to were doing just that. But not all of them were, and after a while it got to you. The police officers that called, the mothers, fathers, friends.... people crying, desperate, frustrated. All the time making a decision based on our guidelines and our best judgement, in a 5 minute timeframe. Several times I heard things that prevented me from sleeping that night.
I was disturbed and happy to see this article, it was nice see someone express our side of the situation. Because I am not a neo-nazi and I am not a liberal left winger. I was just someone trying to do an unusual job as best he could.
For a number of reasons. The predominant one being that I knew everyone involved. I attended the same classes that were mentioned and as those 4 were pulled off to work on profiles I went on to the CAT team.
Let me quickly clarify some misconceptions that I saw in some of the postings.
Monitoring - If you spent some time to think about it you would recognize the impossiblity of that. The sheer number of IM's and chatroom conversations that occur would overwhelm anybody trying to actually monitor what was going on. They were referring to other departments that dealt with reports of violations. nothing more.
Civil Liberties, 1st amendment and others - I took it as a good sign when, in a course of a week, I was accused of being a neo-nazi and a liberal left winger the same number of times. I will neither defend nor condemn AOL's policies but I can tell you that I never once saw an account being actioned for a viewpoint, rather for how that viewpoint was expressed. If you are unable to express your viewpoint without the use of vulgarities, slurs, or personal attacks then AOL was not the service for you.
the last call -
It actually hurts sometimes to remember the things that we had to deal with. Sure it would be easy and convenient for us to label all of the stories that we heard to a socially engineered hack and I know very well that some of the people that I talked to were doing just that. But not all of them were, and after a while it got to you. The police officers that called, the mothers, fathers, friends.... people crying, desperate, frustrated. All the time making a decision based on our guidelines and our best judgement, in a 5 minute timeframe. Several times I heard things that prevented me from sleeping that night.
I was disturbed and happy to see this article, it was nice see someone express our side of the situation. Because I am not a neo-nazi and I am not a liberal left winger. I was just someone trying to do an unusual job as best he could.
