Well, now it appears that they are coming for the bbs's also. Well they'll get mine when they pry the keyboard from my cold dead fingers. Communication Is Your Right The growing national and international outreach of computer bulletin board systems (BBSs) and their effectiveness in reaching the masses outside of the Establishment media were discussed on the October 7 broadcast of The SPOTLIGHT's nightly call-in talk forum, Radio Free America, with host Tom Valentine. The guest was veteran Washington-based investigative journalist Patrick M. Clawson. He has worked for Cable News Network (CNN) and NBC News and is now becoming active in the BBS industry, which, he noted, is under fire from the gouernment. The SPOTLIGHT is also involved in this new medium, through the LogoPlex BBS based in Richmond, Virginia. An edited transcript of the interview follows. Valentine's questions are in boldface. Clawson's comments are in regular text. [Clawson's comments are in square brackets for this file] You've recently entered into a new communications endeavor. Could you discuss that? [ I've been helping to organize a trade association, the National On-Line Media Association. That is an organization of people who are running computer bulletin boards around the country. The computer bulletin boards have become quite a force. It's a great way of getting your news outside of the traditional stream. Frankly, a lot of the news you get through the BBS is a lot more accurate than the stuff you read in the mainstream press. ] [ Many people around the country are getting onto BBSs. ] [ What's happening with this on-line media is quite exciting. It really is going to upset the balance of media power in America. Lots of people are very discouraged with the way the conventional news media reports the news. I am, too, and I've been a member of the Washington press corps for a long time. ] [ The thing that's interesting about this bulletin board technology as it is proliferating across the country is that for the first time in the history of the world any person can be a publisher and can have their voice heard worldwide, on these computer networks.] [ Any person can report the news and put the word out worldwide to any person who wants to read it. That's a tremendous change in the balance of media power. It's going to liberate people. It's going to give them a chance to report things and to dig out government corruption in a way like they've never been able to do it before. ] Is the Establishment getting leery of the development of the computer bulletin boards? [ What's happening to a computer bulletin board system based in Boston is a very interesting story, and it has gotten no press play. This is a clear sign of how the media industry is changing. ] [ There's a gentleman in Boston named Brian Miller. He and his wife run a bulletin board, Channel 1 BBS. This is one of the largest bulletin board systems in the country. They have built this system up through hard work to the point that it's quite well known. ] [ The state of Massachusetts, in its infinite wisdom, has now decided to reinterpret the state's tax laws on telecommunications to try to make it retroactively fit this company. The state is using this as a test case. The state has hit this company with a tax lien of more than $150,000. This is a small business, and this lien could shut this company down. ] [ Here you have a media voice in Boston that is being threatened with silence, and it has gotten no national publicity at all. If the U.S. government or the District of Columbia government moved against the Washington Post with a major tax assessment in a clear effort to shut them down, we would be hearing about it.] [ There have been several cases across the country where the FBI and/or the local police have gone in and raided bulletin boards under the pretext that the board may have transmitted pornography or somebody might have posted somebody's credit card number on the board. ] [ However, instead of taking some kind of carefully defined legal action to deal with those issues, the law en-forcement people have broken down doors and grabbed equipment and shut down these media operations. ]