"The New America" (aka "SpewAmerica" as it was known among anti-spammers) was also a "free speech" effort by some
Usenet kooks. Some spammer thought anti-spammers violate his
constitutional rights (which they don't do: Usenet is a privately
owned medium, and distributed worldwide).
I must do some in-depth research to know more. All I remember at
this moment was that Tim Thorne, an überkook, was involved. Not a
smart person. One of the first kooks that I killfiled. All I know that
they sent forged stuff with "Supercedes:" headers to
news.admin.net-abuse.usenet, saying stuff like this is "banned from
the New America Newsservers".
Not to even mention that the supercede attack failed and the original
articles were still there. (They weren't exactly geniuses.)
They also had some kooky web pages that had some unbelieveably lame
and far-fetched excuses to justify spamming.