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Virginia Arrests Man For Spamming
volpe writes "According to this Yahoo news story, Virginia arrested a North Carolina man for spamming in violation of a new state law. He was arrested Thursday afternoon in Raleigh, NC. The story is pretty fresh, so the news details are still pretty thin."
This spam problem is getting out of control, I am glad that some one is trying, but the problem is that the spammers will probably move out of the country.
Although based in North Carolina, Virginia is asserting jurisdiction over Jaynes because he sent messages through computers located in the state.
Roughly 50 percent of the world's Internet traffic passes through Virginia, home to big Internet companies like Time Warner Inc.'s (NYSE:TWX - news) American Online unit and MCI (Other OTC:WCOEQ - news).
I like this new so called 'state' law.
Prosecutor: Your spam is illegal. You'll be prosecuted in all 50 states and more on different state crimes since your email traveled through all 50 states.
Hmm .. on second thought .. this might not be such a good thing for people
who actually send emails.
Prosecutor: Your email allows us to prosecute u at least 50 times minimum.
...for doing something that they won't legally be able to do in just 2 weeks.
I know we all hate and despise spam, but doesn't a possible 20 years in the clink sound a bit excessive?
Seems to me that the punishment should fit the crime - in this case, economic penalties (aka, "big fat fines"), and mandatory loss of Internet access would be more appropriate.
I think the quote about spam being a major threat to the stability of the internet is taking it a little far. It might be more than a minor annoyance, but I don't think it's actually going to cause major outages/delays in service. All the traffic genrated by one one spam message is less than the amount it generally takes to display 1 web page...
Spam is a problem, but it's not going to bring the internet to its knees anytime soon...
Be careful what you wish for... What if your p0rn is going 'merely' being 'passed through' VA and happens to be against their laws?
I want a new world. I think this one is broken.
I hope that the SPAM either originated or was delivered in Virginia (though possibly by zombie machines in Virginia), because you have no control over where something is being routed.
It'd be a very sticky situation if you had to ensure that whatever you did was legal through every jurisdiction that traffic went through. So the line was down and it got routed over Virginia *this week*. Oh fun, new legal statutes to adhere too, wii..
Kjella
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
Carefull.
What happens when some state inacts a 'no porn' law, and you send a picture of a naked women to your friend, but it happens to get routed through the 'no porn' state?
This is wrong.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Not if the originating servers were located in Virginia. Many spammers are located in the U.S., but use offshore servers, so they are not entirely in violation of local law. That's why I maintain a legal solution will never work, only a global technological effort to deny spammers the resources.
If someone did as much damage to the phone system as spammers are doing to email, they would be labeled terrorists and imprisoned/executed.
These days the professional spammers control an army of trojan infected zombies running proxies that completely anonymize the source and zombies that they use to DDoS Spamhaus. You could track it back one more hop with a honeypot, but that's just one more hop. Sounds pretty criminal to me. Lots of crackers have been sent to prison for less than that.
Your email travels through lots of routers in lots states during it's delivery. So who gets to prosecute? The state with the most stringent anti-spam measures, I would assume. But making this sort of distinction sets precedence for things OTHER than spam: for example decency/access laws w.r.t. adult materials.
And at some point in the future, this may extend to deciding who gets to levy state taxes on an electronic purchase. Buyer's state? Business's state? Location of the webserver? Warehosue? They may point to this case and say: in the course of an Interstate transaction, computers critical to the transaction completing in XYZ state are enabling commerce, and thus the transaction is subject to XYZ state's tax laws.
Once you start recognizing the computers in-between the end points of a transaction, you open yourself up to all sorts of state legislation designed to take advantage of internet traffic.
This may be a little premature an assessment, however, because the article doesn't say whether or not the spammer spammed AOL customers, in which case it's a direct offense on a business located in VA... this does not set precedence because if that were the case, AOL would be the endpoint of the spamming (regardless of whether the spammee is in another state as well, having yet to download it). For all we know, the filters caught the spam, it never reached the customers, and AOL reported it to the police.
THIS THING CAN TURN ON A DIME, MACROSSZERO STYLE ALSO FUCK BETA, ~NYORON
Do you really think the investigators would be so incompetent as to boot off the harddisk in question, thus allowing such a dead man's lock to activate?
On second thought...
I suffer from attention surplus disorder.
- Protesting about his First Amendment Rights being squashed
- Abused as a child
- Private conversations were taped without his permission
- Roughed up when arrested
- Evidence was planted
- Friends and family all claim he is 'a really nice guy'
Did I miss anything?
Of course, it might encourage people to keep their systems patched. Perhaps if they can't prove intent to spam, there could be a lesser penalty...? I suppose if someone cracks your system, you can consider your computer "stolen" from you, but you still have physical control. Is that "possession of stolen goods"? ;)
"The biggest problem with communication is the illusion that it has taken place."
you're saying there's something wrong with american law? heaven forfend!
The fact is, if people don't know someone, they are more likely to vote the existing guy, even if he's a schmuck, because they don't know enough to say the other guys are better. Therefore, toward the end of the election is when it counts for people to see a new face. If they haven't seen someone for 30 days, they are just going to go with the guy they know. The way that new guys get in is by keeping their name out there for the last 30 days.
All of the media outlets want this passed, too, because it doesn't place any restrictions on them. Therefore, they have no accountability to facts. If they want to totally smear a candidate, they can, and the candidate can't respond.
In order to correct these failings, they are going to enact legislation to have publicly-funded campaigns. Well, if everyone gets a publicly-funded soapbox, it will cost too much. This will wind up meaning that the government gets to choose the candidates that they will give money, too, making the problem even worse. You may think that I'm just guessing on this paragraph, but in fact it's already being discussed (publicly-funded elections, that is).
We really need to get rid of our supreme court justices and put in people that will uphold the Constitution AS WRITTEN. If you don't like everything in the constitution as it's written, that's fine, that's what the AMENDMENT process is for. The Constitution is a changeable document and does not need the "dynamic interpretation" (that's Sandra O'Connor's word) that the supreme court justices are trying to give it. If you want to change something in there, make an amendment. Don't use the courts to circumvent a well-established process.
You should read Justice Skalia's dissenting opinion.
Engineering and the Ultimate
Assume each spam takes five seconds to download, identify, and delete. Many spammers send out billions of messages per year. That means that they waste several lifetimes per year. Do the math.