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Spammer Sentencing Guidelines Released
jfengel writes "The United States Sentencing Commission has issued its guidelines for punishment under the CAN-SPAM act (PDF, beginning on page 155). You can get 5 years for a second offense or if you're spamming for fraud, child porn or other felony, or 1 to 3 years depending on how much spam you send. If Congress doesn't say otherwise, it goes into effect November 1."
Unenforceable overseas.
Still those spammers have to be caught don't they? I think it's time for all of us to see that just introducing a new law will never again be enough to stop determined, persistent, and, worst of all, quite clever folks among them do what they can. Compared with the money you still can make spamming around, 5 years are nothing, and for child porn you get even more (money, that is...).
Black holes were created when god tried to divide by zero
Lately I've been thinking about sentencing, and I see people complain about how it's unfair that non-violent crimes get just as much time as, say, a man plowing over another person at 90 mph. And then we see the CAN-SPAM act, and think that these people should get MORE time than that. It makes me wonder if our view of sentencing being linearly or otherwise correlated to the aspect of the crime is wrong.
Entire companies whose anti-spam products are sold at substantial profit to businesses would go out of business forcing them to lay off their employees.
True, but their profits don't come out of thin air. Other companies could pay for more employees if their costs for anti-spam, anti-virus, etc. software weren't as high as they are. Add the costs for bandwidth (almost never free for companies), wasted time, annoyance (which results in lower productivity) etc. - then do the math.
I'm sure your result will show that without spam, the economy as a whole is better off than with.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
I don't know what kind of email accounts you all have, but I rarely get spam, and when I do, the filters pick it up. Sure it's annoying, but it's really not that big of a deal. We need better filtering, if anything, not 'better' legislation. I can't understand how the same people who want to keep the internet free of government influence are supporting laws to crucify spammers. Maybe after we tackle the spam problem, we can lock up those damn haxorz for life and censor all that indecent content out there. And, actually, let's do it for the whole world, not just the US.
As sick and hateful as we all find it, legit spamming (in large numbers) does seem to produce income, although it also produces dire hatred by all. It's disgusting, because the real truth here is that spamming actually targets the demigraphic of people who are truly most likely to spend their large quantities of hard-earned, overvalued, stamped, signed paper & plastic: old people in retirement, impressionable people, and young people with access to $. ... hmmm ... (imagine Gameworks spamming people with deals to take to the nearest arcade ? Or I remember for awhile that the Toyota dealer in my area had an insane family deal, buy one actual car, get the next for a dollar -- truth ! I wanted to split the cost with a friend, but neither of us had enough to pay.) Initially, I thought, "hey, this is great ... if they're just going after spammers who scam, I'll have to read more on it," but if you spam, then you're either ignoring the demigraphic, or don't care about it.
I wouldn't have much of a problem with it if it were not for the malicious nature that is ingrained within those who use it. (And in fact I analyzed what I would need to do to start it, until realizing that the services would be abused to take advantage of those who can't help themselves.) If it were more reliable and better structured, I'd feel okay with it. After all, there are hands down, enough ways to efficiently deal with it and cut down on it. A legal protocol for a spam-newsgroup system where people can filter them to various folders would be of interest to me
I hate spam, not for the fact that it hounds many of my emails with 3-10 messages per day, but because of the people who are literally preyed upon by it for their money. That is reason enough for spammers to spend jail-time, and lots of it. The government didn't go far enough.
--I gots 99 problems but a new machine ain't one!
AMD! Asus! Whoot! 6 years!
Capital punishment also happens to be barbaric according to the standards of most civilized nations on earth.
The owls are not what they seem
How about tacking on a little "not allowed to use computer systems" after the 2nd offense?
The War on Spam sounds great, and I'm sure every citizen is happy their politicians are taking such draconian measures. Ditto for the spam fighters, who will get nice shiny boxes and new powers to help in the fight. But it won't work and for simple reasons.
One: spammers have huge networks of zombied computers at their disposal and can send spam almost entirely undetectably.
Two: this legislation does not affect the companies actually selling their products via spam. Thus it simply acts as a darwinian filter, eliminating the spammers stupid enough to remain in US jurisdiction and allow their identities to be tracked (see point one).
Three: there are already more effective ways to get the consumers' attention, and by legislating against spam, these will simply become more used. Mainly, I'm thinking of spyware/trojans like CoolWebSearch.
A realistic attack on spam and the rest must be focussed on the people paying for such services, i.e. advertisers. They must be liable for the cost and moral damage their marketing causes, as in any other domain. Further we need some changes to the policy of "receiver pays" which is the basic reason why spam exists at all.
But as so often, this attack on spammers is too little, too late, and ignores what is a much more serious problem: spyware, trojans, and worms that spread via security holes in MSIE and Windows.
Ceci n'est pas une signature
So imagine when someone's Gramma, running a virus infected computer on (for argument's sake) Comcast, get's arrested and convicted for spamming.
She goes to Computer-Repair-Center and fixes her computer. But they don't put all the most recent Microsoft patches. 10 days later, she's arrested for spamming, again.
Is she the victim, or the perpetrator? Clearly the SPAM is being sent from her computer.
Any jury will see that she is not actively involved, but she is enabling the actions of the SPAMmers. Is CAN-SPAM written in a way to clearly differentiate gramma from a SPAM company?
Kinetic stupidity has a new brand leader: Allen Zadr.
This is a bad, dumb, wrong law that won't work and will only be used by crackhead prosecutors to harass their political enemies.
Real spammers will simply move their base to a country that won't extradite them and has good broadband connections. Like maybe some island in the middle of the Pacific that acts as a supply and maintenence station for the major trans-oceanic internet cables. So this law won't do anything to reduce the amount of spam that gets to your PC.
I call it a 'Yuppie' law because it's one of those 'feel good' laws that make Baby Boomer mommies believe that they're solving a problem but in reality has exactly the opposite effect of what they're trying to achieve. Because the definition of spam here is so broad, the law can be used by prosecuters ( in the USA these are the government's lawyers who file charges against citizens in the courts. Unlike most other countries, in the USA, the courts are a seperate division of government from the police and the police are subject to the law as interpreted by the courts) to go after people for their lifestyle. For instance anyone sending an e-mail about an out-of-favor political position or an announcement of a demonstration could be sent to prison under a broad interpretation of an anti-spam law. And the present government of the USA is really big on broad interpretation for laws against people that it doesn't like.
So this law is stupid and worthless for what it's supposed to do, and provides a broad weapon to be used indiscriminately against citizens.
So why would anyone on Slashdot support it?
RickHunter wrote
The problem with fining the companies offering the products/services is that you've then handed their competition a great way to get rid of them. Having trouble beating a rival in the market? Hire a direct marketer in Russia, say, to send out ten million mails, carefully targetted to include government and law enforcement officers in their jurisdiction claiming to be selling their service. Watch them implode under the fines.
Kjella wrote:
Quite simply, it's neither practically or legally possible to skip establishing the chain of events. To take a classic example, referral scams. It's the referer that is misleading them to the site, not the site itself.
I disagree with both of you. All I have to do is follow the Deep Throat Watergate Principle: follow the money. All I have to do is purchase one of the products or services and follow the chain through the payment processors all the way to the source. There will be a nice money trail. That's why I said "the vendors or their payment processors in my previous post.
Cheers,
Eugenehttp://eugeneciurana.com | http://ciurana.eu
We should put these guys to work doing human spam filtering. Sure, it sounds like a recipe for disaster, but just tie their pay to their performance. Let through an ad for grey-market software at huge discounts? Looks like you're gonna have to get friendly with Bubba if you want your cigarettes this week. Of course you also spot-check their rejects. Drop the email from the ex asking if you wanna get drinks some time? TWO WEEKS IN SOLITARY!
In all seriousness, 5 years ago I would have said that multi-year prison sentences for spamming would be extreme, at least in cases without other crimes involved. On its face, it's still extreme, but these guys now hold an entire communication system hostage. If sending several of them to prison for their transgressions (which ARE transgressions) can be a deterrent, then I'm for it. I think it really will be a deterrent if we can get some convictions. It's not like people spam in a brief burst of anger. These people generally have some business or technical skills that could find them legitimate employment (perhaps somewhat less lucrative, but above the poverty line) even in the lousy tech economy. I hear the porn industry does well when the economy is lousy. I'm sure my mom would much rather I manage a (legitimate) porn server farm than a spam server farm anyway.
WARNING: there is a trojan on your
While my original post was about a kid who Emails the entire internet about the lemonade stand he's putting up next week (or some other innocuous example), there's another issue I see as well...
You know its not that easy to email "the entire internet". When was the last time you got an innocuous spam?
So imagine when someone's Gramma, running a virus infected computer on (for argument's sake) Comcast, get's arrested and convicted for spamming.
I guess you kind of hope that the law enforcement have an ounce of brain and only arrests/convicts the actual spammer.
How about a war on overreaction of an impotent legislature.
We have here a crime (since 2004-01-01) that causes, at most, annoyance.
It's very politically correct these days to hate spam. But, frankly, it's the kind of hatred that's reserved for rude drivers, cell-phone wielding restaraunt patrons and the like.
Plenty of examples have already been posted about the little old lady with the virus-infected computer or the kid with the lemonade stand. I'll not pile on here.
Who among us has asked "we the people" to throw somebody in prison for being a pain in the ass?
Dontcha think that's a little harsh?
Death penalty for parking violations and all that.
It's the responsiblity of "we, the people" to create justifiable penalties for offences, and then enforce them.
The excuse "it's too hard to catch these guys" does not justify cutting the balls off of the poor bastard we do nab.
Society at large (we call "the law") has to follow some rules, too. No unreasonable search and seizure. No cruel or unusual punishment. No taking of life, liberty, or property without due process.
"War on" [drugs, terror, drunk driving], and now spam seems, however, to absolve "we, the people" from restrictions against abuse of the individual.
"Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, it doesn't go away." - Philip K. Dick
Who said anything about that? Take, for example, everyone's favorite company, Softare Monolith M. Now, M's got this problem with company A - specifically, A's eating into their profits and causing problems by blocking off other markets they want to expand into. M is too used to being a monopoly, and so their corporate structure simply can't handle competition.
Fortunately, there are anti-spam laws in place in the country where M and A reside. These laws, as the original poster suggested, mandate penalties - either per-e-mail or per-batch - for any company who spams. So, M goes and pays a bunch of companies in foreign country R to send off a huge amount of spam mail, claiming to be from A about their product. M makes sure that this spam is targetted so as to be sure to attract the attention of those in charge of enforcing said law.
Now, as far as anyone can tell, company A was responsible for this mail. Neither A nor the spammer would be expected to keep detailed records, as spam is illegal in A's home country. M, of course, wouldn't keep any records. All the e-mail system knows is that this spammer sent all this mail advertising stuff for company A. So, in the eyes of the above law, A is guilty of spamming. Since company M, with pocket change, has bought enough spam for the fines to put A out of business, M disposes of a competitor without getting their hands dirty or even adversely affecting their own finances.
See what that kind of law's dumb now? You either have to assume they're guilty because there's spam advertising their product, or assume they're innocent and wind up with a totally worthless law.
On the other hand Italy has a law (since September 2003), which seeks up to 3 years in jail and fines up to 90.000 Euros!
Guess, which law I find better? Jail-time would be payed by us, the innocent citizen, while fines weight on the offenders pocket!
A small gripe about your particular example... The purchase of a new bike helmet is almost entirely subsidized by the insurance carrier; a budget of 50 dollars per helmet is usually allowed for every single member of the family, so buying a helmet costs someone who has health insurance absolutely nothing. Of course, the poor people in your example might not have health insurance; but in that case, they have bigger problems to worry about. Another way to look at it is the poor parents see the ubiqitious warning signs about biking without a helmet on every bike and actually purchase the kid a bike so they won't have to pay a stiff fine later. Lots of ways to look at the problem besides the liberterian lens.
And how much do we as a society end up paying out when some poor kid (whose mom has no insurance) destroys himself because she is not wise enough to prioritize her funds to purchase things to protect him? I oppose "protect you from yourself" legislation as much as you do, but for an entirely different reason--not because of yuppies. I could actually give a damn if someone wants to darwinize their kids out of the gene pool, I can't stop it, I can't be there to help, and they would most likely dislike me anyway. But one thing is for sure--I sure as shit don't want to pay for it. Seatbelt laws are another example. Yeah, I don't like being told what to do, but there are people out there far dumber than you or I, and with far worse judgement and reflexes. Firemen and paramedics are payed out of our taxes. If someone doesn't have enough sense to enact a little bit of self-preservation and wear a seatbelt, they shouldn't receive the benefit of modern science trying to save their life, at my expense. It's not my fault they're dumb and dead, and I never got a chance to talk any sense into them.
Apparently some kid darwined himself by running out into traffic and the idiots in Sacramento thought "I'll make sure that never happens again!" Nevermind that in decades of public transportation this was a freak accident.
Religion is a gateway psychosis. -- Dave Foley