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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."
For plain advertising - Five Years is actually a decent sentance. It's really too bad that, technically, it's so difficult to catch a spammer. Especially if they route through international hosts. Sadly, this is likely to have the worst effect on those that are not technologically savvy, and know the least about how Email works.
To me, those types of people are the least of the SPAM problem.
Kinetic stupidity has a new brand leader: Allen Zadr.
What to you count as an "offense"? I would expect all spammers have sent more than 2 spam messages. Do you have to be caught, let off scott free, and then caught again before anything happens? Sounds like an easy ride to me...
I'm more concerned with the rules of evidence that we need in order to bring these losers to court. The judicial system needs to produce a more concrete set of guidelines for what the average joe needs to bring to a law enforcement official (and which law enforcement office) in order to get convictions!
I place spammers right below murderers and birthday party clowns, but aren't these sentences a bit overkill?
Sometimes I wonder if the prison overcrowding problems aren't because they toss out 5 year sentences like candy to spammers (soon), hackers, and people who get caught with a single joint. Meanwhile the cliche of "rapist out in 3 years" continues to remain valid.
Is it all becoming about profits?
To prosecute, just follow the link.
I would agree, but in my view, at least two of these punishments should apply for each offence.
Sent from my ASR33 using ASCII
They need the 2nd offense to be punished by chemical castration, as in the pourig of the gentals in caustic chemicals.
Totally wrong attitude. What is needed is not vicious punishments, but certainty of getting caught. If you could prove quickly and cheaply that 1) This is spam, and 2) He sent it, you wouldn't need massive punishments. $1000 fine, or maybe a week in gaol, would do fine. Spammers spam for money, not for fun. If you make spamming financially unviable, it will end.
What we need is a good way of letting honest, opt-in, mass mailers prove their honesty, at low cost. I enjoy quite a few mail-lists which use the fact that email is near zero cost to tell me things about things I am interested in.
Suppose we have a mechanism whereby bona-fide newsletter senders can cheaply (say no more than $50) register themselves. Then we can say of any other bulk emailer "He sent to more than 1000 recipients. Book him, Danno".
Certainty of punishment is much more effective than magnitude of punishment.
Consciousness is an illusion caused by an excess of self consciousness.
A 'Yuppie' (from 'Young Urban Professional') law is any emotional law that is passed to enforce a lifestyle affection primarily of the young and upper-middle class on the poor and lower-middle class people. It gives the Yuppie do-gooders the impression that they have addressed what they precieve to be a 'social problem' without actually doing anything about in the real world and often making the underlying problem worse.
An example would be the law that requires all children to wear bicycle helmets. Fine for yuppie mommies, they're the first to buy anything that might help protect precious little Megan and Justin. But bad for the children of the poor.
Say a cop sees a poor kid on a bicycle without a helmet. He stops the kid and gives him a big (more than $100) ticket that his parents must pay or lose their driver's license. [I know, there's no connection between the two in the real world. But yuppie mommies love to come up with creative and nasty little ways to make the poor people improve themselves i.e. see things from a yuppie mommy prespective]
The parents can't afford a $100 helmet for the kid -and- pay the ticket. So they tell the kid on the threat of a beating not to get caught by the cops for riding around the neighborhood without a helmet.
So the next time that the cops are around and see the kids riding without helmets, the kids take off in the opposite direction. Being kids, they don't look where they're going and dive right out into traffic where they get hit by a car.
The good yuppie mommies point to this incident as a reason for all kids to wear helmets and to increase the penalities on the parents of the working class children to 'encourage them to make the right choices for their children's safety'.
I know, I know, that you're all going to tell me what a shit I am and how this doesn't make any sense and , of course, kids NEED helmets and what a stupid jerk I am and how I have a serious attitude problem and how I could certainly benefit from counseling and how my own kids deserve a better parent than me and everything else...
It doesn't change the fact that we don't need any more yuppie mommie laws. You need to consider the possible side effects of any law will have before you endorse passing it.
Thank you,
For a long time, I agreed spam is a problem, but I never had more than a couple dozen a day, easy enough to delete. Until this year... now I've had the same email address on my site for years now, and I always disguised it to help against spam bots, but something happened in the last six months. I started getting 10-12 spams EVERY TIME my mail client checked my mail at ten minute intervals. and I was only getting worse.
I switched hosts and had access to install SpamAssassin. Now it catches about 600 spams mails and spam mails to addresses that don't exist on my site a DAY. And still, more and more are making it through to my inbox just because of the sheer volume. And SpamAssassin has gotten a couple of real mails caught in it, but now the volume is so high I can't skim the sorted spam to double check, so I just hope anything that gets caught isn't important.
Unless they either find a way to stop it via legislation, or changing how email works to make it more secure and harder to abuse, and ISPs are pressured to not let spammers use their services, they are going to render the email system completely unusable. My business is online, I can't use a whitelist -- I have to be able to get email from potential clients and customers easily. I shouldn't have to go to this much trouble just to use email, it just isn't right.
My Webcomic: Asylum on 5th Street
A senseless waste of our tax dollars. This won't work because spammers know how to hide behind hijacked computers and open relays, etc.. Having glanced through these guides I couldn't help thinking how easy it would be to distrubute spam containing child pornography while posing as your competitor.
It's ironic that our elected officials can't take on tough issues like health care but seem to have plenty of time to pen 161 pages of rendantly abominable extraneous verbosity.
We've had the DMCA, now it's CAN-SPAM. What troubles me about these laws is that they're ineffectual. People will copy DVDs and distribute them, others will send unsolicited advertisements to any email address they can get. Relax people. This is no biggy. For the domains I manage I get about 1500 emails/day (webmaster, postmaster, admin, etc.) but I use a spam filter and a procmail script to deal with it.
What we're asking here is for the government to control what comes into our inboxes. I'm sure CAN-SPAM will be tied up in the courts for years over it's implications on the First Amendment. The whole thing is a waste of society's resources.
Though this is a rather redundant message i just want to second the prior statement.
Jails in US(and in general all over the world) are overcrowded, and too many gets jail time for doing stupid stuff that doesn't endanger anyone.
And yes, i even feel that the Enron people shouldn't go to jail, What would the use be? A better option would be for the Enron people to give the money to a fund for all the people that got laid off. So they could get money both now(till they get a new job, and for training), and for when they retire. Putting them in jail serves no one.
And the same stands for spammers. Spammers are annoying, but they dont hurt anyone. Someone killing another person is a danger, reserve prisons to them. And force the rest to give up alot of money, and(if appliable) go through some program that would make them behave better in the future.
Prison doesn't help people stop doing crime, prison only keep the criminals away from the public. And whats the need of keeping a spammer away from the public. If he learns his lesson(in any appliabel way), he wont hurt anyone again, and jail is just a waste of money and space.
Jails should only be used for people that harm people, not just annoy them. People who wont stop annoying(spamming, stealing money) should also go to jail, since they wont learn to behave. But give them a chance first.
Sorry for the redundancy of this post, and the redundancy in this post. And sorry for the errors(spelling, grammar) i have made, i am rather drunk.
Tobias Ussing http://www.nearby.dk
I know perfectly well that this is probably illegal. However, we all know that now spammers generally send their trash through 0wn3d Windoze computers. Is is not possible to write a slowly-propagating virus (One that will NOT cause the network to slow to a crawl) that will search out and destroy spam/spy/ad-ware on the computer?
There is no way to find the bastards or stop them from sending their trash without getting rid of their zombie networks. If you eliminate those, you might as well break their electronic kneecaps.