FBI Plans Spammer Smackdown

An anonymous reader writes "ZDNet News reports: '...the FBI told Congress on Thursday that it has 'identified over 100 significant spammers' so far and is targeting 50 of the most noxious for potential prosecution later this year.' and that '...an 'initiative is being projected for later this year in which it is anticipated that criminal and civil actions under the Can-Spam Act of 2003 will be included.'"

Comments

Same old...

[bendelo]

Your post advocates a

( ) technical ( ) legislative ( ) market-based (*) vigilante

approach to fighting spam. Your idea will not work. Here is why it won't work. (One or more of the following may apply to your particular idea, and it may have other flaws which used to vary from state to state before a bad federal law was passed.)

( ) Spammers can easily use it to harvest email addresses
( ) Mailing lists and other legitimate email uses would be affected
(*) No one will be able to find the guy or collect the money
(*) It is defenseless against brute force attacks
(*) It will stop spam for two weeks and then we'll be stuck with it
( ) Users of email will not put up with it
( ) Microsoft will not put up with it
( ) The police will not put up with it
(*) Requires too much cooperation from spammers
( ) Requires immediate total cooperation from everybody at once
( ) Many email users cannot afford to lose business or alienate potential employers
( ) Spammers don't care about invalid addresses in their lists
( ) Anyone could anonymously destroy anyone else's career or business

Specifically, your plan fails to account for

( ) Laws expressly prohibiting it
(*) Lack of centrally controlling authority for email
(*) Open relays in foreign countries
( ) Ease of searching tiny alphanumeric address space of all email addresses
(*) Asshats
(*) Jurisdictional problems
( ) Unpopularity of weird new taxes
( ) Public reluctance to accept weird new forms of money
( ) Huge existing software investment in SMTP
( ) Susceptibility of protocols other than SMTP to attack
( ) Willingness of users to install OS patches received by email
(*) Armies of worm riddled broadband-connected Windows boxes
( ) Eternal arms race involved in all filtering approaches
(*) Extreme profitability of spam
( ) Joe jobs and/or identity theft
( ) Technically illiterate politicians
(*) Extreme stupidity on the part of people who do business with spammers
(*) Dishonesty on the part of spammers themselves
( ) Bandwidth costs that are unaffected by client filtering
( ) Outlook

and the following philosophical objections may also apply:

(*) Ideas similar to yours are easy to come up with, yet none have ever
been shown practical
( ) Any scheme based on opt-out is unacceptable
( ) SMTP headers should not be the subject of legislation
( ) Blacklists suck
( ) Whitelists suck
(*) We should be able to talk about Viagra without being censored
( ) Countermeasures should not involve wire fraud or credit card fraud
(*) Countermeasures should not involve sabotage of public networks
( ) Countermeasures must work if phased in gradually
( ) Sending email should be free
( ) Why should we have to trust you and your servers?
( ) Incompatiblity with open source or open source licenses
(*) Feel-good measures do nothing to solve the problem
( ) Temporary/one-time email addresses are cumbersome
( ) I don't want the government reading my email
(*) Killing them that way is not slow and painful enough

Furthermore, this is what I think about you:

(*) Sorry dude, but I don't think it would work.
( ) This is a stupid idea, and you're a stupid person for suggesting it.
( ) Nice try, assh0le! I'm going to find out where you live and burn your
house down!

Skeptical

[ralphb]

I'll believe that this stupid law is having a positive effect when I start getting less spam. Hasn't happened yet.

Re:Skeptical

[Otter]

Geez, and people wonder why the government is prone to grandstanding and empty gestures, or to policies written for them by lobbyists. They pass a sensible, cautious law, monitor violations and prepare to bring legal action against violators. And all they get is complaints that the magic anti-spam fairies haven't been deployed yet.

Basically, what the crowd here seems to want is that:

• Spammers should be summarily shot.
• To accomplish that, Internet anonymity should be eliminated for spammers, while not affecting the rest of us.
• Any such policy must apply to the entire world. Instantly.
• Oh, and if anyone can think of a way by which a single spam might slip through, a proposal is obviously worthless and the person who proposed it is a techno-illiterate simpleton.

And then you wonder why the legislators and regulators don't listen to nerds.

I got scammed by all the spams..

[brxndxn]

Good! My penis never got any larger. Horny wives never had sex with me. My prescriptions for Xanax never arrived. My cheap version of Windows XP wouldn't activate. My home loans never came through. Michelle's page made just for me had 900,000 visits and I'm beginning to think she is cheating on me...

They're all scammers - a bunch of spamming scammers they are!!

Re:Yes but

[meringuoid]

That's very nice, but the fact remains that 90% of all spam originates from countries that are out of the FBI's jurisdiction. What are they going to do about it?

90% of spam is sent from servers outside the FBI's jurisdiction. That doesn't mean it originated there: it's sent by Americans who are offering products in America to an American market and expecting to be paid in American dollars to an American bank.

Unless the spammer is prepared personally to move overseas, sooner or later the matter comes into the FBI's jurisdiction.

And since when does being in a foreign country mean you can flout US law? Dmitri and Jon found that out to their cost. Criminals beware: you can no longer hide behind the figleaf of foreign national sovereignty!