USA, UK, Australia Sign Anti-Spam Memorandum

securitas writes "Computerworld's Todd R. Weiss reports that the USA, Britain and Australia have signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) for six agencies to share resources to fight spam. The MoU lets the government agencies 'share information and work together to detect, investigate and track spammers' as well as 'exchange evidence and coordinate enforcement efforts.' The agencies involved include the US Federal Trade Commission (FTC), its counterparts in the UK and Australia, and several other consumer protection agencies. You can get a full list of participating government bodies from the FTC press release, 'Consumer Protection Cops Join Forces to Fight Illegal Spam'. You can also get the spam MoU full text in PDF format from the FTC. More at The Register, vnunet, The Age/Sydney Morning Herald and InfoWorld."

Comments

Potential for misuse?

[bhmit1]

share information and work together to detect, investigate and track spammers

So is this just forming some back channels to track anyone, or are their limits to ensure that only spammers are tracked. And if there are limits, how do they define a spammer?

I just got back from holiday...

[danormsby]

I just got back from a week long holiday to find 226 e-mails of which 170 were spam. I used to get far less but now my out-of-office (as enforced by company policy) replies automatically to spam stating I'm away thus reenforcing the fact that my e-mail address is a real and active one therefore even more spam gets directed at it. :-(