Slashdot Mirror
Defending Harsh Sentences for Spammers
BMcWilliams writes "Russell McGuire, one of the government lawyers who prosecuted spammer Jeremy Jaynes, has published an article justifying the tough sentence recommended by a Virginia jury. He writes, 'the defense attorney argued that greed cuts both ways and the victims got what they deserved because they were trying to get rich quick. Needless to say, this did not go over well with the jury.' Still, the eye-popping 9-year sentence has even some ardent anti-spammers wondering whether 'proportionality is becoming a completely forgotten concept.'"
And what is the defense attorney e-mail address?
So, how much did it work out *per spam*? A couple of seconds, if that? If "it takes a second" to hit delete, then that's a reasonable sentence for each spam.
so they got of lightly...
If Google really cared they would fix Android Chrome to reflow text, instead of discriminating
It doesn't need to be said that you can get off with a lighter sentence for killing someone. This just goes to show that we're too quick to lock people in cages these days. Why not have them give back to the community or something constructive?
and go to jail for nine years. Drive a car drunk, sell crack, or commit rape and serve far less (or even any) time. I love this country.
the amount and cost of the bandwidth they stole, nine years is about right.
12:50 - press return.
Well maybe the victims did deserve everything they got, but two wrongs do not make a right in America. (Guantanamo Bay is in Cuba)
Proportionality be damned. They're out for blood and need to make an example of him. What I have been wondering is why spammers even need to spend time in jail. Wouldn't a large fine be in order and serve the same purpose? Do we really need more non-violent criminals crowding up our jails and costing taxpayers even more money?
"On a scale from 1 to 10, people are stupid"
Seriously, the guy has cost thousands and tens of thousands of dollars in manhours from his activities, defrauded dozens of folks to the tune of millions of dollars. This isn't about having to hit the delete key in my InBox one more time. Spam has a very real cost and pain associated with it and that is what anti-spam adovates try and focus on not just "It's really annoying".
Yes, spamming is not comparable to rape. It is white collar crime. However, the solution is not to go all powder puff on these people. If a rapist convicted at the same time as a spammer will get out of prison earlier than the spammer, guess what. The spammer is not in for too long, the rapist is not in for long enough.
Does the 9-year sentence reduce spam? Keep doubling the sentence until spam stops.
Spam isn't victimless, and it isn't done accidentally. It is professional crime, done on purpose and with pre-meditation.
Did anyone get hurt? Die? There was a child molester in our local community who recently was sent away for 10 years - is that only a little worse than a spammer?
I know, some people will say yes. I hate spam too . But jail time - in a country that has the fastest growing inmate population in the world - over a few billion electronic bits?
I can understand bankrupting them, and even a few months of jail time - but NINE YEARS? ARE THEY INSANE?? What next, 5 years jail for pirating and providing a commercial OS?? (Sorry, just because you didn't understand that P2P means you are distributing content is no excuse..)
Seriously, where does it all end?
As someone who has to deal with endless user complaints on the subject, I see nothing wrong with public executions for spammers. That way they won't take up valuable jail space.
Are these same laws also going to be applied against TV adverts, newspaper adverts, advertising in general?
What is the difference between spamming and advertising?
You could argue that you buy a TV/newspaper expecting to see adverts, but surely that can be taken to be the case with e-mail now?
Than you can for rape, or causing death by dangerous driving, etc, then there's something wrong with the justice system.
It's official. Most of you are morons.
I'm not so worried about proportion that I'm willing to let them ruin the internet. I think this was a good first start - hopefully the next one is tougher.
But this is slashdot. A slashdoter who didn't build his own computer is like a Jedi who didn't build his own lightsaber!
Rape is usually about 5-20 years, isn't it? I agree that 9 years is a little extreme for spamming.
The problem with our society is that we can't figure out a better way to punish people than to put them in jail for a decade or so and let them think about what they did. We're not quakers, for the love of God. Why can't we just:
1.) Take all the money paid to him for spamming,
2.) Fine the companies that paid him to spam, give as much of that money back to the gullible suckers as we can, and
3.) Give him 50 lashes and tell him he's not allowed to use email for 5 years.
Last week my neighbour's brat rang my door bell then ran away.
I demand at least 5 years in prison as it's not the first time he did that and I'm not the only victim.
I don't need a signature.
The spammers in this case comitted many counts of fraud. If they'd been charged with that (which probably would have been a tougher case to make than proving they'd sent emails that hid their identity), they probably would have gotten a much longer sentence. Everyone, the spammers included, should be happy that the prosecuters decided to make an example of them for spamming instead of putting together a solid fraud case with a few thousand consecutive sentences.
Don't blame me; I'm never given mod points.
What jail sentence would a person receive for blowing up a million letterboxes ( I know I can't use my e-mail address anymore for the thousands of spams that come in every time I check my mail)?
What jail sentence would a person receive for putting hardcore pornography into a million letterboxes?
What jail sentence would a person receive for delivering unsolicited pornography to children?
What jail sentence would a person receive for causing massive civil disturbance that wastes hundreds of thousands of working hours?
What kind of person would do this? Is such a person safe to be walking the streets?
Spammers do all of this, and more. Maybe nine years is a light sentence.
1. Is this nine years in Supermax/leavenworth breaking rocks, or is it nine years in white-collar minimum security for dysfunctional mob accountants?
2. Certainly the criminals can get out earlier with good behaviour.
3. Porportionality, and the excess thereof, is the entire basis behind "prison" as a concept: we try to make that destination deplorable enough to try and discourage certain behaviours that society deems as "crimes".
4. These bozos made the mistake of committing a crime where the jurors themselves were also victims (indirectly). Stupid. Very, very stupid.
davejenkins.com |
I used the Wake County website to look up Jeremy's million-dollar home. We should send him some mail and see how he likes it : )
This a good example of why we probably don't need new laws. If they committed fraud then convict them of fraud, regardless of the mechanism. If they went phishing and stole money right out of accounts, then charge them accordingly. The sentences would then be more in line with expectations. However, one could argue that sentences are too short becuase they obviously aren't deterring enough. :-)
IANAL: Why do people think the different methods of committing a crime require different laws? Is murder by using a knife versus a crowbar defined and treated differently in the law books?
Keep the Classic Slashdot.
I'm sorry but I don't hate spammers because they want to get rich quick. The desire to get rich quick is a natural, healthy and legal one!
I hate spammers because they are lying, thieving scamming criminal bastards.
They hijack computers to send out millions of junk messages to millions of people. They do this to be anonymous and therefore unaccountable, and they use other people's bandwidth to send out their junk.
Some spammers send out pornographic email knowing damn well thousands of kids will end up with it in their inboxes, and they include spurious text in the messages to try to evade spam filters.
I would wager than 99% of all products they advertise via spam are fake or illegal. Anyone stupid or ignorant enough to buy anything from one of these criminals is simply encouraging them to annoy more and more people.
It's not about getting-rich-quick that I have the problem with, it's the way they go about it.
Sorry, but my karma just ran over your dogma.
Thank you!
Spam costs society big time.
People need to learn that spamming is just like selling drugs.
It may get you rich quick but it is very negative to society and in the end you will just go to jail for a LONG time...so don't do it.
(yes, I realize giving out 25 year sentences to coke dealers hasn't stopped drugs, but still that's no reason not punish them)
It was pretty clear from the article that these guys were also guilty of fraud. They had a 30% chargeback rate and from the description of what was involved in the chargebacks, I'm surprised 30% were that persistent.
I'm curious why fraud charges weren't stacked on top of all this.
I'm not complaining. 9 years for spamming. I just hope this guy isn't the last. I really want to see them go after as many of these guys as they can. Going after 1 isn't much of a deterrant. Going after dozens could be. It's not like there are as many big-time spammers as there are file sharers. You don't have to get that many convictions to start scaring them.
It's proportionate to the liklyhood of catching one of these idiots. If the odds of actually getting one in front of a jury is 1:N -to be an effective deterrant the penalty has to be a facor of N. Otherwise what's the threat?
If I make $10 dollars in a scam, and I have a 1 in 1000 chance of getting caught, a penalty of $10, $100, $1000 isn't enough.
Spammers like this are essentially guilty of false advertising, concealing their identity, digital identity theft, and flagrant misuse of public and private networks.
They suck time and bandwidth from system administrators, sell products they know don't work as advertised, make it difficult or impossible for customers to seek restitution, and wreak havoc on the digital lives of those they impersonate.
They're liars, thieves, swindlers, frauds, cheats, conmen. And like anyone in those professions, they justify it by insisting they're just "honest businessmen" and "let the buyer beware".
In the old days, people like this got tarred and feathered and run out of town tied to the back of a horse. If they were lucky.
Nine years is just long enough to teach a valuable lesson, if you ask me. If we're lucky the technology will have outstripped his ability to take advantage of it by then and he can go back to practicing shell games on city street corners.
Wasn't it obvious? People get charged with jaywalking, conspiracy to jaywalk, purchase of running shoes with intent to jaywalk, reckless jaywalking, disregarding traffic signals with intent to jaywalk, and end up pleading down to "just" a year.
"There's no way to rule innocent men. The only power any government has is the power to crack down on criminals. Well, when there aren't enough criminals, one makes them." - Ayn Rand
Not that spammers don't deserve jail time, but realize that we're quickly approaching a stage where everyone is guilty of something.
Spamming, or fraud. IIRC, they were actually found guilty of committing fraud. The fact that they spammed peoples mailboxes to find "easy marks" is by the by... Fraud is Fraud... and it carries a hefty punishment.
Donald 'Duck' Dunn: We had a band powerful enough to turn goat piss into gasoline.
You want to deter people from spamming? Isn't spamming that annoying that there ought to be harsh treatment?
If anything, instead of being too harsh, this simply shows sentences for other crimes are way too light.
Stupid sexy Flanders.
If I understand the principle correctly, prison is the place where you put people who can't function in society: the murderers and rapists of the world.
While spammers are a menace to online society, they're more than likely perfectly harmless in the real world. Fines, bans on internet use, these would be more appropriate punishments.
As for those who want to give money back to the gullible twats who lost money: I have a diametrically opposed view: fine people who respond to spam! If that one person per 100,000 or whatever didn't click on the damn link I wouldn't get 100 messages a day trying to sell me $29 penis enlargements. Oh, and *anyone* who' s willing to mess with their manhood with cheap products deserves what's coming to them.
I hope his fellow inmates really like spam and for best results the viagra ones. Can you imagine the *hard* time his going to get?
;)
"Come here bitch, i've got something for you"
I have no complaints about spammers selling dodgy things to gullible individuals. The only thing I complain about is them causing hassle to non-gullible individuals in the process. So I don't see the relevance of that argument.
In soviet russia stale jokes recycle you!
I hate spammers as much as the next guy, but I can not agree that the punishment should be equal to crimes of violence such as rape, murder, and assault. I would submit that the nature of the crime of spamming is to make a profit that the primary punishment should be a fine. In the case of successful drug convictions the dealer can loose their house, car, boat, and everything they used to traffic and store the drugs. While I don't wholly agree with many aspects of the war on drugs, I fully agree that profits made from illegal activities should be funneled back into crime prevention, education, and generally improving the quality of life.
There is no sanctuary. There is no sanctuary. SHUT UP! There is no shut up. There is no shut up.
This sends a good message. Future defendants will be much more willing to plea bargain for a lesser sentence, fines, etc. if they know they might get serious jail time.
Obviously I'm not privvy to any negotiations between the defense and the prosecutors, but it's a fair bet they were offered a deal in exchange for a guilty plea. They probably figured a they'd get a fine and a suspended sentence and go back to business.
a significant reduction in the SPAM they're receiving? At our organization (2500+ employees) the number of SPAMS went down by about 1/3 the day after this sentencing, and has stayed down ever since. Coincidence?
What about chat and message boards spamming... What about chat and message boards spamming... What about chat and message boards spamming... What about chat and message boards spamming... What about chat and message boards spamming... What about chat and message boards spamming... (sorry if this wasnt funny, feel free to mod down)
He should just send an apology email for each spam. That would certainly cut down on the problem.
Drive a car drunk enough times and you will go to jail the rest of your life as a serial criminal.
Same with any of the other crimes.
Personally, I think if we find someone selling crack and we know they are selling it for $5 a rock, and they have $500 on them, we should charge them for 100 instances of selling this item. Sure, all but the first is circumstantial, but people have been put to death for circumstantial evidence as well.
If you are a serial criminal and see nothing wrong with it, put them in prison for life. If we can prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that they were doing this -- far more than just Reasonable Guilt -- kill the fucker because there is no reason to keep someone alive that is flagrantly flaunting adherence to the law when they are never going to be able to be a productive member of society. I don't believe in the death penalty, but I do believe that if we have it, we need to be less hypocritical in its usage and make certain all wastes of life are treated as such.
They waste network bandwidth, most of which is paid by others. Server capacity is wasted with spam-filtering. Admins, developers & home users have to waste time on writing/deploying anti-spam software.
They make e-mail, a very useful internet resource, a lot less useful, and I view that as a form of vandalism.
Much of their work is done by breaking into other people's computers (zombie networks), which in itself is illegal in many places. Not to speak of other uses (DDoS attacks etc.) spammers may have for zombie networks they control.
Users don't want spam, there are laws against this, and even in the face of all this, spammers continue with their business on a massive scale. So sorry, but they deserve every punishment they get.
The sentence, although it seems fitting at times, is kind of harsh, couldn''t they have them doing something productive for the electronic community?
I think that their sentence should have been a cash sum to pay off the cost of prosecution and then make them build PCs for underprivledged people/ schools.
Hell, make them teach a class on identifying SPAM and phishing scams. They may not like it, but dang it they better do it and do it right, cuz THEN they go to the pokey.
Am I just being too hopeful? Maybe. But We have so little jail space, and so many more worthwhile sickos to lock up.
If I wrote something witty, you would say I stole it from somewhere.
Kill the fucker? for what serial crime exactly? Murder, or smoking pot?
Really - Hardly anyone genuinely cares about the time it takes to deal with spam, or the nadwdth it takes up. You're not really going to do anything productive with the extra time taken. I mean, come on!
The issue I have, and everyone else has is that it's simpyl really really rude. I have email for a specific purpose. I provide it for people to contact me. Having some jerk take advantage of this to try to sell me something - especially something that I didn't want in the first place - is simply extremely bad manners.
There are way civilised people behave. This is not one of them. If you want to advertise, provide me with something that benefits me.
The US has more people in jail as a percentage of the population than Russia.
I hate spammers as much as anyone but is this really who we want filling up our federal prisons?
That's our life, the big wheel of shit. - The Fat Man, Blue Tango Salvage
Damn right, but americans are too squeamish to
deliver 50 lashes.
Fines are unfair. They are nothing to the wealthy,
and the poor simply won't -- can't -- pay.
Jail is unfair. For the poor, it is free food and
housing. Oddly, the rich (see Martha Stewart) seem
to get off pretty easy too. The rich don't have
employment to worry about either.
It's always the middle class that suffers the most
from our current forms of punishment.
At least with lashes, you have to be one of a few
perverts to enjoy the punishment.
BTW, the rapist is kind of special. One could just
remove the offending body parts.
Actually, most murderers are being caught while thieves, such as pickpockets are rarely being caught.
According to your logic, the penalty for theft must be harder than for murder.
I don't need a signature.
In the same cell as a gay rapist. It should be enough for him to never spam again.
perception is reality
People keep running the comparison to violent crimes. So let's keep doing that and show what I think about it and how they compare.
Murder and rape are rarely, if ever, premeditated. When they are, the sentence is WAY beyond 9 years. Crimes of passion are handled in a much lighter way in most cases... as they should be.
Spamming and fraud are not crimes of passion -- they are more than simply premediated, they are planned to very small details. While committing the offense, they continue to show contempt by attempting to evade the people trying to stop them. This is a HUGE lack of respect for other people and for their property. A hefty fine and/or a short time in jail isn't going to teach the man some respect... but someone named Bubba that he might share his cell with might be able to do that over time.
Will he be in for 9? I doubt it... it's a state conviction... he'll be out in 3 or less. But he'll also belong to the state on parole for the remaining time... waiting, watching for him to do it again... and if he does, *SLAM!* -- deep shit.
More seriously, from reading the prosecutor's letter, it sounds like the jury gave the defendants a wire fraud sentence without actually convicting them of fraud. This ain't good -- if the prosecutors wanted to put the defendants away for a long time, they should have charged them with fraud as well as with spamming.
Of course, that's not the way the system works. In this case, the prosecutors got an incredibly long sentence and didn't have to prove the defendants engaged in fraud. (It also sounds like the defense lawyer let a lot of argumentation slide that wasn't directly germane to the case.) America, love it or fear it.
Added extra brownie points: Those nine years in prison are without a computer.
I can imagine the finger spasms now.
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
I realize our justice system all about law and completely devoid of ethics, but sometimes the jurys are allowed to inject some sanity. Spammers are FULLY AWARE that they're intruding on millions of people who won't want to be intruded upon. They shouldn't be doing it in the first place.
But then the legal system responds to citizen unrest and develops laws which try to restrict what spammers can do.
NOW, the spammer is flagrantly violating both ethics and the law. They're filling your inbox with thousands of unwanted emails, stealing half the available handwidth in the fastest networks, and costing people inordinate amounts of money, just so the spammer can scam 0.01% of his email recipients. AND THEY KNOW IT.
I think people should be hanged for such flagrant disregard for everyone else on the planet. 9 years in prison? He got off light.
Well, I was on a plane once filled with Zimbabweans (?), this big safari mofo and his 5 wives, and dear Lord, not one of them was under 200 pounds, and the smell in that little plane was overwhelming.
It's a simple fact that spam costs ISPs lots of money. If someone stole millions from AOL and got a 9 year sentence, no one would think twice. But if someone forces AOL to spend millions to block the unwanted spam, suddenly that's ok?! It makes no sense.
If someone says he and his monkey have nothing to hide, they almost certainly do.
The sentence isn't merely punishment for the crime. The sentence sends a clear message that SPAM is serious and it will not be tolerated. It not only punishes the spammer, but also acts as a deterrent to future spammers. Considering the purpose of the sentence, I think that it was perfectly reasonable.
Yep. The Commonwealth of Virginny doesn't do parole.
/. If the government wants us to respect the law, it should set a better example.
Do we really need more non-violent criminals crowding up our jails and costing taxpayers even more money?
Hang 'em first, try 'em later. -- Judge Roy Bean
My idea of a good sentence for spamming is 15 minutes.
Of course, that 15 minutes is spent in front of a webcam having the shit caned out of you, but, still , only 15 minutes.
www.eFax.com are spammers
Rape can carry a term of anywhere from 5 years to life, depending on the circumstances.
That may be the legal situation, in the real world:
Rape can carry a term of anywhere from 0 years to life, depending on how rich your are.
Multiply the number of messages, times the basic unit of the US currency, a penny, Plus the cost of the user's ISP, PC and etc. They did get off light. But they both should get the same sentence. Just because one has TiTs, is NO excuse.
I made the mistake of once having my email address on my web site. Just a few personal pages, nothing real visited much by anyone, been up for at least 9 year, maybe 4000 visitors since I put it up. My email is so swamped with spam at this point it isn't funny any more. An average day is 400 messages now, of which 2 or 3 are actual real messages. Thank god I have a good filter to deal with this crap. I keep the account because it is one that people know to reach me.
Kneecap the scumbags, cut their fingers off, and let them rot in a hole.
... cutting off his balls, feeding them to him, skinning him alive, and slowly burning him alive? That would be harsh
Is this nine years in Supermax/leavenworth breaking rocks, or is it nine years in white-collar minimum security for dysfunctional mob accountants?
It's 9 years in a federal ass pounding prison...
With 10 seconds spent downloading and removing each spam message, a spammer having sent one billion messages will have imposed 300 years of wasted time and irritation to his victims. Compared to that, nine years is a very light sentence !
if we could effectively exterminate all spam mail, but at the same time put a stop to all software piracy, would it be worth it?
personally i hate spam, but at the same time i pirate software like nobody's business... am i wrong to hate spam so much?
each are easily done and usually justified the same ways... anyone else pick up on this relation?
I see a lot of people saying things like "you do more time for rape and muder, so these sentences are disproportional". But the purpose of the criminal justice system is to try and make people comply with the law, not just to punish them for breaking it. Increasing the sentences for already serious crimes like rape and murder won't significantly affect the likelihood of people comitting those crimes, because of the nature of the crimes. On the other hand, if a crime like spamming is seen as a high-profit, low risk option (slap on the wrist and a fine), the law will be widely broken. It is therefore perfectly reasonable to impose hefty jailtime sentences to make sure spamming is not seen as a low-risk crime. Just my 2 cents.
Oh no... it's the future.
1. After the first conviction the spammer has his left hand chopped off with an axe if he is right handed, if he is left handed he has his right hand chopped off.
2. After the second conviction the spammer has his remaining hand chopped off with an axe. He now has no hands and will find sending spam to be a difficult task indeed!
3. After the third conviction the spammer is executed.
Ever drive faster than the speed limit? Ever fail to pay tax on something purchased across state lines? Ever taped a TV show and watched it more than a week later? Do you have all of your receipts for every taxable item for the last 7 years? Is viewing pr0n legal in your state?
We're all already criminals. It's a matter of being worth pursuing. There are no more free men, only men not worth catching.
-theed
+1, Discworld Reference
But since when has the Discworld been any sort of Utopia, anyway?
Incidentally, by your argument, they'll be banning the Internet any day soon. And there is a good reason why advertising is regulated - if they didn't regulate it, advertisers would lie, and very few people would believe advertising.
So it's in advertisers' interests to have some regulation. Whereas reputable companies don't spam, and no-one with sense buys anything from spam anyway...
Do you want SPAM or don't you?
The court is making me call everybody back and apologize for my telemarketing scam. I'm sorry. If you can find it in your heart to forgive me, send one dollar to Sorry Dude, 742 Evergreen Terrace, Springfield. You have the power.
Thats correct, he made millions with it so probably send billions of spams.
Now other reason is that he will probably sit in a prison HALF the sentence,
and non violent can get out with good behavior at that time.
Emacs is good operating system, but it has one flaw: Its text editor could be better.
Bruce Tognazzini calculated that the accident death rate around Palo Alto would have to be several times what it was to justify the time wasted by all the extra signal-controlled turn lanes.
I used to say the death penalty should be restricted to public and corporate officials who abuse the authority of their (respective) office. E.g., using the Army to execute a private vendetta, or disposing of heat-resistant toxic industrial waste by diluting it in the company's gasoline product. One person, alone, can only do so much damage. The same person backed by industrial or military might can do unlimited harm, even just negligently. Tobacco company officials deserve to have the skin flayed from their flesh, and have salt water sprayed on them for weeks until they succumb; likewise prosecutors who conceal evidence of innocence. (But I digress.)
Now I think spammers should get it, too.
"I'd rather see the economic incentives for spam eliminated; as long as they exist, so will spam."
Impossible. Even if drugs (spam) were made legal? There would still be a degree of economic incentive to provide it. Eliminate end-user desire, and you get rid of both.
Aye! ;)
I don't read AC A human right
You think nine years for a spammer is too harsh? What moron would say that? It does not go far enough; they should have thrown the spammer into jail for 90 years.
Harsh punishment, yeah right! Spammers deserve death, but 9 years is really too little.
And yes I am serious.
> Fines can work very well, if done right. If it's say 3-4 times what came in because of the the activity, it's more than a cost of business.
The problem is in calculating that cost, and in recovery. Firstly, the damage a spammer does to the email system includes stuff like people who spend their time maintaining spam filters and mail servers, but it's hard to pin that to one person, so calculating how much damage is done is more than just adding up receipts. Also, getting solid information on what "came in" becomes problematic, especially if he's taken steps to hide his tracks. Secondly, if the fine runs into tens of millions of dollars, the the spammer can reasonably declare bankruptcy, find a home somewhere that won't kick you out of your house for doing so (several states won't foreclose on a primary residence) and other items to minimize the fine. If he can hide the money, then he makes a bunch and only loses a part of it. Sending him to jail disallows this sort of profit sheltering. Sure, he may be able to hide the money, but he has to spend the next nine years in jail. That will go much farther toward reducing his profits.
Virg
I've often thought that the basic concept of a time based prison sentance was flawed. Other than opportunity for parole, there's really no incentive for rehabilitation with this system. I just breaks down to managing the prison population until it's time to release them back into society.
What if, instead of a time based prison system, we could incorporate a level based system? The further within the system you go, the less priveledges you would have. Instead of years within the system, it would be levels within the system that you must earn your way out of in order to be released. This would also have the effect of causing similar types of criminals to be populated together. The very top level could be something like a "half way house" that would replace the concept of parole. To ultimately earn your freedom, you'd have to have demonstrated your ability to function as a law abiding citizen.
White collar criminals, like our spammer, could also have thier assets taken while they are in prison to make restitution for monetary damages.
The idea needs development I realize, but I think it would emphasize rehabilitation more than a time based system would.
A goal is a dream with a deadline
How about fining/jailing the System Administrator/company of the system that the Spammer Uses?
Perhaps we would then see ISPs actually caring about spam being generated on their network, and taking steps to prevent it.
In the grand days of UUCP, if some dork down stream was, well, being a dork, a simple email (read threat to cut the uucp feed) was enough to crack down on the offender.
Actually,
1. Deterrents work admirrably. The fact that you can walk on the street and not be mugged as soon as you open the front door, or for that matter that you didn't get that front door bashed in every night by everyone who would like your TV, is because of the deterrent effect. A lot of people would love to have your wallet or your TV, but wouldn't like the consequences. See? It works.
Sure, it doesn't deterr _everyone_ but if it works on, say, 99% of would-be spammers it already solved the problem perfectly.
2. In this case, you don't even really need it to be a deterrent. It was proven again and again that the majority of spam comes from a handful of fucktards.
So if we throw the top 100 spammers in jail for a decade, there you go, we'll enjoy a decade of email being usable again. It doesn't even matter if it was the best deterrent, or if it deterred anyone at all. We just took the problem out anyway.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
Personally, I would think that the 9 year jail time is "proportional" punishment for a number of reasons:
1. How much time was spent deleting the emails that this guy sent - say it takes a cent an email, everytime he sends out 10M emails, this costs the economy $100,000. So taking that into acount, we can probably say that $50-$100 M is lost to the economy each year.
2. How much has been spent on Spam filters, installation and upgrades? How many billions of dollars per year are spent by businesses, individuals and governments? Let's be conservative and say $100M per year.
3. How much bandwidth has been stolen, proxies illegally set up? What is the cost to individuals, businesses, government - again being conservative let's say $50M per year.
4. I won't even guess at the amount of money that this guy's clients have taken from (dumb) people that respond to the emails.
So, looking at this from this prospective, this guy is a kingpin in a minimum $200M per year scam. It could probably be argued that this guy's contribution to the problem could cost society $200M per year. What do you think is an appropriate punishment for a crime of this magnitude?
Fines for this type of behavior don't work; the spammer will just declare bankrupcy after moving his money to a protected location.
The comparison to the time given to a rapist or murderer is not reasonable. I would expect that the spammer is going to end up in a minimum-security institution. Where a rapist or murderer will end up in a maximum security prison or better. On leaving prison, a rapist/murderer is normally required to register where they are living and will be regularly interviewed by police when there is a crime that is similar in nature to theirs - they can never leave this behind them.
The spammer, if he does change his ways, can lead a new life after prison with it just being remembered as a mistake that he didn't fully understand the consequences to - but at least he try to destroy somebody's life (as a violent criminal would have to live with).
myke
Mimetics Inc. Twitter
I have to agree with this. You can successfully argue that a convict is better off in Abu Graib than some american prisons. From what I've heard, it seems that the higher ups, not having any experience running a prison, used reservists who were civilian guards. I noted that the highest ranking individual charged was one. I think it indicates a major problem with our civilian prison system.
Consider-You have problems in american prisons with:
1. Rape
2. Murder
3. Beatings/assaults
4. Drugs
One such problem, but google's overwhelmed
I don't read AC A human right
Everybody is arguing if 9 years is an appropriate punishment for spam. But remember, these guys are con-men! They were tricking people into giving them money for non-existent/faulty products! It's just like the Nigerian 419 scam, only it netted more people but for less money per victim.
To repeat, 9 year sentence isn't just for spam, but for conning thousands of naive morons out of their money. The jury wouldn't have awarded the same punishment to spam coming from a legitimate online dating service, so don't lump all spam together.
Nine years doesn't sound like much: Add up all time expended by users, administrators, ISPs, etc. over this SPAM. I bet it comes to far more.
"Love is a familiar; Love is a devil: there is no evil angel but Love." --William Shakespeare ('Love's Labors Lost')
I really, really wish the entire community would grow up.
Either that or we could kill them.
As an ex con who did my share of months in ohios system, this really is nothing new. I spent time inside with a rapist that was sentenced to 3 years (with a prior felony record) and a man that was extorting a catholic priest (the priest supposedly molested his girlfriend) that got 6 years for that.....
So a violent rape gets 3, but extortion (not even with a threat of violence) gets 6....
There is no proportionality in sentencing, there is too much leeway...and they are entirely too ready to lock individuals up, where they can go to criminal college, because let me tell you, prison is nothing but an educational system for crime...
I did not know anything about the criminal lifestyle before going in, now I could (not going to) make crack, and meth, and more importantly how to sell them......without committing the same mistakes that the others made.
The "treatment" that is offered, is a joke, I committed my crime in the heat of passion, under a ton of stress and had a blackout (from bipolar disorder was manic)--no therapy, just give me drugs to make me calm....
Others sold their happy pills.....for cigarettes....it was so noisy that i kept em--have to sleep someway...
And when you get out it is almost impossible to obtain employment. But child support is still going at the rate that you had ordered and earned before you went in so i owe over 10 grand to them--they can garnish up to 65% of net....so what do you do if you cant earn a living with good pay to begin with, and they take out 65% of what you would bring home--my checks right now are less than 150 a week....
The life of crime is looking better and better, I simply cannot make it trying to stay straight.........
> If I understand the principles of Economics, everyone who gets rich, does so at someone elses "expense". You can't get rich without acquiring someone elses money...
Then you don't understand the principles of economics. If what you give to someone allows them to profit, monetarily or otherwise, above what they spent, then you've both profited. If I sell you a computer that allows you to work more efficiently, such that you can earn what you spent on the machine and then some, we've both gotten rich, and not at anyone else's expense.
Virg
The real problem is not that the sentence for spamming is too harsh, it's that sentences for serious crimes are too weak. If you rape or murder someone and a jury convicts you based on conclusive evidence, that should be it. Instead, we have murderes and rapists walking out of prison after 10 years of hard time. I find it hard to believe a person in that situation would not come out more of a monster than they went in.
I suggest capitol punnishment for all spammers :-D
not really, butdamnit....I HATE spam! though, the meat spam is pretty good :-)
1001100 1100101 1100001 1110110 1100101 1001101 1111001 1000010 1101001 1110100 1110011 1000001 1101100 1101111 110111
Thirty million spams sent times 10s on average (connect, download, see, delete, admin's work, network overhead etc) wasted by each one, makes about 9 years of lifetime wasted, the damage spread over a large part of the population.
That seems like an equal payback for the harm done.
Put a single pin into someone's ass, you hardly hurt them. Stuff them with 1000 pins and you're a cruel murderer. Now what is the difference between putting that 1000 pins in one person or spreading it equally over a group of 1000 people?
Anagram("United States of America") == "Dine out, taste a Mac, fries"
Sticking his ass in jail just costs us more money (taxpayer dollars).
Make the sentence that he is not allowed to own or operating a personal computer or touch tone telephone until his 18th birthday.
Wait. Spammer, not http://imdb.com/title/tt0113243/Hacker
cyn, free software and *nix operating systems enthusiast.
Make the generous assumption that it only takes a second to delete each spam you receive. Now compute how many lifetimes worth of peoples' time your typical spammer wastes. 9 years is getting off very, very easy.
In my opinion, spam is a theft of services (bandwidth and mail server capacity), so the punishment should be in the same proportion as for stealing cable or phone service.
I spent about a week and a half in the county lockup once until they realized I was innocent and let me go. Believe you me there is no such thing as a country club jail. Being incarcerated sucks. After about 3 days of solitary confinement (all new arrivals are held seprately until they classify your security risk) and you're ready to kill yourself. After a week your ready to freak out. I can't imagine doing serious time, anything more than a few months and your brain would just be mush.
My take now is to give people an appropriate number of lashes in the city square and let em go.
Crime is detered when criminals believe the chances are they will be caught.
This requires long term investment in the police forces.
Crime is not detered by heavy sentancing since if the criminal believes the chances are he will not be caught, the sentance is irrelevent.
Heavy sentancing however can be enacted instantly, by act of law, unlike long term investment in police forces (which is also, of course, expensive and has little immediate effect).
Over the decades, there has been a general failure to invest in police forces because of the cost and lack of immediacy and, due to the consequencial lack of decrease in crime, a general turning towards increasingly heavy sentancing.
This does not work. It also gradually leads to penalities become entirely disproportional to offence, leading to institutionalized injustice.
Such is the current state of affairs.
--
Toby
I'm a strong believer in the death penalty for spammers.
I do have a problem with sentences that are out of proportion to the crime, a problem that seems to be getting worse. (See: copyright infringement penalties, "three strikes" laws, etc.) But I don't think this is such a case.
Spammers are sociopaths. They've demonstrated that time and again when confronted with their misdeeds -- they don't care at all what the results of their actions are; the best "defense" I've ever heard one come up with is "it's not illegal" (not even always true when they say it, of course). So if law is the only kind of constraint they understand, then law must be applied.
As to the magnitude of their crimes? Collectively, they've nearly ruined the value of email, which had been one of the greatest communication mediums ever invented. They may have entirely ruined Usenet. It's easy to dimiss these, to say that email isn't a big deal compared to prison. But think what it's meant in your life, and then multiply that by everyone who's ever used the Internet. That's what spammers are responsible for killing.
Share and Enjoy: 09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0
Oh, and nobody deserves to be raped. I will say that again: Nobody deserves to be raped. It is a form of torture. Anybody who thinks rape is an acceptable punishment should sit down and talk to somebody who has been raped and tell them why they deserved it.
This is not my sandwich.
Of course, we shouldn't need spam-specific laws to fight this. Notice that the main reason this case was tried was the fact that the spammer was using fraudulent IP addresses, hostnames, from addresses, etc. It's simple fraud. It is good that there are harsh penalties for this. At the very least it will force spammers to take more consideration into whether it is worth it to do what they do. Imagine if spammers never forged where they come from...
Send the phuquer to IRAQ, he can get his jollies there. Hopefully no one will hit his delete button.
A computer once beat me at chess, but it was no match for me at kick boxing. Emo Philips
... is that this is not just unsolicited email, it is FRAUD.
If he was just sending unsolicited email advertising a real product that actually worked, then 9 years would indeed be too harsh. Creating an annoyance, even to many people, should not be punished more harshly than some murders and rapes.
But, he deliberately worked to deceive people in order to steal their money by selling a product that didn't work and that he knew didn't work. This is theft, and when done on such a grand scale ($400K - $700K per month), deserves to be so harshly punished. It could be argued that this is too light, considering the several year sentences typical for car theft.
I'd also be inclined to punish him for stupidity. Having raked in several million dollars in a few months, he should have been long gone sunning himself on a beach in Brazil under a new identity, not sitting around waiting to be busted.
Rape is usually about 5-20 years, isn't it? I agree that 9 years is a little extreme for spamming.
I disagree. Someone who gets 5-20 years for rape has one victim -- albeit one who probably was traumatized by the crime. Spammers, on the other hand, have countless millions of victims. Those victims include the recipients of the spam whose bandwidth and time was wasted,ISPs whose costs are driven up by the spam and their users and stockholders who ended up bearing the brunt of those costs, businesses who lost productivity as employees dealt with the spam, and innocent ISPs and individuals who have to deal with complaints from people who fell for the forged from: address in the spam. The list goes on and on.
If it takes the average person three seconds to download, recognize, and delete spam, then the spammer should get, at least, three seconds times the number of spams delivered. That way, the same amount of his life is wasted as he stole from his victims.
Nine years seems way too light.
The grandparent post which talks about prisoner rape and beating gets modded funny (disgusting) and then a post bringing up a very serious point gets a cowardly -1 Overrated?
Sentence the spammers to be human spam filters for the mail servers of large corporations... at minimum wage !
I'm sorry, I have a cruel streak...
AOL alone deletes approximately 2 billion spam messages each day (reference here), and has won a lawsuit against a company that single-handedly sent a billion. Nine years is approximately 284 million seconds, so I suspect we are talking small fractions of a second per spam message.
Check out Chad's News
A spammer is like a chronic polluter. So here's the question we must ask ourselves: Would nine years be an appropriate sentence for someone who, for example, dumped toxic chemicals in a stream?
I personally think it is an appropriate sentence.
Proverbs 21:19
You are advocating that the punishment for this behavior be rape? What kind of person are you?
Reason is the Path to God - Anon
I don't have a problem with the prosecution. It was fraud, on several levels. Nor do I have a problem with the punishment. AFAIK exemplary sentences _are_ allowed, even under US law. One major purpose of the entire justice system is deterrence. Punishment is too late, and must not be a licence.
If you do a lot of damage to a few people or a little bit of damage to to a lot of people, it is still a lot of damage.
Religion is the main cause of atheism.
And the US does have a sort of levels system. There's time off for good behavoir, parole, sentencing itself can be affected by a variety of things. (I know one person who got 6 months from a state court for manslaughter, and one who got that from traffic court for a moving violation.) A person can go to a minimum security Club Fed, a medium security place, might be on work release. There's Maximum Security. Prisoners can depending on behavoir, be sent from one type of prison to another.
Best Slashdot Co
Add up how much time all their 'victims' collectively have spent either deleting or actually reading their unsolicited crap. I'm thinking it will be way more than 9 years, meaning they got off easy!
Ok, I can see that you don't want emails taking up your time, but when you have a free (yes, i know it's not totally free, connection, computer, space, ect. but it's practically free) communication method that's open up for anyone to send messages how can you not expect that people would send you messages that you don't want?
If your neighbor's son had been pranking millions of doorbells every day for several years, I think years in jail would be entirely valid. Or one spank per doorbell if you're a fan of corporal punishment.
they are the equivelent of cyber terrorist's and they cost the entire COUNTRY and the WORLD millions of dollars that the end users ( you and I ) have to pay . . . I think it should be 9 years per email sent!
But the point of the sentence is not to "pay back" all the time stolen from society. Please see my comment on what the prison system is for, made when this subject first came up the other day.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
When you can serve longer for spamming ...Than you can for rape, or causing death by dangerous driving, etc, then there's something wrong with the justice system.
He didn't get nine years for sending one spam. He got nine years for sending billions of pieces of spam advertising fraudulent products. How many rapists or murderers had billions of victims?
Let's say that the average person wastes three seconds receiving, recognizing, and deleting the spam. If he sent a total of one billion spams (very realistic given his infamous status in the spam community), that's over 95 years stolen from the lives of the recipients. And we haven't even touched on the fraud aspect, the costs to ISPs and users for bandwidth, storage, and personnel (e.g., the guys who answer abuse@{insert ISP domain here}, or the third parties who discover that their e-mail address has been forged by the sender as the "from:" address of the spam.
Yep. The Commonwealth of Virginny doesn't do parole.
o verview.htm
Wrong:
http://www.vadoc.state.va.us/offenders/community/
"inmates can earn a maximum of 4.5 days for each 30 days served"
This figures out to about 15%, so this spammer will serve at least 7.5 year before being paroled.
If you give them back to the commmunity, they will spam again.
If you tell them to do something constructive, well, he thought spamming was something constructive, after all he fed his family and paid the rent on the trailer by harassing only a few millions of people.
Your simplistic solution will only perpetuate the problem. Intarnat Mastarcriminals work hard for their money -- so hard in fact, if they were at a legit job, they would probably make more money. But they are shitty people and that is not an option. They cannot even consider legit work -- the thought never even enters their mind, because it is their basic nature to fuck with people. They will never ever default to good, constructive behavior, excepting only a sudden repentance on their deathbed. Their first instinct is to take selfish advantage of any situation. These are the guys who ruin it for everyone else, quite simply, because their mommas didn't raise them right.
You want to cut them loose? They need to be out of society. They need to be in jail. Releasing them before their 19 years are up only means they will be back hammering us too soon. Hell, if they are only in 3-4 years they will probably work on a new scam to not get caught and it's just that much tougher, meaning more locks on everything, more lost time, more stomach acid.
...the local online rag is talking about the fact that Jeremy Jaynes' bond has been set at $1M. But concerning the "harsh sentence" thing, yes, as stupid as it sounds, a lot of people think it is harsh.
It's education, all over again... people don't realise that "if you don't like it, just delete it" is a totally bogus answer.
Bullshit. Prison as "rehabilitation" is a relatively recent concept and still unproven. For that matter prison itself is a relatively recent concept - through most of human history somebody who commited a serious crime was either executed or enslaved. There was no third choice.
.... The state comes in and says it, alone, can revenge serious crimes. It sounds brutal but it's actually a stablizing factor as long as the criminal justice system is trusted.
Historically, punishment has been done for two reasons simultaneously. The first is to end the cycle of revenge - if you kill my brother I'll kill you and your cousin will kill me and
The second reason is to act as a big cautionary tale to others thinking of doing the same thing. Money (fines) is just money and suitable for small crimes (misdemeanors), but serious prison time will make others think twice about what they're doing.
Is spamming really a serious crime? I haven't RTFA but I haven't seen spam from a legitimate but clueless company in years. Everything I see is a form of fraud. Some of it is just this side of legal (a "genuinue faux imitation Rolex" is not advertised as a real Rolex), most of it is not. We lock up the guy who hustles hundreds of people on the street corner, so damn straight we can lock up the guy who's hustling millions of people online.
For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong. -- H L Mencken
Harsh sentence, my ass. Spammers waste more man-hours than a human life amounts to. IOW, execution is too good for them!
Execute spammers! It won't solve the problem but it's the only thing that will materially help.
If a couple of them fry, some of the others might consider other career options.
A prison sentence should be sufficient to convince you to never commit that particular crime again. I doubt even 9 years will convince some of the people to stop spamming given the money involved and the (still) small likelyhood of being punished. I can only hope that by the time they do get out that the Internet has evolved beyond being able to be taken advantage of in this manner.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
Disproportanal sentancing has always been a problem for drug addicts, who are victims of economic and public health problems, and go away for life with barely any cause.
Spammers are malicious, but most people in jail for drugs are in there because they made some mistakes in their teens or twenties, or are black, or both.
I wish people were more worried about drug addiction than spam.
The desire to get rich quick is a natural, healthy and legal one!
Natural & legal, I'll buy. Healthy? More like stupid. There's no faster way to lose it all than to try to get rich quick by any means. The very phrase "get rich quick" screams ***THAT'S A SCAM*** to me, actually.
Some political pressure groups like to argue that
all rape is purely violence, without any sexual
motivation. This argument is obvious bullshit,
designed to push an agenda.
Of course, it's not always purely sexual either.
The appropriate metaphor for common rape is the
kid in a supermarket who sees candy and grabs it.
An immature mind will cave to any desire.
Well, castration greatly reduces desire, and
docking (removal of penis) greatly reduces
ability. Brain surgery has not reached the
level of advancement needed to be precise about
fixing the issues there, so that won't work
without simply killing the rapist.
Thus, docking and castration are the best we
can do. Fines and jail time are inherently
unfair, and they cost society. With docking
and castration, the rapist can keep his job
even. That leaves him as a productive, though
not reproductive, member of society.
in china they execute white collar criminals because they feel the distributed social harm of ripping off several thousand people is greater than stealing a purse from a single person on the street.
00010111 always try everything twice
Simple, less criminals on the street. Track it.
This guy is just a sacrificial lamb to send a message loud and clear to other spammers. I suppose time will tell if it has any effect. Many of these folks are offshore so it may make no difference unless we get serious about going after the ones offshoring. I'll be interested to see if the sentence stands on appeal or if it gets reduced or thrown out entirely. Personally,I want to see them get tougher on spyware. That stuff is evil. I know spam causes productivity issues and clogs ISP's but some of the latest spyware stuff I've had to endure has been just plain vicious. Anyhow, I'm sure if Jaynes goes to jail he won't be teaching computer classes. Has anyone seen Spam Roast? http://www.spamroast.com/ Kind of a funny little mocking site with someone writing replies to their spams. Good for a laugh or two.
"Whereas failure to stop copyright infringement wouldn't do anything. "
Are you willing to stake your life on that statement?
Weither you're shown wrong now, or in 20 years, are you willing to put your life on the line for that statement.
"(Which is rather obvious, because you can basically get whatever mildly-popular copyrighted works you want via the internet for free right now.)"
That proves availability, but not your assertion that unrestrained copyright infringement will do no harm. There are still (presently) restrains, both internal and external, that keep illegal copyright infringement in check.
One could make the argument that since sex is available (sometimes easily) that unrestrained sex wouldn't hurt anyone. STD's and pregnancy, amounst many other effects (sex addicts, rape, child molestation, adultry) show that to be a lie.
The US rate of incarceration is largely driven by drug-related sentences that are long and frequently manditory. If you fill up your prison space with non-violent drug offenders in on no-parole 20 year sentences and your tax base refuses to pay for increases in prison space for all the other offenders that actually impact quality of life (swindle/fraud, property crime, and crimes of physical violence), you'll find that those "other" crimes have sentences that basically reflect the prison space and the rate of incarcertation.
Harsh prison sentences for rape, most murders, robbery, arson, and a number of property crimes are a good idea. You just need to be able to house those offenders. Locking up guys growing a few pounds of marijuana for 20 years and only locking a rapist for 2 years because you don't have the space is patently absurd.
The other problem driving US crimes rates is our wholesale importation of third world populations and their blatantly broken social environment into our already broken underclass cities and neighborhoods. That only provides more fodder for crime and crime rates.
I'd also mention our other ridiculous desire, disarming law-abiding citizens through "gun control", but would you believe someone who advocated legalizing drugs and must-issue pistol carry permits?
Are we actually to believe your boss makes 100 million people wait through meetings. NO. JUST YOU AND YOU ARE GETTING PAID FOR YUOR TIME. What he is talking about is the collective drain by spammers on society.
ONE SINGLE SPAMMER IN PURSUIT OF $200-$300 COSTS UPWARD OF $100,000 IN LOST TIME AND PRODUCTIVITY.
Life is finite, and I do not need to waste even one second to hear your pitches for third-world vigra or lame-ass fake rolex watches.
"You can look at the percentage of people going back to prison or jail after incarceration and conclude that incarceration has no effect in detering crime."
That's one conclusion. The other is that you need rehabilitation in addition to incarceration.
Don't forget for a lot of people prison IS their home. All they really know, and that "scary world" can't compare. How to go home? Do a petty crime. That's how. Plus in this world crazy as it is. Prison provides a known constant. Food, shelter, clothing, medical care. When you're poor that looks like heaven.
So you have to look at the big picture before you proclaim that the failure is entirely incarceration's fault.
-1, Truth. Look at yourselves!!
Dealing Spam is like Dealing Crack. Do it for a few years, spend a decade in jail and when you get out, you have multi millions at your disposal.
I've been working for 20 years and I don't have any millions to show for it.
When you look at the econimics of it, there is absolutely no reason why any spammer should even flinch at a 9 year sentence. It's still a bargain.
But you have to seperate the morality of the business practices apart from the economics of the business model to get this to work. Personally I don't think there is anything you can do with these people to convince them not to Deal in Spam that will appear fair in the eyes of the legal system or at the very least, pass the UN criteria for Crimes against Humanity.
I think it would be far more effective for them to wear a scarlet S on their clothes and to have their identities posted on the internet just like some convicted pedophile.
That at least might bring to their homes the pain that their Business generates for the rest of us.
One might even argue that this is a violation of free speech in that there is a right to speak, but not a requirement to listen. Maybe we can get spamming classified as a Hate Crime
Wow! Really reading a lot into my comments aren't you?
I never said anything about either Murder or Smoking Pot.
Since you are reading into my post, I'm going to make a few assumptions of my own...mainly that you spend a good portion of your free time at High Times dawt Com.
Smoking Pot? Yeah, actually I think anyone caught smoking it serially and put away several times *SHOULD* be punished with severe terms. if these terms are indicated that they should have to spend the rest of their natural life in jail, I'm all for saying that it was a life wasted and as such, I'm not going to want any additional monies wasted toward your rehabilitation or punishment and simply have you off'd.
By the advocacy of legalising drugs I will assume that you are talking about marijuana. Here in California those who wish to carry or otherwise purchase marijuana must also have a permit. In this case it is a medical 'card' signifying legality of usage. Growers must also keep detailed records of their business.
"Seems like the courts could come up with some estimate of costs imposed by spamming -- how many hours do how many people spend "hitting delete" or installing and maintaining spam filters; what's the cost of the bandwidth needed to carry it nationwide. Then figure out what proportion of that this spammer was responsible for, and you have an estimate of how much value he stole from people."
If we can't estimate the cost of copyright infringement? What makes you think we can for spam?
Spammers are individuals without scruples who deserve to be punnished for each and every crime they commit. In many cases, you can say one message = one crime. This is the case when they attempt fraud for instance each email they send, and they may send millions, is in and of itself a mini-crime. Each one of them could put them in jail.
In other instances, the crime may vary - putting porn in a child's email account is far worse than putting it in an adult's email account yet they (spammers) make no effort to identify and exclude children when they send their pictures of horses and women. Each child who recieves these emails is a true victim and they deserve true justice. There are no grey areas here, at least not in my book. These are felonies. Yes, even if they send a hyperlink to something like this.
Then there is the teft of service issues. When the spammers use someone else's hardware and bandwidth to send their emails, they are stealing something of value from their unwitting accomplice. This is exactly like siphoning gas out of someone's car or "borrowing" a bicycle from the corner. It is theft. Spammers should be held both criminally and civily liable.
These guys do it because they think that they can get away with it. Perhaps some may say "it isn't fair to make an example out of a few of them" and I think that is probably true but the punnishment should fit the crime and many of these people do deserve a rather stiff sentence.
Reading all that's there, questioning what isn't.
And you assumed wrong.
If you don't want to spend your tax money rehabilitating or punishing pot smokers, then don't rehabilitate or punish them. Or punish them for the actual damage they do to someone, which is usually nothing. So either way, I agree, lets save our tax money.
Take the example of Singapore... you do something, and the sentence is far harsher than that of the United States (oh look! sentencing practices harsher than the United States!) - and there's virtually no crime.
Maybe they'll set him up in the same jail cell as Martha Stewart! I know I feel *much* safer with these Spammers behind bars and OJ roaming free!
-Natalie
I would actually legalize all of it, with varying levels of control. Pot would be out and out legal in the same way the alcohol is, as would a number of low-grade pharmaceuticals (ambien, etc).
Heroin, methamphetimine, cocaine and other addictive drugs would be cheap and legal, but would only come from controlled distribution, with severe penalties for violating the distribution.
Even if you kept "hard" drugs illegal and legalized pot alone, you'd still open up a ton of law enforcement and criminal justice resources that are completely wasted today.
From the article:
"He was most notably known for his bestiality-porn spam and the alleged footage of adult film star Jenna Jameson and pop icon Britney Spears making out. This alleged footage was used to lure traffic to an adult Web site * via his spam operation."
The * denotes a little box icon, which has the following mouse-over text:
"Relevant Products/Services from Verisign -- FREE Guide to Secure Transactions"
Sadly, it only seems to lead to a form for Verizon's e-commerce stuff. Alas.
WMBC freeform/independent online radio.
The grandparent may put punishment as #1 on the list, but I think this ridiculous. I have a strong feeling the grandparent poster is from the US, where punishment *is* #1 on the list and where the crime rate seems to be one of the highest on this planet.
I'm from Canada, where we have a much lower crime rate and our "purposes" of prison sentence are more inline with the parent's list.
I remember when legal used to mean lawful, now it means some kind of loophole. - Leo Kessler
This isn't some legitimate business that accidentally ran afoul of some legal technicality. This was a lucrative, large scale, fraud operation.
If being a spammer meant a 95% chance of 1-3 years in prison, there'd be less spam, than with a 0.001% chance of death penalty.
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
has ... some ardent anti-spammers wondering whether 'proportionality is becoming a completely forgotten concept.
Have these people been paying attention? When you can get a life sentence for carrying two ounces of pot, it makes me think that proportionality went out the window a *loooong* time ago.
There may have been a revenge factor involved. When one picks a jury to try a crime the defense tries very hard to, among other things, make sure that the actual crime victims are not on the jury. Because of the pervasive natureof spam this may not have been possible unless one found the last 12 people in the US who simply do not use the internet. Was this tried to a jury and were the jury members internet users? It might have had a major effect on the trial.
I just got robbed, stole half of my life and most of my work for the last year. They won't get caught by the police, but I hope I can enact some karma.
For most of the last 4 years (until i got some spam litigation, and a powerbook with "spam-free" thunderbird)i spent at least 20 min a day deleting junk mail because older spam filters had cost me over $1000 and alot of time. Now I only spend 2. What did I get out of it? Lower mortgage rates from xzzzyxxxx14567@yahoo.com.
SEND THEM TO JAIL, WHOEVER MADE MONEY OFF THIS MIGHT AS WELL BE SELLING CRACK BECAUSE THEY DEAL WITH CRACKHEADS
This means they killed days of my time, and wasted my money (times millions of people) this = worth it.
And no, people are not scared of jail, yes once you go you can't ever come back; people suck, the law sucks, our president is an idiot... what are you gonna do? I'll just be here getting turned away from voting so that some machines can't steal my vote and count it for bush anyway. The world is FULL of evil, and its a dark lonely place.
Time is a number, constant. It will always go on, but the time you have should be invaluable.
I suspect Professor Hawking himself would struggle to parse this statement.
It's a shame more people don't think like you... er us. Drug laws in this country are completely out of control.
I say put them in jail according to two things, how long it takes to read their entire spam and multiply it by how many they've sent. Of course this will put some of these spamers in prison for the better part of the next century with the shear volume of garbage they dump on the net daily.
It makes a lot of sense to me, in a "humans are stupid" kind of way, that a spammer would get 9 years, while a rapist or murderer would get off after 5 for 'good behavior'. When your average citizen gets hundreds of spam a day and doesn't know how to tell the real email from the spam, it tends to hit closer to home than someone they've never known getting raped or murdered - it's something they hear about all the time in the news, and is No Big Deal. It didn't happen to them, so they don't have an emotional response.
I think that this past presidential election proved quite well that Americans are, overall, an emotionally - not intellectually - responsive populace. Most citizens respond to things with an emotional association for them.
~/ssh slashdot.org ssh: connect to host slashdot.org port 22: too many beers
You can also search Google for other sources.
...sentances. The point is that this guy was an obvious extreme case. 24 million in fraud? That's a crapload. Plus the spamming in general. 24 million stolen in fraud definately warrants the 9 year sentance.
Again, I agree with those as well who are confused with why rapists and murderes only get 5 or so years. Yeah, our legal system could use some work, but this spammer definately got what he deserved, if not needed a longer sentance (Or a more extreme sentance).
Let the punishment fit the crime. You kill someone, you get killed in return (death penalty needs to exist for more murderes), if you rape someone, you get raped and beaten back, if you steal from someone, you lose it all plus some.
Maybe, if we had a more extremist view on punishment, we'd have less people willing to exploit the system. Jail time? who cares about that any more. With the modern day jails, it's like a vacation. We've got a seriously overpopulated jail population, and we don't seem to care. They're costing us billions upon billions upon billions of dollars a year to keep convicted rapists, murderers and theives in jail with our hard earned money.
To me, that's a far more horrible crime than one someone commits to get into jail.
For the defense lawyer's mediocre effort of the spammer's defense, I proposed that all lawyers spend a fraction of their clients time whenever they lose.
Really cut down on those lawsuits, uh? Makes it harder to find a lawyer when you need one. (ambulance chaseeeee, anyone?)
But on the other hand, the crime rates would go up or would that means it would become a police state? (like in being judge-jury-enforcer-and-advocate?)
You decide.
Me? I think that defense lawyer, (cough cough), did a rotten job with a remark like "Greed cuts both ways."
I for one plan on sending Jaynes' fellow cell-mates a 9 year supply.
It's true no man is an island, but if you take a bunch of dead guys and tie 'em together, they make a good raft.
Is this really out of proportion?
Takes about 1 second to delete a spam.
1 year is about 30 million seconds.
So one year of jail for every 30 million spams sent isn't out of proportion.
I'll bet he sent a lot more than 9 years worth.
An eye for an eye and a tooth for tooth is the fastest way to an eyeless toothless world.
But if we don't stop the people who are poking out eyes and teeth, then that too leads to an eyeless toothless world.
Some of these people have a message limit, or some kind of per-message or per-kb charge.
SPAM has the ability to kill the wireless email industry, and the devices that support it.
Now, more than ever, SPAM really does arrive "postage due", and is not as simple as "clicking delete" ... the way it supposedly used to be.
This is reason that telemarketing is supposed to be disallowed on cellphones. The recipient is paying for it.
As wireless communication proliferates, SPAM becomes more than just a nuisance, and represents a real and tangible cost to the end user.
When you multiply these charges x millions of people, this is not an insignificant cost. One spam to 1 million people can cost a couple thousand dollars for EACH mailing.
Certainly much more costly than shoplifting or knocking over a 7-11.
because of sentencing practices harsher than any other industrialized country
Maybe the incarceration rate has more to do with the USA having more criminals than anywhere else in the developed world. Their murder rate is about 10x higher, don't know about the rest.
Maybe that high crime rate has little to do with harsh sentencing, and more to do with poverty, and poor education standards. Maybe the US has serious domestic problems... and the politicians are busy saying "look at that shiny oil covered object in the Middle East", helping the elite reap in trillions, while serious issues of education and poverty are overlooked.
Fact: the un-educated are senteced to a life of poverty, bad health and crime.
Like all pain, suffering is a signal that something isn't right
Man I get enough spam in my email, why would i want to be trying to go head to head with a spammer in court. I can just see me inbox now. Youve got mail 190089849 new messages
how about in addition to the jail time, then the public service thing. i am ver much against spam. it is a real nusicne to me. and i'm particularly pissed since my little sister (12) got an "enlarge you shlong" spam. GIMMIE A 2x4 THEN LEMME AT EM!
upon the advice of my lawyer, i have no sig at this time
"Also, what this guy was "selling" was some UPS work-from-home tracking bs where you were supposedly getting paid a good amount of money for sitting at home. This guy made some 8 or 9 million dollars from scamming people with this crap."
So does that mean that ALL work-at-home offers are scams?
If you can't do the time Don't do the crime
You do need a progression in sentences to discourage criminals from progressing to more serious crimes.
Prime example: when I lived in Florida in the early 80s a "get tough" legislature passed a law that anyone convicted of using a gun during the commission of a felony had a mandatory 10-year, no parole, extension added to his sentence.
This was immediately followed by the slaughter of convenience store clerks and patrons.
The logic was brutal but unambiguous. Do a simple holdup and your 10 year robbery conviction (possibly 5 with good behavior) was now a hard 20 years. Since it was "only" robbery you might see your public defender for the first time when you entered your plea bargain - you were seriously hosed.
But if you force everyone into the back room and kill them in cold blood you were in pretty good shape. There are no surviving witnesses to testify against you, and even if caught murder defendants are guaranteed better representation. Finally the average murderer (excluding capital cases) would get out in 15 years anyway under the old system.
It's a no brainer - you kill everyone.
The legislature had tied its own hands - how do you demotivate somebody who's already risking the death penalty? But it couldn't ease the tougher sentences without being accused of going "soft on crime."
The cops figured out a solution. Soon every convenience store had a sign from the local sheriff saying that you would be killed on the spot if you had a gun and didn't immediately freeze when a cop appeared. Or maybe they would shoot you anyway, it's been 20-odd years.
For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong. -- H L Mencken
Wow...
Someone wanted to marry someone else... in fact, you noted they were in a relationship, perhaps a long-term one.... and he realized it would give his partner (who he probably loves) some additional benefits...
That sounds an awful lot like... well, most marriages.
I know plenty of gay folks who get married simply for the 'promise' involved, but even after that, they petition the state to recognize their marraige because of the benefits it entails. If straight folks were suddenly denied these benefits after being legally married, they would probably ask for the benefits back too!!
I don't see how that's a gay thing at all... in fact, I can see that you might have an argument against civil unions for gays (or anyone)... and would in fact PERFER them to be married, since it implies committment, love and long-term promises, rather than economic convienance (not that all civil unions are of convienance, but it seems more apt to the title).
In any case, what you say strikes me as silly because by that logic, heterosexual people shouldn't be allowed to marry unless they can PROVE to the state that they are in love... and that they care nothing about the benefits. Or do you think establishing "special" critera for gay marriages is somehow equitable?
it's bullshit no matter which way you slice it.
If you object to the "partner benefits" that a marraigs "inflicts" on society, then you are against marraiges alltogether, right? The benefits are no different whether it's a man or a woman or two men or two women.. it's one-for-one benefits to anyone who wanders into a courthouse and signs a document... the sex of the people involved is completely immaterial if you object to the nature of the benefits provided.....
Stewed
There are 10 kinds of people in the world. Those who understand binary and those who don't.
Stupid drug laws probably account for at least half of our prisoners. People serving 20-year no-parole sentences for possessing small amounts of drugs, crimes commited by small time drug dealers since they can't turn to the police or the court system to resolve disputes, people stealing property so they can afford drugs that are expensive due to the cost of an illegal importation and distribution system.
That's also behind much of the US murder rate. Somebody rips you off for a few hundred dollars? We would go to the police. They can't so they blow away the bastard.
This is why the "child handgun deaths" must be taken with a boulder of salt. Anyone under the age of 25 is considered a child, and there's no distinction made between a HS student blown away by an unstable peer and some low-level drug dealer killed in a turf war.
N.B., I'm not arguing that all drugs are equal or that they should be totally decriminalized. Sell drugs to a kid or near a school and expect to spend a long time in prison. Run a meth lab in your house and spend a long time in prison.
But I would rather see pot decriminalized, subject to purity laws, and taxed to pay for drug treatment programs than the current mess.
For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong. -- H L Mencken
Hell is where you are forced to read spam all day, so I think his analysis was right on!
Puhleeeeeeze! Hahahah! Thanks for the laugh. Wanna post some stats on that?
every single person they've spammed. A sort of class action guilt trip. By the end, they'll take their own lives, and it will be the fault of noone but their own conscience.
Don't mod down - mod up - how hard can it be...
If Google really cared they would fix Android Chrome to reflow text, instead of discriminating
That comes to about 11 person-years.
Then you figure in how much money he made from his spamming scams... According to the courts, he was taking in $400K-$700K/month. Much of that was essentially money for SCAMS. Even if you presume $10% net profit, that's still about $50K/month. or 1/2Million/year. If you want to amortize that down to $50K/year, a 9 year sentence for a year's worth of spamming isn't too bad.
Then you should consider the people that he scammed. He scammed probably in the range of a million people -- many of them people who were desparate foe some sort of income to begin with. For many of the most desperate it was money that they could ill afford -- so that he could live the high life.
He cost a lot of people time and money -- time that we'll never get back. He didn't just victimize AOL. he essentially victimized the entire country. There is no way to charge him proportional to what he cost us worldwide. If anything 9 years is actually a little thin on that. However, I think it may be enough to make other spammers think twice about what they're doing, so I'd be happy to let it stand.
Free Software: Like love, it grows best when given away.
dollars of ill gotten gains from fraud. At that
rate Martha Stewart should spend hundreds of years
in jail...
go back to high school
Free Software: Like love, it grows best when given away.
Most DAs are willing to suborn perjury and most police are willing perjure themselves to obtain convictions.
What do you expect when laws are passed like this?
A general law "You may not state untruths and collect money, as that is fraud" would have allowed individuals and businesses to put these guys out of business a long time ago.
The specificity of laws is the fatal flaw here. This lead to the legal profession being in charge of laws, and the profession-level conflict of interest between legislators, judges and lawyers. Every new law, every interpretation increasing effective complexity, carves off a slice of the GDP for the legal profession.
The solution is to not allow lawyers to write laws, and to charge DAs if their witnesses perjure themselves and are caught.
Lew
I think he was asking for a source for the statement that crime rates are higher here. Incarceration rates are pretty cut and dry. What percentage of the population is in prison right now? Everyone knows that we have a high incarceration rate, just ask Amnesty International.
Crime rates, on the other hand, are a bit more difficult to quantify. What constitutes a crime? Different countries have different levels of crimes which are not necessarily compatible. One of the methods I've seen is to just count murders, in which case, yes the US is pretty high. But other crimes also exert a high cost to society and it would be unresonable to ignore them.
Even "nonviolent" crimes like drug dealing have a pretty large impact on society. If you don't believe that nonviolent offenders should go to jail, you should ask an Enron employee what they think.
That's not fair. If you are going to make one drug freely available, how can you specify limits on another. Oh, you don't do that drug, that's why.
You think Pot should be as available as alcohol. I think alcohol should be as available as Pot.
If Pot is made legal I would propose the same penalty for Pot related traffic accidents as I do for Alcohol related ones. One bullet.
If you are not allowed to question your government then the government has answered your question.
First, the authorities closed eyes, and in some cases complicity with sexual abuse in prison is just one reason why the US is having a hard-ride in the modern world; it is illegal under US law, contrary to to the Constitution, which almost all office holders are sworn to uphold, and un-consiencable, it is a real 'abuse of process' which ALL investigative journalists should persue. If you need to understand why there is no trust of the US abroad just look at this condoned abuse at home. This is a simple moral issue! The purpose of Prison is either (a) simply to deprive the the prisoner of liberty, or to do (a) and to make life hard, hard-labour. SO, in a WELL run judicial system you hand the serious spammer, a comersurate FINE, a short custodial sentance by sending him to JAIL for, say the 9 years with all but six months suspended. He gets to find out that jail is unpleasent, without abuse, an dosnt want to go back for 8.5 years.
There was once a time in my part of the world when copper suddenly became very valuable. This created a bit of a hysteria, people in the country had their copper washtubs disappear more or less overnight. People would throw a chain around a telephone cable, attach the chain to a truck and just drive. People with hacksaws would climb down into man holes and cut away all the cables flush with the walls. Things got kind of desperate, telco employees who did not do something like park the truck near the manhole would sometimes encounter law enforcement types with drawn weapons on their way out of the manhole.
In their pursuit of beer money, the copper thieves damaged a lot of valuable infrastructure. An armed response to the theft of a few dollars of copper seems disproportionate but as a society we had become desperate. A few hundred telephone subscribers out of service for 6 hours is not all that bad a deal. The problem was that if the informal copper recycling biz had continued to increase in popularity there would soon be no phone service anywhere. Spammers are a lot like the copper thieves. If we do not deter spammers somehow, email and most any other sort of computer mediated communications is dead. It's as simple as that...
I see a lot of people saying things like "you do more time for rape and muder, so these sentences are disproportional". But the purpose of the criminal justice system is to try and make people comply with the law, not just to punish them for breaking it. Increasing the sentences for already serious crimes like rape and murder won't significantly affect the likelihood of people comitting those crimes, because of the nature of the crimes. On the other hand, if a crime like spamming is seen as a high-profit, low risk option (slap on the wrist and a fine), the law will be widely broken. It is therefore perfectly reasonable to impose hefty jailtime sentences to make sure spamming is not seen as a low-risk crime.
... active posture which is designed to deter and prevent ... of our Strategic Plan, the ... it is collected, developing national crime and intelligence ...
... and health and human services to prevent and deter crime in high ... David M. Allender, ...
... improve its internal security and enhance its ability to deter and detect ... 2003 Semiannual ...
... to analyze crime data spatially, identify crime patterns, print crime maps, and ...
... law enforcement to effectively detect, deter and investigate ... our overseas investigative ... of on-line crime and terrorist ...
Abso-fricken-lutely. What part of "deter" don't you "its not proportionate" people get? Crimes of GAIN are detered by examples like this. and yes copyright infringement is a crime of gain. Connect the dots brain-iacks.
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Let's say we're at one of those big rock concert and for some reason, the singer doesn't show up. All the people who drove to the concert wasted their time. Following your reasoning, the singer should go to jail for stealing hundreds of thousands of "people-hours".
OK, I know about the 'tresspass to chattels' decision, and I can agree with your points that spam itself is a form of theft, in that many of the costs are foisted off on the recipient and their providers, who cannot choose whether or not to recieve it.
I am in no way trying to escuse the action of spamming, any more than I would excuse trespass (to land or to chattels). However, I am making a distinction between trespass and outright deception and theft.
It is one thing if I walk past your 'no tespassing' sign, tread on your manicured lawn, and take your time knocking on your door to try to sell you a legitimate product.
It is quite another if I walk past your 'no tespassing' sign, tread on your manicured lawn, and take your time knocking on your door in order to distract you while I steal your wallet.
These are both wrongs, but they are of a different scope and should be punished differently.
> I sell you a computer for 50 dollars. You write a program, and sell it for 100 dollars. Where does the 100 dollars come from? From someone else. At the end of the day, someone pays.
Sure, someone pays, but it their returns increase due to the purchase, they gain too. In our example, assume I sell the $100 package to an accountant, who can use the package to increase his efficiency. Now, he can service more clients than before, so he makes more money than he would without the program. If that "more" is more than he paid, we both win. You can say that means his clients pay, but that's not really accurate. See, without the program, there would still be a need for accounting services, but those people would go somewhere else, so they would not have been his clients. So, an increase in efficiency can (and virtually always does) offset the cost of getting the equipment/service.
Virg
That's not fair. If you are going to make one drug freely available, how can you specify limits on another. Oh, you don't do that drug, that's why.
Opiates and most stimulants (amphetimines, cocaine) are highly addictive and have some pretty significant health consequences with long-term use. Opiates perhaps less so, but controlling access will minimize both "uninformed" access and grossly destructive access. If you want to take these drugs, fine, but we should prevent them getting into the hands of people whose decision making processes aren't capable of understanding the consequences of their use and to prevent profiteering. Marijuana is a lot harder to hurt yourself on; it's not physically addictive (although habit forming, and smoking isn't good for you) and you can't overdose on it. This is even more true than with alcohol.
If Pot is made legal I would propose the same penalty for Pot related traffic accidents as I do for Alcohol related ones. One bullet.
Driving while intoxicated shouldn't be tolerated, period. The death sentence might be bit strong on the first offense. I'd rather see something like 6 months in the workhouse and a 5 year probation for the first offense and a 2 year jail sentence, forfeiture of the automobile and 10 years of probation for the second offense. Third offense would be 5 years in prison, forfeiture of the automobile, permanent loss of driving privileges, and 10 years of probation. I'd consider the death sentence for vehicular homicide.
Any cars driven by the person in question after their 1st or 2nd offenses must have "CONVICTED DRUNK DRIVER" prominently (10" yellow on black reflective letters) displayed on all sides of the car as well as the hood. Getting caught driving a vehicle without these markings would be considered a "next" offense, regardless of whether the driver was drunk or not. Cars so marked would be subject to random and arbitrary search.
I'd also consider mandating the wearing of an orange, non-removable bracelet with "CONVICTED DRUNK DRIVER" on it.
This latter mechanism would probably be as effective as anything else, since the public shame and identification would be highly effective.