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Ohio Law Could Send Spammers To Jail
ej0c writes "We in Ohio are set to save you from Spam. The legislature, with AOL's help, passed a tough anti-spam bill (Reuters). Spam in Ohio, and you'll be in the can for 6 months, with fines of $25,000 per violation, or $2 to $8 per e-mail. Text of the Act."
Ohio Inmate #7779: What are you in for sir?
Ohio Inmate #2466: Nuttin' much, assault and burglary. How about you, cutey-pie?
Ohio Inmate #7779: Selling penis pumps online.
Ohio Inmate #2466: Eyyyyxcellent...
Sigs cause cancer.
Doesn't the federal "CAN SPAM" act prevent state laws from taking effect? I thought that was one of the main provisions that kept the new California law (at the time) from happening.
Save me from popups while you're at it.
Well, I do all my spamming from China. Come get me.
Life is the leading cause of death in America.
...who owns a Zombie machine. I hope that was taken into consideration.
Does not atone for what you did on November 2nd.
Scenario... innocent dumb user has their computer hijacked and made part of a spam botnet.
Did they just spam? Are they now off to jail?
1) Does this affect spammers who operate in Ohio but send the spam from outside of the state? Or outside of the country?
2) Does this affect spammers from outside of Ohio who send spam into the state?
We send drug dealers and drug buyers to jail, we should treat spam the same way.
We should punish the idiots that buy things advertised in Spam.
One could argue that the "war on drugs" is a failure, and for the most part they'd be right, but I was a kid in the mid to late 1970s and the culture has changed dramatically with regard to drugs. People used to smoke weed on downtown street corners, it certainly isn't that way anymore.
Take away the incentive to send the spam out and fewer people will risk it.
LK
"Hi. This is my friend, Jack Shit, and you don't know him." - Lord Kano
Now all we have to do is get all the spammers to move to Ohio and we are set.
I Am My Own Worst Enemy
Hopfully this will be an example to the rest of the world. It would make a banner advert I saw earlier nicely illegal.
It detected I was using Linux (No, FreeBSD) and Netscape 5 (No, Mozilla) then told me that my system could be optimised (yippie!) by installing some Windows-only software.
Deceptive? I'd say so.
Quite amusing though.
Hormel factories in Ohio have been stormed by enthusiastic but confused SWAT teams. Hormel spokesmen could not be reached for comment, as they are being held at gunpoint.
Thinkin' Lincoln - a web comic of presidential proportions
There are already *plenty* of laws under which to prosecute spammers. They simply aren't enforced... The problem is not a lack of laws, it is a lack of resources/motivation/knowledge on the part of law enforcement. I would much rather see a commitment to spend a few million actually *doing* something - and when you consider the drain spammers are on the economy, it would be money well spent.
SSL Certificate
A prison term is the only way to truly deter someone from spamming. Financial penalties are pointless. When Joe Trailerpark decides to start spamming, he is faced with the choice of doing something that is financially lucrative or doing the next best alternative which would probably be something along the lines of working at Taco Bell. The way he sees it, even if he were sued for everything he had, he wouldn't be any worse off than he would have been by not spamming and taking the shitty fast food job. Prison on the other hand would make him really stop and think, and most likely he would decide that spamming just isn't worth it. Sure some people will do it anyway, just like some people sell drugs, but that is what the legal system is there for.
I am not being a troll, but for all the known spammers, there are so many unknown, who live in other countries. How is a state law going to prosecute these people? How/Will the law be implemented. This remains to be seen.
Maybe this is a warped way to improve the conditions of America's prisons. Once they're filled with non-violent offenders like spammers, drug-users, and copyright violators, there will be less incidence of assault and rape behind bars. We'll leave that for the outside.
Ohio legislators sent an anti-spam bill to Gov. Bob Taft on Tuesday, with the aim of joining other U.S. states that have laws that put people who flood the Web with junk e-mail behind bars.
I guess if you use webmail the "Web" could get flooded with junk "e-mail" (previously known as email for at least 10 years), otherwise the "journalist" looks pretty dumb right from the 1st sentence.
If signed into law, it would outlaw Internet ads that are deceptive or misleading and ban people from setting up false accounts to send spam, the junk e-mail that clogs consumers' online mailboxes and taxes the resources of Internet service providers.
The measure would also allow the state attorney general to impose criminal and civil sanctions against spammers.
fraud n.
1) A deception deliberately practiced in order to secure unfair or unlawful gain.
2) A piece of trickery; a trick.
3) a) One that defrauds; a cheat.
3) b) One who assumes a false pose; an impostor.
I know of no state in the United States where fraud is already legal. I'd be content with enforcement of existing laws before wasting time and effort passing new laws where enforcement of either the new or existing law is nonexistant.
why don't we go after spammers in snail mail?
I really don't want advertisments ANYWHERE unless I say ok, so why is snail mail exempt? Granted, most of it is not offensive ( except for the odd jury summons ), but that doesn't change the fact that it's unsolicited junk mail, albeit arriving via physical means instead of electronic.
Mod me down with all of your hatred and your journey towards the dark side will be complete!
Tough lawyers and Walcher* coming,
We're finally on our own.
This winter I hear the drumming,
Spam dead in Ohio.
Gotta get down to it
Spammers are mailing us down
Should have been done long ago.
What if you knew her
And found her swamped on the ground
How can you spam when you know?
* Representative Kathleen Walcher co-sponsored the bill under discussion.
I hear there's rumors on the Slashdots
I am all for taking a tough approach to spammers, but putting them in jail? Have you heard about the prison overcrowding problem?
Why don't we instead seize all of their assets, profits, and make some money for the people, instead of having to pay for them in jail?
This is more feel-good legislation that will probably have no teeth because it takes too much work for too little result. Real change requires going back to holding ISPs responsible for spam -- cutting the worst off at the uplink when they don't put some minimal effort into keeping their users from spamming.
Maybe that'll mean certain countries are delinked until a scrupulous ISP shows up. It'll do a hell of a lot more than prosecuting a handful of spammers here.
I never vote for anyone. I always vote against.
-- W.C. Fields
Additional civil cases may be personally filed with the state over spam. This is stating that the attorney general has no judical power in the courts of Ohio. Such as the normal separtation of state and federal branches and laws. If the federal goverment fails to honor the CAN-SPAM act. You can still seek compensation through civil action through Ohio court.
Good news for me, however it is hard to say if this will help. I can see ISP rates going up due to increased labor with judical action requesting for records.
Your post advocates a
( ) technical (x) legislative ( ) market-based ( ) vigilante
approach to fighting spam. Your idea will not work. Here is why it won't work. (One or more of the following may apply to your particular idea, and it may have other flaws which vary from state to state.)
( ) Spammers can easily use it to harvest email addresses
( ) Mailing lists and other legitimate email uses would be affected
(x) No one will be able to find the guy or collect the money
( ) It is defenseless against brute force attacks
( ) It will stop spam for two weeks and then we'll be stuck with it
( ) Users of email will not put up with it
( ) Microsoft will not put up with it
( ) The police will not put up with it
(x) Requires too much cooperation from spammers
( ) Requires cooperation from too many of your friends and is counterintuitive
( ) Requires immediate total cooperation from everybody at once
( ) Many email users cannot afford to lose business or alienate potential employers
( ) Spammers don't care about invalid addresses in their lists
(z) Anyone could anonymously destroy anyone else's career or business
(x) Ideas similar to yours are easy to come up with, yet none have ever worked
( ) Other:
Specifically, your plan fails to account for
( ) Laws expressly prohibiting it
( ) Lack of centrally controlling authority for email
(x) Open relays in foreign countries
( ) Ease of searching tiny alphanumeric address space of all email addresses
(x) Asshats
(x) Jurisdictional problems
( ) Unpopularity of weird new taxes
( ) Public reluctance to accept weird new forms of money
( ) Huge existing software investment in SMTP
( ) Susceptibility of protocols other than SMTP to attack
( ) Willingness of users to install OS patches received by email
(x) Armies of worm riddled broadband-connected Windows boxes
( ) Eternal arms race involved in all filtering approaches
(x) Extreme profitability of spam
( ) Joe jobs and/or identity theft
(x) Technically illiterate politicians
(x) Extreme stupidity on the part of people who do business with spammers
(x) Dishonesty on the part of spammers themselves
( ) Bandwidth costs that are unaffected by client filtering
( ) Outlook
( ) Other:
and the following philosophical objections may also apply:
( ) Any scheme based on opt-out is unacceptable
( ) SMTP headers should not be the subject of legislation
( ) Blacklists suck
( ) Whitelists suck
( ) We should be able to talk about Viagra without being censored
( ) Countermeasures cannot involve wire fraud or credit card fraud
( ) Countermeasures cannot involve sabotage of public networks
( ) Sending email should be free
( ) Why should we have to trust you and your servers?
( ) Incompatiblity with open source or open source licenses
(x) Feel-good measures do nothing to solve the problem
( ) Temporary/one-time email addresses are cumbersome
( ) I don't want the government reading my email
( ) Killing them that way is not slow and painful enough
( ) Other:
Furthermore, this is what I think about you:
( ) Nice try, dude, but I don't think it will work.
(x) This is a stupid idea, and you're a stupid person for suggesting it.
( ) Nice try, assh0le! I'm going to find out where you live and burn your house down!
Follow the money. If it comes back to Ohio then they've got a case.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
Well, everybody should do their part. China is good at controlling Internet Access, and spammers are one group of criminals for whom labor/re-education camps would be actually approporiate and helpful. When they start a crackdown on spam under international pressure, I am sure they'll have excellent results.
In the meantime, Ohio can jail CEOs of companies that advertise through spam.
Physical spam is actually more of a nuissance IMO because it is wasteful of real resources and takes up space in my trash bin (requiring me to empty it more frequently, requiring me to buy more trash bags). Also, I live in an apartment building in which the communal area is regularly a trash heap from tenants who refuse to take their unwanted flyers and catalogues with them when they retrieve their mail.
in essence, if a federal law does not specifically permit an activity, it is within the state's power to prohibit that activity. The State law here [but IANAL] appears very clearly written and defines all its terms and the crime described in those terms with some precision. If a spammer is fighting this law in court, they will have to show that the Fed regulation [sorry, text not available to me here] explicitly permits something that the Ohio law has prohibited. [Law is NEVER as simple as the people enacting it would wish or would promise their constituents.]
SLASHDOT: news for people who can't concentrate on work or have no life at all and got tired of yelling back at the TV.
Wait a second -- you seem to be implying that if something isn't punished in another country, it shouldn't be punished here. Why not punish them here? It's not going to stop all spam, of course, but it doesn't make sense to scoff at each individual step because it doesn't solve the whole problem immediately. Even if all we do is stop all spam from inside the US (eventually, I hope) it'll then make it that much easier to identify spam and deal with spam.
Yep.
We've got the Dept of Homeland Security, FBI and CIA chasing terrorists around the world and tracking down their fundraising, but without pursuing all the spammers, for all we know, terrorists are raising funds with phishing and selling junk through spam. Their contempt for people is so complete that they'll slaughter their own countrymen and consider it an acceptable loss in pursuing their goals, so they'd have no problem offering anything and everything to those gullible enough to take them up on whatever offer or hand over their passwords, credit card numbers, bank account numbers or personal identification bits.
The problem with W. is he still sees the enemy as something that you can shoot or drop a bomb on. No wonder people say there's a problem with intelligence.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
Nope, I'm a laywer, they're lawyers, this is how we're taught to think. If we can assume that a sheet of paper signed by a judge will keep your ex girlfriend from stalking you, we can certainly assume that the law will keep spam at bay. (And thus technological solutions are not needed.)
Trying to use sarcasm in text-based forums does not work.
Wouldn't Florida be a better place for a law like this?
Slashdot: News for Nerds, Stuff that matters only to them
If the spammer's cell mates were given some of the penis enlargment pills during the spammer's visit.
Fight Spammers!
If this had been a law designed to send copyright infringers to jail for six months, I doubt we'd be hearing the many 'hell, yeah!' responses posted so far. We should all be uneasy about 'tough' laws which can send people to jail by criminalizing online-specific types of behavior.
...
I'm not claiming that copyright infringment and spamming are equivalent activities, but I'll bet many of the same arguments people would use for criminalization and tough sentencing in one case are applicable to the other.
There are laws out there already against fraud and deceptive advertising, just as there are (old, established) laws against copyright infringement. We only start running into trouble by trying to 'update' these laws for the internet age (think DeCSS, DMCA, etc.). IMO, little good comes out of these 'tough updates'.
And so I say "tech solutions for tech problems" and keep the government and courts out of it as much as possible
Imposing Libertarian views on everyone online since 1992.
I just hope the penalty is $2-$8 per e-mail, or $25,000, whichever is HIGHER.
Hitting em in the pocketbook is usually pretty reliable. Assuming you can enforce it in the first place, but that's another discussion. =P
Erioll
By allowing a private right of action for individuals, you get some of the smaller-time spammers.
There is one spammer, AVTech Direct (Avtech Direct 22647 Ventura Blvd. Suite 374 Woodland Hills, CA 91364), that I and about 10 others filed suit against for spamming. A $5000 small claims judgement won't get them, but if they had 100 or 1000 judgments for $5,000 each for spamming, they may not spam anymore.
Fight Spammers!
I had an idea for a TV show. It's called Spam Cops and it would use a similar format to the current show Cops. Every episode would focus on a differant scam. It would start out explaining how the scam works, then a commercial, then we get interviews with people who were taken in by the scam, perhaps using pixelated faces. Then, a commercial. Then an investigative segment where the spammers are tracked down. Then, a commercial, then the cops bust into the spammer's office and beat them with clubs. Then, commercials. Then, credits.
Seriously, it would at least educate the people out there. They would know not to fall for Phishing scams, and maybe they would switch to Firefox or at least change their IE settings. And they would see the effects that spam is having on real people.
Ohio Inmate #7779: What you here for?
Ohio Inmate #2466: I massacred almost an entire town, for the hell of it. What about you?
Ohio Inmate #7779: I spam inboxes
Ohio Inmate #2466: You make me sick!
Ohio Inmate #7779: *Lowers head in shame*
Here's what I'm yapping about:"(F)(1) The attorney general or an electronic mail service provider that is injured by a violation of this section may bring a civil action in an appropriate court of common pleas of this state seeking relief from any person whose conduct violated this section. The civil action may be commenced at any time within one year of the date after the act that is the basis of the civil action."
We have that same (or damn close to it) language in our state law. Notice the word "may", that's the key. If the AG chooses not to he doesn't have to do shit. He can let it all flush away. They should have put that word as "must", which would have mandated action. As it is, this law is no better than Iowa code 714E that we've had for a while now and not one case has been put to the measure, sadly.
I predict no real help from this "feel-good" legislation.
That is in fact totally correct. If "Joe Trailerpark" is faced with a consequence along the lines of a 6 month prison stretch then he's going to take that into account when deciding whether he really wants to make that fast cash and certainly it sounds harsh. That's why it works. Is Joe Trailerpark a "criminal" though? Probably not but that's exactly why this could be effective.
I have a law enforcement background (8 years of MP work in the army followed by another 5 years in civilian law enforcement) and this reminds me of something I learned many years ago in one of the endless ongoing training courses I sat through. The subject was capital punishment as a deterrant but the basic idea still fits.
We went over a series of case studies with interviews that clearly showed that the death penalty was not in any way a deterrant to the people who had consented to be interviewed. They either never considered it or the idea that they might be caught and sentenced to death for doing what they did was in no way a factor when they made the decision to commit the crime.
When another series of interviews were done with people who agreed to discuss the death penalty most of the respondent stated that they would consider the possiblity of being put to death a big factor in whether they would commit a murder regardless of the circumstances. They also were very much under the illusion that having a death penalty in place helped reduce the number of murders.
Basically it comes down to the mindsets of criminals being very different from the mindsets of the average person. A harsh sentence deters those who in most cases wouldn't do it to begin with and barely registers with the people who would. In Joe Trailerparks case finding out whether he decides to spam in the face of prison time will be pretty revealing. Some of them, probably a majority of them will be deterred from doing it. Others, probably far fewer, regardless of how harsh the penalty may be will do it anyway.
Appended to the end of comments you post. 120 chars.
There are multiple Americas. There share some common needs, and have some common traits, but the East Coast has different needs and wants than the West Coast. Different still are the needs and want of the South, the Southwest, the Industrial/Great Lakes Region, the Northwest, and the Midwest (Grainbelt).
Farmers have different needs than auto manufacturers, and insurance companies, and stock brokers, and software houses need.
This is why states rights is such an attractive doctrine. A solution for Kansas, may not work for Alabama, and a solution for New York might make no sense for Nevada.
My Heart Is A Flower
Theft of service.
It costs that person distributing flyers - the paper, the toner/ink, etc. That comes out of their pocket, not yours. That is why I'm willing to tolerate junk mail - because I'm not footing the bill for it.
On the other hand, those of us who pay for bandwidth, servers, etc end up footing the bill for spam, because its our system that has to accept/store the crap.
Imagine if the junk mailers started sending their crap COD through the mail, and expected you to pay for it.
Now, if spammers want to pay me a monthly fee of around $10,000 to cover expenses associated with them using my resources, as well as make sure my users get paid for the time they spend reading the spam, I may let them in.
Ahh, one can dream...
Brielle
I don't like spam anymore than anyone else but my advice to you is to install a spam filter and shut up. I get one piece of spam a day.
Who the hell cares how much spam you hide from yourself, spam ostrich? Just because you don't see it, doesn't mean that it's not there. You still paid for the bandwidth the spammer used. If you're using your ISP's mail server, you paid them for the storage and delivery of the spam. Spammers are costing everyone money.
If you can't bare that toll, time to get off the Interweb.
While your time may have zero value, others do value their time and an attorney, CPA, or other professional using the net should not have to invest his time, or his money, fighting off spammers. Spammers are stealing from him and hurting his ability to earn a livelihood and should be jailed just like any other thief. Why the hell should millions of people have to invest billions of dollars and countless hours just so that spammers can spam without fear of jail time?
While your little geek-boy spam filter might suit your needs, I've worked with someone who consults to the real-estate industry and real-estate agents are bombarded with spam -- as well as legitimate business newsletters, business communications, and client communications. In order to be competitive, they have to post their e-mail address online. And that means that it gets harvested. They can't afford to lose a commission on a half-million dollar home sale by posting some javascript obsfuscated mailto link that doesn't work with the buyer's or seller's web browser. Nor do they want to get important mortgage rate information scrapped -- but they don't want some spam with a refinance-your-home scam.
I have my own domain and probably get two to three pieces of spam a week through my blacklists and filters, but I'm a grown-up, so I recognize that what I, as an individual, do isn't going to work for most businesses. If I bounce all mail from Taiwan, that's fine. If a business does, they might miss out on important correspondence that translates to large sums of money.
Instead of arguing about whether a legislative or technical solution will work better, why don't we do both? Obviously Ohio spammers can simply move to Jersey or something, but this is a strong precedent that hopefully everyone else follows. Also, I've seen some comments about SPAM laws not being enforced. Well, if the DA can get actual prison time and the politicians tell the DA that anti-SPAM is a priority then maybe law enforcement *will* bother finding and prosecuting these cretins. Why would a DA bother now if they know they'll have to fight for months and the spammer will walk away with a 25k fine, which the spammer will make up in a month?
The technical ideas are being proposed, and we are learning about which ones are promising (note to M$, byte me). This process will take 5+ years to codify into some IETF stadard and get deployed in some meaningful way. In the meantime we can let our politicians do something useful by making the spammers we can catch pay in a big way (with community input I hope). This means prison time; just like embezzlement must carry a prison sentence because the financial incentives are so great and the chance of getting caught in time are small enough to be enticing. That is the *deterrent* factor. The malicious grin we get from this law is the revenge factor of punishment. This law has both.
Can state anti-spam laws only be passed if states have been expressly granted the power to do so under CAN-SPAM? Or am I missing something?
:)
There is a loophole that allows states to pass anti-spam laws providing they don't address activities already covered under CAN-SPAM. I don't recall the exact details at the moment, but I remember that much. Perhaps a NANAE regular can recall more than I?
Also, I believe that ligitation that started before CAN-SPAM went into effect was allowed to continue, which is how Virginia got to pack their boy away.
Come to the University of Mars! Classes starting soon!
Wait no more!
Your post advocates a
( ) technical ( ) legislative ( ) market-based ( ) vigilante
approach to fighting spam. Your idea will not work. Here is why it won't work. (One or more of the following may apply to your particular idea, and it may have other flaws which used to vary from state to state before a bad federal law was passed.)
( ) Spammers can easily use it to harvest email addresses
( ) Mailing lists and other legitimate email uses would be affected
( ) No one will be able to find the guy or collect the money
( ) It is defenseless against brute force attacks
( ) It will stop spam for two weeks and then we'll be stuck with it
( ) Users of email will not put up with it
( ) Microsoft will not put up with it
( ) The police will not put up with it
( ) Requires too much cooperation from spammers
( ) Requires immediate total cooperation from everybody at once
( ) Many email users cannot afford to lose business or alienate potential employers
( ) Spammers don't care about invalid addresses in their lists
( ) Anyone could anonymously destroy anyone else's career or business
Specifically, your plan fails to account for
( ) Laws expressly prohibiting it
( ) Lack of centrally controlling authority for email
( ) Open relays in foreign countries
( ) Ease of searching tiny alphanumeric address space of all email addresses
( ) Asshats
( ) Jurisdictional problems
( ) Unpopularity of weird new taxes
( ) Public reluctance to accept weird new forms of money
( ) Huge existing software investment in SMTP
( ) Susceptibility of protocols other than SMTP to attack
( ) Willingness of users to install OS patches received by email
( ) Armies of worm riddled broadband-connected Windows boxes
( ) Eternal arms race involved in all filtering approaches
( ) Extreme profitability of spam
( ) Joe jobs and/or identity theft
( ) Technically illiterate politicians
( ) Extreme stupidity on the part of people who do business with spammers
( ) Dishonesty on the part of spammers themselves
( ) Bandwidth costs that are unaffected by client filtering
( ) Outlook
and the following philosophical objections may also apply:
( ) Ideas similar to yours are easy to come up with, yet none have ever
been shown practical
( ) Any scheme based on opt-out is unacceptable
( ) SMTP headers should not be the subject of legislation
( ) Blacklists suck
( ) Whitelists suck
( ) We should be able to talk about Viagra without being censored
( ) Countermeasures should not involve wire fraud or credit card fraud
( ) Countermeasures should not involve sabotage of public networks
( ) Countermeasures must work if phased in gradually
( ) Sending email should be free
( ) Why should we have to trust you and your servers?
( ) Incompatiblity with open source or open source licenses
( ) Feel-good measures do nothing to solve the problem
( ) Temporary/one-time email addresses are cumbersome
( ) I don't want the government reading my email
( ) Killing them that way is not slow and painful enough
Furthermore, this is what I think about you:
( ) Sorry dude, but I don't think it would work.
( ) This is a stupid idea, and you're a stupid person for suggesting it.
( ) Nice try, assh0le! I'm going to find out where you live and burn your
house down!
...is that if and when spam is ever eliminated, it would mean the end of Spamusement. http://www.spamusement.com/ I actually look through my spam to find the weirdest subject headings to send to the guy who makes the cartoon. It's the best use for spam I've yet to see.
"I'd rather stay here with all the madmen, for I'm quite content they're all as sane as me..." ~ David Bowie
A very few years ago, there were less than a hundred major spammers. And most of them were low-rent operations. One arrest per week would have killed off the spam industry.
Now that organized crime is involved, it's going to be much harder.
On the other hand, "legitimate" spam is almost dead. You see few spams today from any business that is even vaguely legitimate.
Why should I (an Ohio tax payer) pay to keep a non-violent criminal in jail? Most jails are so over crowded they parole people early to make space. I don't care if you want to fine spammers, but don't ask me to support them in jail. Jail should be for people who are a danger to society, not for someone who sends junk emails.
Actually, an effective law would need to allow for whats known as a "private right of action" where individuals (or groups of individuals, classes, etc) can *SUE* senders of spam for damanges.
Anything requiring DA's to be involved will not be enough of a threat to spammers. And yes, it needs to be written without regards as to the *content* of the spam, as you note.