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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.
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!
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?
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
Oh, get off the high-horse. For the average reader, Web and Internet are the same thing.
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.
If the spammer's cell mates were given some of the penis enlargment pills during the spammer's visit.
Fight Spammers!
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*
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.
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.
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.