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Spammer Sentenced to 9 Years in Jail
Iphtashu Fitz writes "Jeremy Jaynes of Raleigh, NC now has the dubious honor of being the first spammer sentenced to jail for the felony of spamming. Virginia judge Thomas Horne sentenced Jaynes to 9 years in prison based on a jury recommendation after he was convicted of sending out 10 million e-mails a day. Jaynes, who sent out much of his spam using the name "Gaven Stubberfield", has held a position on the SpamHaus Registry of Known Spam Operations for a long time.
Unfortunately the sentence has been postponed while the case is being appealed." Commentary on the sentence available at Forbes as well.
What kind of "status" would a spammer would get in jail? (For example, child abusers are the lowest form of life on the prison evolutionary scale.) And how it will affect their behavior after relase, and how it will affect the behavior of spammers who haven't been caught but may end up fearing what awaits.
People say I'm crazy, I got diamonds on the soles of my shoes...
Not.
There's a suit in the courts seeking to overhaul the entire justice system, based on the premise of cruel and unusual punishment. I'm not sure how it's going, frankly I hope they win.
Everyone in the Dept. of Corrections knows about the constant rape and torture of inmates, by inmates, and yet have done little to fix the problem in a century.
Sentencing someone to rape is cruel and unusual by any stretch of the term.
At any rate, prison makes bad people worse. There are dangers to society that need to be locked away, but the attitude of "throw everyone in for everything" is really warped. In my state, it's a manditory 10 years for being busted for anything drug related within 5 miles of a school. Get out a map of your city or town - unless you're way out on the farm, EVERYONE lives within 5 miles of a school. Erego, every college kid busted with a half a doobie gets his life ruined.
And then theres the practice of civil forfeiture, a great way to get around the constitutional protection to be able to refuse to testify against your spouse. "Mrs Malda, either you testify that Rob was selling crack to 6 year olds, or we take your home, car, all your money, and then put your kids into protective custody so you'll never see them again"
Cheer all you want about this, slashbots, this just sets a precedent for when you're in front of a Judge for downloading those Metallica mp3s. After all, a computer crime is computer crime to a clueless jury. Hell, the DMCA calls for even stiffer penalties than this, should you dare modify that PS2 to play copied titles.
I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
But then, why not charge him with fraud? After all, that's crime already exists.
Why charge him on spam alone? It's kind of like breaking a window to get into a house, robbing the people inside, and gunning them down, only to get charged with destruction of property.
If he is a fraudster, then he is a fraudster. Get him on that count, right?
/^[A-Z0-9._%+-]+@[A-Z0-9.-]+\.[A-Z]{2,4}$/i
I see a lot of people decrying the 9-year length of sentence as excessive. I'd like to promote the idea that its actually lenient, given the harm to society.
First, for those who haven't RTFA, this guy's crime wasn't just "spamming", it was the electronic equivalent of mail fraud. Take a look here for mail fraud penalties. Yup - that's right. Up to 5 YEARS per occurance. Not per person actually defrauded, but per mail sent.
Furthermore, we seem to want to punish "blue collar" crime (physical violence and theft) as somehow more heinous than "white collar" crime (usually fraud and theft of money or intangible property). As a poster above noted, blue collar crime tends to have a severe impact on a very limited number of people, though in the aggregate it also attacks a locality's social fabric (consider the number of violent crimes in someplace like South Central LA and the correlation to property values there). White collar crime, however, tends to impact a large number of people to a lesser extent, but also directly attacks the fundamental underpinnings of the society: in particular, the fundamental trust in fairness and shared responsibility that is essential for modern societies to function.
Fraud in particular is a particularly heinous crime from a societal standpoint, as it attacks the basic trust we put in financial transactions. A CEO giggering quarterly numbers is doing more than just cheating some stockholders out of a few cents in stock price - he's attacking the whole investing system which depends on truth in information dissemination. For if investors can't trust that a company's 10k annual report has real numbers, how can they invest?
White collar crime needs to be far more heavily punished than it currently is. And, it is much more deterred by increased prosecution and higher penalties than blue collar crime. Blue collar crime is generally only deterred by increased police presence (i.e. preventative measures) and not by increased penalties. White collar crime, on the other hand, generally shows a strong correlation to the likelihood of prosecution and severity of penalty. This is due to the fact that most white collar crime is committed by the more wealthy segment of the population, who generally do a risk analysis before committing the crime (i.e. "I'll steal $100,000 from the company, if I'm only 10% likely to get caught and only face 3 months in jail, but won't steal if I've a 50% chance of getting caught or if the sentence will be 5 years").
Also, remember that as "non-violent" criminals, white collar criminals tend to get put in low-security prisons, which cost much less to maintain than those in for violent crimes.
Overall, I'd like to see us start to put the emphasis on white collar crime instead of blue collar crime. In the big picture, I think it's far more damaging to society, and is far more frequent than people think.
There are some issues with this case (more specificly, the technicalities of the anti-spam law), but in the big picture, I think the sentence is exceedingly fair.
-Erik
There are always four sides to every story: your side, their side, the truth, and what really happened.