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Spammer Scott Levine Convicted
bani writes "Spammer Scott Levine was convicted of massive data theft from Acxiom Corporation. Prosecutors say his company, the now-defunct Snipermail.com, stole 1.6 billion customer records from Acxiom and sold the data. He faces a maximum of 640 years in prison under the law, though he will likely be sentenced to far less. One spammer down, several million to go?"
Only give him 1/10th of the maximum.
The difference between Canada and the USA is that in Canada healthcare is a right and gun ownership is a privilege.
i'm pretty sure noone has ever had to serve more than around 200 years in prison
They should put him in prison and make him write out every e-mail he ever sent with a pencil and paper. He gets out of jail whenever he is finished.
From TFA:
"We're very pleased with the outcome. We think it's the appropriate verdict," U.S. Attorney Bud Cummins said outside U.S. District Court.
As much as I dislike spammers, is 640 years appropriate for one man? He didn't even kill anyone. Maybe he should have gotten something more brutal, like 64000 hours of community service...as a tech support operator!
Every spammer that goes to jail for his actions is a victory. For one, it's quite well-known that most of the spam we see today originates from a relatively small group of people, so it's not exactly "one down, several more million to go"; and also, even if there were considerably more, the mere fact that they now know that they might go to jail for spamming just might be a deterrent. Spamming is pretty much a textbook example of whitecollar crime, and it's been shown that unlike with bluecollar crime (that is, more physical crimes, like assault, rape, robbery etc.), prison sentences actually do serve as a deterrent here.
Remember, spammers are cowards - and greedy cowards, for that matter. They do what they do to get rich quick, so the prospect losing their money in lawsuits and possibly going to jail afterwards will scare them quite a bit.
quidquid latine dictum sit altum videtur.
You can't really be that stupid, can you?
Stealing is not exclusively defined as depriving someone else of something that belongs to them.
Most children know that stealing is taking something that does not belong to you, regardless of whether it is a copy or the original item.
Stealing has a lot to do with intent as well. If I take the wrong coat at a restaurant, I deprived it from someone else, but I didn't have the intent to do so, so it isn't stealing.
Besides, even by your deifinition, it IS stealing. The records were private, once they were copied, the company was deprived of its secrecy/privacy of those records. Same as stealing a password.
-David
The problem is, that most spammers are seen in the 'industry' (so to speak) as some of the best paid, their earnings from the illegal mailings dwarf what some porn websites make in a day, and that can be huge
As long as their is money in it, people will try their hardest to do it. It will be very hard to stop in the end, as for every spammer who goes down... 10 new kids with a copy of a mailing script pop up.
What would be better is taking down the companies who fund the illegal mail by paying comissions on the products advertised, no spammer would risk jail if they weren't getting paid.
Business Voyeur
So Acxiom lost 1.6 billion private records... what were they charged with for such shoddy security?
How much did they pay consumers for not protecting their data..?
What new standards did they have to agree to with the government..?
From what i can tell, he is being jailed for THEFT, not spam.
While i agree with most here that spam sux, there is a difference between being convicted of spamming and convicted of being a common thief.
So dont get too happy yet shouting 'spammers are toast'.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
So what will happen with this guy in jail? I can just see the conversation-
Scott: I'm new here
Inmate #1: I'm in armed robbery. Motherfuckers locked me up for 12 god damn years. Can you believe that shit?
Inmate #2: I'm in for not paying child support for 8 years, and not paying taxes. I have to serve two years. Can you believe what the bitch did to me, the father of her kids? Inmate #3: I'm in because the bitch said I raped her. She was all "yes, yes, yes". Bitch set me up. Can you believe this shit? Hey, Scott, what are you in for?
Scott: I got 640 years. I sent out millions of emails offering people a breakthrough product that enlarges penis size.
Inmates #1, #2, and #3 (all together): Aaa... yay. We gonna get along just fine.
Inmate #2 talking to Inmate #3: You hold his head in the toilet while I prop his ass up.
Inmate #1: You gonna forget about me? What does a brother have to do to get some props. Gimme a piece of that creamy white ass.
Scott (heard through the bubbles comming out of the toilet water: Oh, shit!
I don't want to defend spammers. But did society make a toy (computers) that can no cause massive harm to many people (spam), and society did not make any safegaurds. Look at script kiddes. Download and run, it takes no brains. I hate to say it, but people are very stupid. And if you get a stupid person that is desperate, they just might become a spammer. Who wants to spend out their whole life in a 2 bedroom trailer home in a crappy area with savages? The lure to riches can be hard to resist.
And how do we sentance a wrong do'er? Do we sentance based on each act, that every single peice of email is a seperate offense? Or do we sentance based on the whole of what he did? For example, if someone rapes one person, that is very different than if someone rapes 10 people. But what about spam?
I think if they made a BIG example out of him, took away all his money, sent him to prision for 2 years, and humiliated him, that would be a detterent. Look at Martha Stewart. How much money did she steal? I would like to compare numbers in terms of monitary loss.
I wonder if there is a way to change email, so before any email is passed on, there is some visual confermation that has to be entered by the sender. Kinda like joining a forum. Hopefully that will stop the mass emails.
Rosco: "If brains were gunpowder, Enos couldn't blow his nose."
hmmmm.
<i>640K software is all the memory anybody would ever need on a computer</I>
640 years is all the punishment anybody would ever need for computer spaming.
somebody has a sense of humor.
Spam used to be a big problem for me until I stopped using Outlook and started using Thunderbird. Dealing with spam used to take minutes, now only seconds. Really, just about 10-30 seconds to identify the bad mail that Thunderbird's filter didn't catch.
Is it not the same for you?
I'm not defending, or apologizing for this guy. I'm just saying that you seem to be making a very big deal about something that, for most of us, isn't taking more than a minute a day to deal with.
By your sentencing formula, shouldn't hackers, virus writers and script kiddies be getting a lot more time than they are now? I mean, how many productivity hours are lost every year due to a virus?
I empathize with you. I'll never forgive George Lucas for the two hours of my life wasted watching SWI.
damaged by dogma
So the difference here is that one person has the ability to disturb the whole infrastructure fo the economy, and waste a lot of time and money.
As bad as they are, a violent criminal only disturbs a small segment of society.
So a data 'thief' is like a lawn mower and a violent criminal is like an ant eater.
Hello Cruel World