Slashdot Mirror
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?"
He didn't? Let's assume (conservatively), that he sent out one spam per customer record he stole. 1.6 billion spams. Let's further assume that it takes a human being one second to "Just Hit Delete". 1.6 billion person-seconds wasted. 444,444 person-hours wasted. 18,518 person-days wasted. 50 person-years if you're working 24/7. At 8 hours a day, that's the entire productive lifespan of three people. Three lives - stolen just as effectively as if he'd killed them.
> Maybe he should have gotten something more brutal, like 64000 hours of community service...as a tech support operator!
64,000 hours, at 8 hours a day, is 40000 days, or 218 years, so you're not too far off the 640-year mark.
640 years ought to be enough for anybody, but what I'd really like to see is to have him locked in a cell, "Just Hitting Delete", once for every spam he sent, for 16 waking hours a day.
Four or five times a day, an email with a From: line like "Your Warden", "Health Services", or "Cafeteria" with a Subject: line such as "Extended recreation hours!", "Take a break!", or "Lunchtime!" will appear.
He has to reply to this mail to get an hour of exercise, have his medical checkups, or his meals.
Hey, it's just spam, right? Doesn't hurt anyone, right? Just delete it, right? Well, if he hasn't starved to death when he runs out of 1.6 billion spams on which to Just Hit Delete, he can walk away a free man.
It's great to see a spammer taken down. But what about this Axciom company? According to the article, Axciom "serves large corporations by collecting and managing information for marketing purposes". Maybe they don't spam directly, but it sure sounds like they at least help spammers. And probably not just email spammers, but telephone and snail mail, as well. And apparently they're storing "personal customer records, including names, postal and e-mail addresses, bank and credit card numbers." [ephasis mine] Why does one company have so much information on so many people? And why when they are negligent with that data, do they not face any consequences?
The article seemed to imply that the snipermail spammers initially got access to more records than they were supposed to have because of something Axciom did (this isn't clear) before they started breaking passwords to get even more data. Where are the 600+ year prison terms for the Axciom management?
"Save the whales, feed the hungry, free the mallocs" -- author unknown
"One spammer down, several million to go?"
I heard that less than 200 people account for about 95% of all spam.
If this guy cost every person who he spammed one minute of their lives why shouldn't he be be responsible??? Lets (conservatively) say he cost 1 minute x 100 million recipients, thats 100 million minutes of life that he cost others, or over 190 years.
He has wasted 190 years of resources that may have been spent on more productive or fulfilling purposes. I think that is a big deal.
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?
This is a good point. The law seems to be intent on treating computer-related offences identically with "physical" crimes, although the notion of number of counts makes much less sense in the electronic context.
The same reasoning that brings us a potential 640 year verdict for a spammer (yay!) also leads to kids being subjected to $100 billion lawsuits (boo!). If you can do something online once, you can set it up to be done 1000 times -- is that a single offence, or 1000 of them?
From TFAs:
"There is no evidence that any individuals are at risk of harm due to the breaches," the company said. "It is also important to note that only one external server was accessed, and there was no intrusion of Acxiom's internal security firewalls or internal databases."
"The 1.6 billion records included names, home addresses, phone numbers, e-mail addresses, bank and credit card numbers"
HAhaahahhahhahhaahahahaha. Yeah. what an excuse, no internal server was breached. And WTF was an "external" server doing containing all that information without any firewalls? Was thier security totally incompetent?
You think 64 years is fair?
No, it's far too lenient.
Are you telling me that his crime is worse than a rapist's?
"Crimes", not "crime". We're not talking about one act, but millions of counts of theft. Heck, I'm fine with only giving him one day in jail for each person's data that he stole.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."