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High Earning Spammers Face Tougher Sentences
netbuzz writes "More big-time spammers may find themselves doing longer stretches behind bars if a federal judge's first-of-its-kind sentencing decision in a Denver case becomes widely applied. In a sense, these spammers would be hoisted on their own profits, as language in CAN-SPAM allows the use of their profits instead of the difficult-to-measure financial damage they cause in establishing a prison sentence. The Denver spammer earned $250,000 — and a 20% longer prison stint — using this approach."
Steal $15,000, and you get 15 years. Steal $15,000,000,000 (can you say "Enron"?), and you get 2 years plus time spent.
Oh, well, American jurisprudence overcomes all obstacles, I guess.
Generally, bash is superior to python in those environments where python is not installed.
To me there is no greater crime than the one that involves planning and execution, breaking and skirting security measures, taking advantage of and defrauding thousands if not millions of people, and doing so with a sense of entitlement.
They demonstrate no remorse and no regret. They commit criminal acts on a very wide scale and they somehow think it's business. The crime is executed in a cold, calculating and callous manner against people who often go through great and expensive means to avoid their acts only to have those measures thwarted with ever-increasing intent. INTENT. These guys are intent on doing what they do.
They demonstrate skill that could just as easily be used in honest ways. They choose not to for varieties of reasons, but they clearly have options and ignore the legal ones in favor of illegal ones. Why? Because they stand to make more money criminally? That's the most likely reason.
Now let's compare that to, say, armed robbery. Aside from the true professionals, armed robbers are generally pretty desperate people. Very little planning goes into the act. Get get a weapon and engage in violent and brutal behavior to get money... a relatively small amount of money at that when compared the the criminal described above. The victims are limited in number. The victims aren't usually pulled from a list, but rather someone at random... an unfortunate.
And while an armed robber might present the victim(s) with momentary fright or even injury, it's a much more honest and direct crime. It's also far less planned. The degree is intent is orders of magnitude less than that of the criminal described above. The drive for this crime is generally one of desperation; it's emotional in nature -- passionate. And let's face it. If he had better options, he would be doing that at all.
So really... which one is actually the worst person? Which is the worst crime? Is armed robbery worse because it involves fear?! Someone ran a red light and scared me half to death the other morning! By that measure, a red-light runner is worse than a spammer... and let's not forget that more people die in those types of accidents than from armed robbery, let alone spamming. So REALLY. What makes other crimes worse?
Well it does seem logical that those who earn more from spam would do longer times, but I'd rather have it based on the volume of spam, than the earnings.
Al Capone, the notorious Chicago gangster, was brought down this way. Not through being a member of the Chicago mafia... but through failing to declare his illegal income.
Hmmm. What is "the one that poses a substantial and unavoidable chance of someone getting killed when it all goes south," Alex.
Come on. Wrap your head around this: Armed robberies often involve people getting shot and killed. Spam, to the best of my knowledge never killed anyone.
And in most (94% or higher) states, the only death qualified felonies (if any) are homicides and rape (especially the rape of children). Spam is simply not in the same ballpark as other crimes.
Now that's not to say that I don't think a good public flogging wouldn't be in order, on the way to the prison . . . . But the death penalty for what is essentially a victimless crime? No.
--AC
In the interest of fairness, I should mention that under the Federal Sentencing Guidelines, it is a capital offense to grow pot. To be death qualified, you've got to grow lots and lots and lots of pot (like 200,000 plants). But that shouldn't be the law either.
I keep wondering, why do we need to charge the spammers with anti-spam laws.
Because otherwise, you couldn't get slashbots to support the destruction of the first amendment. It sounds a little like, "Won't someone please think of the children^W spam!!!" Yes, we need to stop the email scammers/phishers/trojans, we need to stop people peddling deadly/addictive drugs via email, we need to stop the email pump and dump scam artists.... We don't need to make it illegal to send an email message to 20 million people just because you don't know them.
The parent's point was that the difference between armed robbery and capital murder is generally luck, so saying that spammers have committed a more morally heinous crime than armed robbery is a stretch; spam has a much lower likelihood of ending in death (approximately zero) than armed robbery (some high percentage).
I'm a lawyer, but not yours. I wouldn't represent someone who thinks taking legal advice from Slashdot is a good idea.
See my earlier post in this thread for my thoughts on a comparison between armed robbery and spamming.
Your question is: Do you honestly think spamming and murder are morally equal? I wouldn't, unless as a result of the consequences of the spam, someone died. I think with high probability unfortunate engineers in Japanese ISPs (and elsewhere) have died from overwork combatting spam. They call it Karoshi in Japan http://www.apmforum.com/columns/boye51.htm and the Prime Minister around the turn of the century, OBUCHI Keizo, is a recent extremely high-profile victim.
He wasn't offering moral comparisons though, only the amount of intent involved. I would imagine more effort, planning and callousness go into spamming than nearly any premeditated murder.
Think outside the box for a moment. Murder is ending the life of an individual, in effect stealing time from their life away from them and their loved ones. Spamming is stealing time from the lives of millions of individuals and the overall costs to society as a whole may well be greater.
And the more I think about it, the more I want to hear your answer. What makes you think that murder is morally worse than spamming? Just asking.
but is putting them behind bars really a fitting punishment? Yes, they're highly annoying and may even have done some damage depending on their use of botnets and the like, but isn't the whole reason to have a prison to keep DANGEROUS people away from society? I'd sure as hell want a serial killer in there rather than just a spammer. And then there's the argument that prison isn't an effective punishment, but that's beside the point...
"Beware of he who would deny you access to information, for in his heart he dreams himself your master."
And then buy a lottery ticket with it, and win a million, I'd get a much longer sentence than someone else who stole a quarter and didn't make anything out of it?
Sorry, I'm all for canning spammers, but punishing people based on profit they make from ill-gotten gains, rather than the damage they actually caused, seems to be as violating fundemantal principles of justice.
There is a world of difference between this and altering the punishments based on intent. Do you think that someone who buys a gun for the express purpose of murder and then uses it to kill someone is as guilty as someone who is negligently handles a weapon on a firing range and accidentally kills someone? Should they both be subject to the same punishment?
Ignoring the moral aspect, the first person in the above aspect has demonstrated that they are guilty of premeditated killing and is likely to be a future danger to society. The second person has not (although they might be dangerously incompetent).
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There's no aspect of "thought crime" whatsoever involved. Putting people at risk is doing something wrong. That's one of the reasons there's a difference between robbery and armed robbery, or why you can be arrested for DUI even though you haven't crashed into anything or anyone.
When someone says, "Any fool can see
The crime is putting people at unacceptable risk. By your argument, it should be perfectly legal to run around firing a gun in random directions until you happen to hit someone. Yes, "endangering other people" is a subjective term--that's why we have lawmakers who (in theory) create rules that exlpicitly state what the community considers acceptable.
When someone says, "Any fool can see