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Spam King Pleads Guilty in Seattle
arbitraryaardvark writes "The Seattle Times reports that spammer Robert Soloway has pled guilty to mail fraud and tax evasion, in exchange for the state dropping multiple counts of identify theft. 'The electronic-mail fraud charge is punishable by up to five years in prison. The tax charge is a misdemeanor and carries a maximum one-year sentence. The law also allows for fines against Soloway and his business of up to $625,000 on all charges. Both sides agreed to let U.S. District Court Judge Marsha Pechman determine not just the amount of prison time Soloway, 28, might serve but also the number of his victims, the size of any fine and the amount of restitution he may be ordered to pay.' We've previously discussed his arrest and mention in the New Yorker. The wire fraud felony count is based on selling $500 packages to wannabe spammers."
Why would they drop the charges of identity theft and charge him with sending too much email? Who cares if someone spams, SMTP is an open system and it's designed to indiscriminately deliver messages- CAN-SPAM is a terrible idea. If you don't want spam, just don't accept email from every mail server on the internet. ID theft and tax evasion are the real charges here.
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The major charge in this case seems to be that he defrauded a bunch of other spammers. For that, he faces serious time - conning a bunch of nasty people who had every intent to spam a lot of genuinely innocent people if they could. He faces only much more minor time and fines for not paying his fair share of taxes or for spamming anybody who wasn't themselves out to con people. The guy's pond scum, and a few years in medium security looks reasonable, but isn't this all sort of like arresting Clyde Barrow and threatening him with 30 days for each murder, 180 days each for the robberies, and 20 years+ for shortening shotguns?
Who is John Cabal?
The problem with this? The depressing number of office workers who use their accounts for personal type mail. A company uses your smtpx protocol and promptly sees their rating drop due to the dozen fifty year old ladies in accounting forwarding on every piece of cute spam and donate-to-save-the-children mail they get.
I don't think he should be killed or raped, but he should be put away for more than a year. The cumulative damage he caused to many people in bandwidth costs alone is probably much more than the guy who vandalized a few SUVs as an environmental protest and got 10 years or whatever, too lazy to look up the details. If you want to deter a crime that is easy to commit and where those committing it are hard to catch (as with spam) you do it by imposing harsher sentences.
Negative moral value of force outweighs the positive value of good intentions.