CAN-SPAM Act Turns 5 Today — What Went Wrong?

alphadogg writes "Five years ago, the US tech industry, politicians, and Internet users were wringing their hands over the escalating problem of spam. This prompted Congress to pass a landmark anti-spam bill known as the CAN-SPAM Act in December 2003. Fast forward five years. The number of spam messages sent over the Internet every day has grown more than 10-fold, topping 164 billion worldwide in August 2008. Almost 97% of all e-mails are spam, costing US ISPs and corporations an estimated $42 billion a year. What went wrong here?"

Comments

hint:criminals don't follow laws

[hguorbray]

especially when they are anonymous(or at least obfuscated) and in many cases, overseas and therefore beyond prosecution under this law

'I'm just saying

Re:hint:criminals don't follow laws

[the_womble]

It may be obvious, but it was not obvious to legislators....

Unless, of course, its more important to them to be seen to do something, rather than actually do something effective (like providing a budget for enforcement).

Re:hint:criminals don't follow laws

[lysergic.acid]

except in this case the people profiting from (and are the driving force behind) the crime aren't considered criminals. it makes no sense to outlaw spam but not go after the companies that hire spammers, and whose product advertisements are filling everyone's inbox.

even though a lot of spam is bounced through other countries, most of the products/services being advertised are of U.S. companies who operate completely out in the open and have easily traceable bank accounts. by going after these scummy businesses, you would cut off the money supply the fuels the spam industry and eliminate any financial incentive to send spam.

otherwise, this is like making it illegal commit murder but still allowing people to hire hitmen to do the killing for them.

More enforcement would help

[alain94040]

Enforcement would be nice. How hard would it be for some FBI office to sign up to get all the possible spam out there, and start replying to all the great offers from African banks?

Of course, a lot of the perpetuators do not reside in the US, but quite a few do. The more legitimate a business looks like, the more likely it has a US presence that can be used to stop it.

So vote with your US tax dollars and force your government to allocate serious funds to the problem. Please!

--
http://fairsoftware.net/ -- where software developers share revenue from the apps they create

Re:More enforcement would help

[SomeJoel]

Yes, well, while the RIAA can evidently track down and prosecute a 6 year old downloading "Wheels on the Bus", the U.S. government can't seem to figure out which companies are responsible for the SPAM, even with all the contact information that must be available for the SPAM to have any value whatsoever.

What went wrong here?

[flaming error]

1) Legislation was flawed
2) Problem transcends US Jurisdiction
3) Enforcement is spotty at best
4) Idiots buy their stuff

Legislation fixes nothing

[EmbeddedJanitor]

Legislation only allows some other mechanism to be used. Legislation on its own can do nothing.

All the legislation in the world won't fix teenage pregnancies, the War On Drugs, etc etc.

Since there is really no technical mechanism to kill spam, the legislation itself is ineffective.

Re:Legislation fixes nothing

[Sancho]

If there were a technological means to fight spam, we wouldn't need the legislation.

What's needed is actual enforcement. Spammers make money because people buy their wares. Where there's money changing hands, there's a trail you can follow. The problem is seemingly that no one wants to follow that trail.

No enforcement? Practically no law.

Re:Legislation fixes nothing

[Luthair]

I disagree, I believe that there are definitely changes which could lower the amount of spam, the problem is that getting all parties (ISPs everywhere) on board a single standard is nigh impossible. Perhaps one possibility is to require that the sender's domain resolve to the system sending the mail. This doesn't correct hijacked servers, or spam servers, but it might eliminate spam sent from botnet zombies.

What really needs to happen is that big players (MS, Yahoo, Google, Comcast, British Telecom, etc.) get together and agree on a standard. Make the standard open, unencumbered, and state that as of date X they won't support anything else.

what went wrong?

[Anonymous Coward]

Anything that fails to remove the financial motivation behind sending SPAM will fail to prevent SPAM.

No one in their right mind ever thought CAN-SPAM would have any tangible benefit.

Making things illegal WORKS

[Anonymous Coward]

Remember when we made weed illegal and now you can't buy... ooh, wait a second.

What went wrong? What could have gone right?

[Antique Geekmeister]

Quite seriously, this law was specifically not aimed at spam. It was aimed at certain types of online fraud, and it deliberately took power away from local law enforcement to put it in the hands of a federal power that does _nothing_ about mere spam. It was carefully designed to allow 'opt-out' advertisements, and that first advertisement from any spammer, and it was carefully legislated that way by the Direct Marketing Association to avoid interfering with the advertisements of their funding agancies. It was also carefully designed to overrule more effective, state efforts.

Such laws should instead be modeled on the junk fax law, which has withstood the test of free speech challenges and ease of prosecution.

Obligatory

[Anonymous Coward]

Your Congress advocates a

( ) technical (X) legislative ( ) market-based ( ) vigilante

approach to fighting spam. Your idea will not work. Here is why it won't work. (One or more of the following may apply to your particular idea, and it may have other flaws which used to vary from state to state before a bad federal law was passed.)

( ) Spammers can easily use it to harvest email addresses
( ) Mailing lists and other legitimate email uses would be affected
( ) No one will be able to find the guy or collect the money
( ) It is defenseless against brute force attacks
( ) It will stop spam for two weeks and then we'll be stuck with it
( ) Users of email will not put up with it
( ) Microsoft will not put up with it
( ) The police will not put up with it
(X) Requires too much cooperation from spammers
( ) Requires immediate total cooperation from everybody at once
( ) Many email users cannot afford to lose business or alienate potential employers
( ) Spammers don't care about invalid addresses in their lists
( ) Anyone could anonymously destroy anyone else's career or business

Specifically, your plan fails to account for

( ) Laws expressly prohibiting it
(X) Lack of centrally controlling authority for email
(X) Open relays in foreign countries
( ) Ease of searching tiny alphanumeric address space of all email addresses
(X) Asshats
(X) Jurisdictional problems
( ) Unpopularity of weird new taxes
( ) Public reluctance to accept weird new forms of money
( ) Huge existing software investment in SMTP
( ) Susceptibility of protocols other than SMTP to attack
(X) Willingness of users to install OS patches received by email
(X) Armies of worm riddled broadband-connected Windows boxes
( ) Eternal arms race involved in all filtering approaches
(X) Extreme profitability of spam
( ) Joe jobs and/or identity theft
(X) Technically illiterate politicians
(X) Extreme stupidity on the part of people who do business with spammers
(X) Dishonesty on the part of spammers themselves
( ) Bandwidth costs that are unaffected by client filtering
( ) Outlook

and the following philosophical objections may also apply:

(X) Ideas similar to yours are easy to come up with, yet none have ever
been shown practical
(X) Any scheme based on opt-out is unacceptable
(X) SMTP headers should not be the subject of legislation
( ) Blacklists suck
( ) Whitelists suck
( ) We should be able to talk about Viagra without being censored
( ) Countermeasures should not involve wire fraud or credit card fraud
( ) Countermeasures should not involve sabotage of public networks
( ) Countermeasures must work if phased in gradually
( ) Sending email should be free
( ) Why should we have to trust you and your servers?
( ) Incompatiblity with open source or open source licenses
(X) Feel-good measures do nothing to solve the problem
( ) Temporary/one-time email addresses are cumbersome
(X) I don't want the government reading my email
( ) Killing them that way is not slow and painful enough

Furthermore, this is what I think about you:

( ) Sorry dude, but I don't think it would work.
(X) This is a stupid idea, and you're a stupid person for suggesting it.
( ) Nice try, assh0le! I'm going to find out where you live and burn your
house down!

Laws just hamper the law abiding

[Alain Williams]

Just like all this wire tapping, surveillance, air port searches, ... they don't really stop the criminals - they just get up everyone's nose and provide an excuse for those who ''investigate'' us with excuses to abuse our privacy.

Look at the people who blew up the hotels in Bombay (Mumbai these days) - just a few men in boats with guns -- sophisticated protection can't stop them every time. We might as well give up and spend the money on something useful.

Re:Laws just hamper the law abiding

[mjwx]

You could require all men to carry guns. How far do you think the gunmen in Bombay would have made it if they knew every man they came upon would shoot back?

Instead of 100's of dead, you'd have 100's of dead and no way to tell who started shooting in the first place. Person A Shoots persons B and C, Person D shoots person A, Person E sees person D shooting, assumes that Person D is responsible and Person E shoots Person D who is then taken out by person F and so on until you pretty much have no one left capable or willing to shoot. MAD only works if its never used. Your analogy assumes that the shooters will begin to fire ensuring that the MAD bluff is called so this is where MAD fails and a great many people get killed.

Certainly this plan has a lot of side effects, but it is not completely without merit.

Yes it has a great many side effects and this is why it is completely without merit. Your plan relies on the same flaw that all extremist philosophies rely on, that everyone thinks on the same path. In a situation like the one in Bombay no single person will have total awareness of the situation and cannot determine who are the attackers and who are the defenders, thus the person is forced to choose who to attack based on extremely limited observation and you can guarantee that at least 60% of the people will choose the wrong target. Let me add to this, if the myth that guns keep people safe were true, why aren't Somalia and Russia amongst the safest places to live? Firearms are very common in these places. Or perhaps you would look at South Africa, where no-one is willing to travel without a gun, not because Johannesburg is safe but because if you don't have it you will be a victim because crime is so high. Guns don't keep people safe, good laws and effective policing keep people safe. The US, Sweden and Russia have a lot of guns in the hands of civilians, why does Sweden have an order of magnitude less crime then the US (and several orders less then Russia), because of effective policing and a calm populace. Most Swedes will say they don't feel the need nor actually wish to carry guns.

Crime in the US is higher then any other western state (unless we include Russia) so please don't bring up US and the UK as examples of how gun legislation hurts. Properly enacted it will reduce the number of gun deaths (accidents in AU have dropped by 90%, whilst violent crime has not increased by the same amount as the US). You are 8-12 times more likely to suffer injury in by violent crime in the US then you are in Australia.

Private right of action

[gorbachev]

Private right of action got stripped out of it due to complaints from the direct marketers. That was strike one. With so much spam it's completely unreasonable to expect anyone to enforce the law. Crowdsourcing the enforcement through private right of action would've worked. And the direct marketers knew it...

The second strike was that the bill didn't anticipate the success of botnets and Russian organized crime. The law doesn't do jack s*** about that problem.