Slashdot Mirror
US Congress gets Spammed by Self
Doug Muth writes "There is an
article on MSNBC's website
that talks about a recent bout of spam that seriously bogged down some
of the mailservers delaying message delivery for some users by "several hours". Maybe
now that they got hit in the face with a spamming incident Congress will
finally try to write some decent anti-spam legislation. " Heh - an aide to Rep. Alcee hastings (D-FL) sent out an e-mail to hundreds, potentially thousands of people on an internal mailing list - no BCC or majordomo, so when people hit "Reply All"...well. You can imagine the fun that ensued. The great part is that the letter was apparently recommending a weight loss pill.
This is a great idea. Let's install the most byzantine operating system imaginable. Congress and tHoR will grind to a halt. Libertarianism through bad software! Bad UI coders of the world unite!
The "Can Spam Act" merely allows ISP's to enforce their "no spam" policies by making it illegal for a spammer to spam to/via an ISP that expressly forbids UCE.
They're not regulating at all, they're just giving ISP's the express ability to sue.
It occurs to me that if a congresscritter can notice a mere 20 e-mails extra in their inbox, we citizens must not be doing our job!
:)
Congress should be getting thousands of emails each day, making 20 more unnoticeable. Clearly, they don't read their e-mail from us, or we aren't mailing them often enough!
Or maybe they only read "important" mail - those whose subject and body are all caps?
The majority of Hill offices run Microsoft Outlook (I worked there for quite awhile). In the TO: field, you can select from almost all House offices, leadership, and committee staff.
Personally, I don't buy it. You have to go out of your way to e-mail the entire House e-mail list. While there are only 440 members (5 delegates) there are thousands of staffers. It's not like there is one button that says "everyone" that you hit by accident (if that was the case, this wouldn't have been the first time).
By default, you are set to your own office, but many users change that to a personal e-mail listing). I think the "mistake" was a cover up for a real spam.
Anyway, the House system has a pretty good firewall against the outside, but once you are on the inside, it is, well, "possible" to get into a bunch of systems around the Hill. The encryption isn't that tough and with a dictionary, you can do wonders.
The passwords on a lot of Hill offices are a joke. At one time, I had nearly 300 user ID's w/ passwords onto the old HIS system (they shut it down due to Y2K). With a staff turnover of something like 40% a year (yes, it's that high) system security often falls by the wayside. Amazing how many Intern accounts have passwords of "Intern" "Intern2" "Monica" etc.
First of all most of these people have already been the victims of spam at some point. Second of all I doubt many of them want the guy who sent the original message (who didn't seem to be aware that it was inappropriate) to be punished that severely. It was a only minor annoyance.
More than anything it demonstrates how careful you need to be in setting up large listservs, and things of the sort.
A moderated listserv would do far more to solve their problem than an anti-spam bill.
God does not play dice - Einstein
Not only does God play dice, he sometimes throws them where they
Here's the actual article from RollCall (congressional newsletter).
Text of the actual mail:"IF YOU'RE LOOKING TO LOSE WEIGHT PERMANENTLY AND YOU DON'T HAVE TIME TO SEEE AN EXPERT HERE'S THE PERFECT OPPORTUNITY. MY FRIEND LOSS 40 LBS. READ THIS! [sic]"
Yeah, uh, real important stuff...
--
This incident is a laser pointer at the crux of the problem: our old guard politicians just aren't capable of handling today's technological world.
We need to get some geeks elected soon, or at the very least get the 18-24 demographic group into the polls.
Here's some amusing quotes from the article in RollCall.
Wanna bet they're using Micro$oft?
--
Maviglio said that the anti-spam bill, known as the Can Spam Act , had picked up a half-dozen additional sponsors in a 48-hour time span.
hmm..It might be possible that the aide deliberately sent out the spam to gain support for the anti-spam bill.
The whole problem here seems to be one or two (thousand) misinformed individuals using their email the only way they've ever done before.
I'd like to see some people read this in to the whole story:
"It's all Microsoft's fault. They try to make it so easy for total newbies to use a PC and Windoze that that at least one of the uneducated fools is bound to f*ck up from time to time, and every now and then, in a very big way".
Because basically that's how I see it. That MS guy said "I wan't my mother to be able to use it" when reviewing the W95 OS. Quite frankly I wouldn't trust my mother on my PC. Why? because there is too much that can go wrong when left in uneducated hands.
Same goes here. A little bit of education can prevent a whole lot of trouble.
Dan. -- So what if it's spelt wrong, nobody's perfect
Come to think of it, people's brains need to get amended a bit, too. Those may be the age limits, but how many under-30 Representatives are there? I'd say probably not very many. The youngest president we've ever had was IIRC 41, and he wasn't elected -- he was a VP who succeeded a Prez who got shot (T.R., who became President after McKinley's death.)
Even when Clinton/Gore ran for the first time, "are they too young?" was a big campaign issue even though they were in their mid-40s. Sheesh. For all the "Don't Trust Anyone Over 30" buttons, it seems like in practice "Don't Trust Anyone Under 50" is the way politics are REALLY played.
"Somebody exploded a letter-bomb today
You're missing something...
Unrestricted internet communication IS NOT THE SAME AS HARRASSMENT.
SPAM == HARRASSMENT.
Harrassment is illegal - freedom of speech does not give you the right to scream into your neighbor's windows at 4:AM with a megaphone.
The people who are crying for anti-spam legistlation are only trying to clearly define what spam is, so that existing legal principles can be applied.
But what I'm getting at in the end is that anyone who can say that they want to legislate SPAM while simultaneously stating that there should be no internet censorship of any kind is simply a fool.
So... by this logic, anyone who says "there should be no internet censorship", and also says "kiddie porn should be illegal" is also a hypocrite? Not likely. One has absolutely nothing to do with the other.
Agreed.
This problem could/would easily have happened regardless of the chosen platform of the recipients. This has nothing at all to do with evil Microsoft and everything to do with a lack of training.
Perhaps when you click on the "Reply To All" button and there's more than a handfull of recipients the mail client should pop up a suitable warning?
And these are elected leaders.
No, they're the fresh-faced aids.
but also TO HERSELF AT HER OWN ISP MAILBOX. This normally bright person had sent and resent numerous times, AND NEVER ONCE BOTHERED TO LOOK AT WHAT SHE WAS DOING.
In many e-mail clients there's a setting to automatically add your own e-mail address to the list of recipients on all outgoing messages. It sounds like this is enabled in her e-mail client. She likely made no conscious effort to send this to herself (in all likelyhood the To: line in her client didn't even have her own address in it) and it's understandable that she was confused.
I do agree that if she had been better trained in the e-mail software, this probably would have been averted, but I don't think this was due as much to incompetance as you think. I know lots of educated people that would be just as confused if this setting were enabled and would also make the assumption that they were receiving e-mail via the recipient address they were using. *shrug*.
These are people YOU elected into office. It is your RESPONSIBILITY to see to it that they are educated with respects to matters that affect you, the constituent.
Write a letter. Make the world better.
This statement is repeated on all login screens on all Government computers.
If a contract programmer reads Freshmeat, without proper authorization, they are liable to be sacked at best, and face the threat of court action from the DOJ for gross misuse of Government-furnished Equiptment.
If a Government employee violates privacy, misuses a list of e-mail addresses, sends spam that's illegal in several States, recklessly puts Congress' e-mail system in jeapordy, advocates a product that may be a severe health risk, violates European privacy law (which may adversely impact relations between the US and the EU), has triggered a scandal in the media which could damage the image of the US Government (if that's still possible), they get a minor telling-off.
You'd never guess I'm a bit pissed-off over this.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
I wonder if it's displayed in a "collapsible" list, or is just being truncated, for display purposes....but it also means that the original spammer probably put them in the to: or cc: instead of bcc:.
I'm glad that some folks are putting their poli-sci degrees to good use.
_______________________