A Bounty on Spammers (CIO Insight) [LWN.net]

Lawrence Lessig suggests new methods for dealing with spam, and also looks at copyright issues. "But at least with the spam problem, there is a much simpler solution that, so far, Congress has failed to see. Imagine a law that had two parts—a labeling part and a bounty part. Part A says that any unsolicited commercial e-mail must include in its subject line the tag [ADV:]. Part B says that the first person to track down a spammer violating the labeling requirement will, upon providing proof to the Federal Trade Commission, be entitled to $10,000 to be paid by the spammer."

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A Bounty on Spammers (CIO Insight)

Posted Sep 25, 2002 14:59 UTC (Wed) by steve (guest, #3972) [Link]

Great. Let's make more American laws, and enforce them internationally. Most of the spam I get doesn't originate in the USA; I understand that this applies to most spam.

Wasn't the Sklyarov/DMCA debacle bad enough?

The USA cannot just pass arbitrary laws and arrest anyone anywhere who doesn't abide by them.

What if the UK decided that too much spam came from .ar, and made ownership of a .ar domain illegal? Or .us? Or .net?

The net is international; a single country's laws are at best arrogant, at worst futile.

A Bounty on Spammers (CIO Insight)

Posted Sep 25, 2002 18:26 UTC (Wed) by JoeBuck (subscriber, #2330) [Link]

A large fraction of the spam you receive that appears to originate overseas actually originated in the US, and was bounced off of some misconfigured machine's open mail relay.

A Bounty on Spammers (CIO Insight)

Posted Oct 1, 2002 17:19 UTC (Tue) by gswoods (subscriber, #37) [Link]

I think a lot of the radical anti-spammers are also using short-term
thinking. I hate spam as much as anyone, but I fear government attempts
to control what we can do with our machines and our network much more
than I do spam. Spam can be controlled by technological means. When everybody
is running SpamAssassin, Bogofilter, etc., spam won't be effective any more,
and therefore won't be profitable any more. On the other hand, politicians
have a long and bloody history of abusing their power. Pass anti-spam laws,
and you can bet that, sooner or later, they will be used for purposes other
than suppressing spam. Purposes that, most likely, will further inhibit
our freedom.

A Bounty on Spammers (CIO Insight)

Posted Sep 26, 2002 8:37 UTC (Thu) by rmdirms (guest, #2659) [Link]

I'm pretty much all for a bounty, too. However, I can see some serious privacy issues here. In order to make the bounty validt, the true identity of the originator of the spam MUST be unequivocably known. Since many misconfiugred servers or hapless victims abound, then ALL machines's CPUs or NICs (non-changeable) would have to be known. It's bad enough that our SSN is used for utilities and telco billing, even for cable subscriptions.

So, while I DO support bounties (why not create a company called: CORRUPT CEO BOUNTY HUNTER CORPORATION to go after some dirty bastards pillaging their companies, lying to the public and the investors, fudging numbers, and more.. I suspect that at least 80% of US corporations engage in this, heck, maybe even my prior employers. After all, most corps despise government intervention, so it is not out of the realm of possibility that MOST if not all US companies regularly engage in deception, deceit, misstatements, off-shore hiding, and more, even round-tripping on their books. If this is true in the chips and networking industry, some MAJOR shockwaves will thunder their butts out of the circut pathways...)

Anyway, a friend of mine who got laid off also is thinking of a corrupt ceo bounty hunter plan...) the use or support of bounties would imply a massive rethink and concession to the loss of anonymity (relative anonymity), the loss of anonymizers, and maybe even 1984 style laws. Maybe the ISPs would be the waystation for fingerprint access to bband, DSL, or dialup access, instead of the use of passwords. Then, there'll be laws that every transmission must be tied to a sender, via retina, thumb (or other digit/finge recorded by the US states' DMV field offices...) to make sure the senders are found...

Just some thoughts.. I am REALLY tired and need some serious sleep...

Regards,

David Syes

A Bounty on Spammers (CIO Insight)

Posted Sep 27, 2002 20:32 UTC (Fri) by jschrod (subscriber, #1646) [Link]

I don't see why one has to tag the originator of spam in Email.

Spam is made to sell something. It doesn't matter who sends it, eventually the responsibility lies with the originator. To make a buck the originator must include contact information in the spam, phone numbers, email, or URLs. This contact information can be used to track the spammer down by law enforcement.

As for your other comments, as a CEO, I won't answer on them...

Cheers, Joachim

No, better sender information is still needed

Posted Sep 28, 2002 20:09 UTC (Sat) by giraffedata (subscriber, #1954) [Link]

>This contact information can be used to track the spammer down by
>law enforcement.

This misses the point of the article, that enforcement would be done by private individuals (with the help of civil courts), and the point of the comment, which is that this means private individuals would have to have more information about other people than perhaps they should have.

I don't see anything wrong with having an anonymous email option. As with the properly labelled advertising emails, I would route all my anonymous email to a bin where I would scan it quickly every day or two, while leaving my regular mailbox open for mails that deserve my full and immediate attention. Much as my telephone routes anonymous calls to voicemail.

(I have email routing like that set up today, but due to the lack of clear labelling, it uses a formula that sometimes routes important email to the bulk bin).