[One quibble: I got a russospam sent to an address that I've never used. So it's not always sent to a "real address." --Declan] -------- Original Message -------- Subject: Re: [Politech] Weekly column: Political spam, the new national pastime? [sp] Date: Tue, 18 May 2004 20:17:00 -0400 (EDT) From: Dean Anderson <dean@av8.com> To: Declan McCullagh <declan@well.com> I'd rather have the email than the postal mail. 1) I can more easily quote it in email. If you are for the candiate or against, this is a good thing. 2) I can save it and search it. Nothing helps keep a politican honest than their old promises. 3) It is more cheaply stored. 4) Of course, there's always Sanford Wallace's old 'save trees' benefit. I don't really know what the problem is with political email. This isn't truly unsolicited in the sense of broadcast to bogus addresses, which is a bane to ISPs. Rather, it is broadcast to a list of real addresses. I think the anti-spam radicals must be succeeding in getting people conditioned against getting email. This is a good segue into noting that in January, 56% of the bulk emailers fully complied with CAN-SPAM, and 90something percent partially complied. I haven't seen more recent statistics, but there have also been some suits against real commerical operators who haven't complied with CAN-SPAM. So why is almost none of the spam compliant in my email box? Could it be that someone is just sending abuse in the hopes that it will annoy people? (I think the answer is yes) But, I read a book recently on "Crypto-virology", which presented the premise that by sending a lot of email from one infected host to another and encrypting or encoding it at each hop, it was possible to create an anonymous communication system that the author called a "mix-net". It went on to describe the utility of mix-nets in extortion and information theft via virus infection. Whether this non-commercial junk mail represents a mix-net or not I think is a testable hypotheses. One just needs to go back through the viruses that have been released or captured sending junk mail, and see if they resend messages after some encyption steps. If they do, then a mix-net is possible. If they don't, then this is just so much hypothesizing. But assuming that this 'mix-net' theory is true, then it certainly means that we need to have much more attention from law enforcement on viruses and virus operators. Not only will this halt extortion and information theft, but it will halt the deluge of junk email that isn't a real commercial offer. My expectation has been that these non-commerical messages coming from viruses are just anti-spammers trying to annoy people into banning spam. Many of these messages appear at first glance to be commercial, and appear unlikely to be coded. But some messages contain random words and character strings. It had been supposed that this is to confuse Bayesian anti-spam filters, though I doubt it, because bayesian filters shouldn't be confused--they are trying to distinguish wanted from unwanted, not spam from non-spam. But there is some increasing portion of spam that could be suspected as containing coded messages in the random words and characters. But this is somewhat academic, though interesting. In either case, it is imperative to have more law enforcement attention on viruses and virus operators. There really isn't any question of that. And that is the road to spam solutions. Just ignore what the anti-spammers tell you. Dean Anderson CEO Av8 Internet, Inc On Tue, 18 May 2004, Declan McCullagh wrote:

http://news.com.com/2010-1028-5213287.html?tag=nefd.acpro

Political spam as national pastime May 17, 2004, 4:00 AM PT By Declan McCullagh

Aaron Russo wants your vote so badly, he's willing to spam you for it.

Last week, Russo, a Hollywood producer who is running for president as a Libertarian Party candidate, fired off thousands of unsolicited e-mail messages announcing his campaign and asking recipients to "help support Russo financially" with "automatic monthly contributions."

Russo, whose films include "The Rose" and "Trading Places," is not alone. Political spam has become a thoroughly nonpartisan communications technique, with Democrats, Republicans and third parties alike turning to bulk e-mail in numbers that are still small but steadily increasing. Two percent of all spam is political, according to statistics compiled by antispam vendor Brightmail.

Since Jan. 1, a federal law has regulated spam. But if you look at the law's fine print, you'll find a telling exemption: Our elected representatives made sure the restrictions don't apply to them. As a result, the Can-Spam Act covers only e-mail promoting "a commercial product or service," which lets political spammers off the hook.

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