[eff-austin] Antispam Bills: Worse Than Spam?

[Jim Choate]

For this to be taken seriously one must be able to -define spam- as if it
were a mathematical entity (eg a 'point'). It must be absolutely
differentiable from -all- other speech.

You can't do that, nobody can.

Anti-spam bills are worse than spam because they put transient feelings of
anger above the principles of freedom.

Freedom is -not- free!


On Fri, 1 Aug 2003, Carl Webb wrote:

>                         Antispam Bills: Worse Than Spam?
>
>
> By Ryan Singel  |   Also by this reporter Page 1 of 2 next ;
>
> 03:55 PM Jul. 30, 2003 PT
>
> While no one has sympathy for the devils that fill inboxes with promises
> of lower mortgages and larger members, not everyone is supporting the new
> movement to banish spammers from the Internet.
>
> Some online advocates worry that heavy-handed antispam measures, such as
> centralized blacklists and charging for delivery, will destroy e-mail.
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> Electronic Frontier Foundation's head counsel Cindy Cohn, for instance,
> argues that antispam crusaders are forgetting the Internet's first
> principle -- information flows freely from end to end. Cohn fears that
> the Internet's openness will be collateral damage in the war against
> unwanted e-mail.
>
> Cohn says her organization's position on spam blocking can be boiled down
> to a simple proposition: "All nonspam e-mail should be delivered." It's
> an information age take on the Hippocratic oath, which requires doctors
> to first do no harm.
>
> "It's not the job of an ISP to block e-mail," added Cohn. "E-mail isn't a
> toy anymore. If I don't get an e-mailed notice from the federal district
> court mailing list, it's malpractice."
>
> Even some who sell antispam software to companies say that ISPs shouldn't
> be blocking mail.
>
> "Blocking e-mails is folly," said Brian Gillette, whose company sells an
> enterprise-level, antispam appliance called trimMail Inbox. "If I'm an
> ISP and I stop a $150,000 equipment sale because I decided it was spam,
> I'm in for a lawsuit."
>
> Marv Johnson, legislative counsel for the American Civil Liberties Union,
> worries that the ability to speak anonymously on the Internet is being
> put at risk by federal antispam legislation.
>
> Howard Beale of the Federal Trade Commission told House members at a
> recent hearing on proposed antispam legislation that "spam threatens to
> destroy e-mail."
>
> Several of the bills currently under consideration would make it illegal
> to mask a sender's identity or forge routing information, both of which
> are tricks used by spammers to avoid the ire of those who receive their
> e-mails. But it's also a tactic used by dissidents in countries with
> repressive governments who want to communicate with like-minded
> individuals.
>
> "Many of these bills criminalize a message header that isn't accurate,"
> said Johnson. "That's not fraud. If you send out messages through an
> anonymizer, then you could get sent to jail."
>
> Cohn concurs, arguing that the bills criminalize the behavior of people
> -- such as closeted gay teens or government whistle-blowers -- who have
> legitimate reasons for speaking anonymously on the Internet.
>
> EFF already has been a victim of overbroad spam filters. Its newsletter,
> which has more than 30,000 subscribers, has been bounced by aggressive
> keyword filters. In one case, its message was blocked because it
> contained the word "rape," used when talking about EFF's advocacy on
> behalf of an online group, Stop Prisoner Rape.
>
> When the EFF asked around, it found that other noncommercial bulk
> mailers, such as listservs, were running into problems, too.
>
> For example, AOL blocked e-mails from one of EFF's clients, MoveOn.org,
> an online, liberal political action group which saw its membership swell
> to more than 2 million during the antiwar movement.
>
> "MoveOn.org, one of EFF's clients, has problems all the time, but
> MoveOn.org is now big enough to be on whitelists," said Cohn. "I'm more
> concerned about the next MoveOn."
>
> Challenge-and-response systems pose particular problems for newsletters
> and listservs. These systems try to cut down on fraudulent e-mail by not
> delivering a message until the sender replies to a confirmation e-mail
> sent by the intended recipient's ISP or e-mail host.
>
> "Declan McCullagh of Politech and Dave Farber of Interesting-People can't
> do 100 challenge-responses a day," said Cohn. "That, as a solution,
> doesn't scale."
>
> It would be wrong to call Cohn soft on spam. While in private practice
> she sued a spammer and won a court injunction and $60,000. And her
> employer uses antispam technology on its own servers.
>
> The difference, according to Cohn, is that the SpamAssassin software EFF
> uses doesn't block spam, it simply rates each e-mail. Staffers then set
> up their e-mail clients to separate messages into different inboxes. This
> keeps the main e-mail boxes free of spam, but allows individuals to check
> the spam folder occasionally to see if a legitimate e-mail was
> incorrectly tagged as junk.
>
> Many in the technology industry think that only better technology can
> stop the spam deluge.
>
> "The only people who can stop spammers are other technologists," said
> trimMail's Gillette.
>
> The most promising new approach is better filters that use Bayesian
> algorithms to tag spam automatically and move it into a spam folder. The
> algorithms look at the body and header of an e-mail and judge from past
> experience whether an incoming message is junk. Users then train the
> algorithm, by moving misclassified e-mail from one e-mail folder to
> another.
>
> Paul Graham, who many credit for applying Bayesian filtering to the spam
> problem, is ecstatic at the power of the new filters.
>
> "I don't need blacklists," said Graham. "My own software is better than I
> am at deciding what is spam and what is not."
>
> Several open-source and commercial products, such as SpamBayes and Spam
> Bully, already use Bayesian filtering.
>
> The ACLU's Johnson hopes the new technology will head off the worst of
> the antispam legislation.
>
> "Why do we want to start imposing a different world for the Internet than
> we have in the real world?" asked Johnson.
>
> "Let the marketplace handle spam," he said. "When Congress wants to show
> they are doing something about an issue, they often screw it up."
>
> End of story
>
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