Nigerian Spammers Using TDD/TTY Telephone Relay Service

[John Kelsey]

At 06:41 PM 5/27/03 -0500, Roy M.Silvernail wrote:
>How about simply holding companies absolutely responsible for the methods
>used to distribute their advertising? Couldn't Truth In Advertising be
>extended to email solicitation?  The one thing that *all* UCE has in common
>is the attempt to sell something, and that requires an identifiable business
>presence. After all, people can't buy from a company if the company doesn't
>provide *some* method of contact to accept orders.

Nearly all the spam I ever see (when cleaning out my "probably spam" 
folders to make sure I'm not losing real correspondence) is transparently 
fraudulent, advertising illegal or stolen products, from forged or hijacked 
sender addresses, etc.  The fact that the spammers are violating laws right 
now, but prosecutors can't be troubled to do anything about it, makes me 
deeply skeptical that passing an antispam law would change that much.

And when you think about it, spending a lot of police resources to go after 
spammers probably wouldn't make much sense, at least beyond shutting down 
really large organizations.  It's the same problem as fighting the war on 
drugs or the war on music piracy, or trying to deal with your kitchen ant 
infestation by mashing each ant you see with your fingers.

This is aside from the first amendment problems (it's commercial speech, so 
it may be possible to get around those problems, but who really knows?) 
with antispam laws.


--John Kelsey, kelsey.j at ix.netcom.com
PGP: FA48 3237 9AD5 30AC EEDD  BBC8 2A80 6948 4CAA F259