[NTLUG:Discuss] the breaking point of spam

[steve]

. Daniel wrote:
> Actually, the legislation I'm thinking of would be against PURCHASING many 
> of the products from these vendors.  It's already illegal to do online 
> gambling... to the extent that the federal government has blocked banks and 
> credit card companies from paying to these sites.  (They now use other 
> methods... I know an online gambler who uses some other manner of 
> transferring money to another account... like a paypal account or 
> something.)  But the gambling itself is rarely if ever acted against.

Well, exactly - it'll be the same deal with Spam.  You can't require
banks to research every single transaction to see if it might maybe
have been a sale of a product that maybe was advertised through spam.

The offenders could simply put up a perfectly legal web site selling
the same stuff at the same price - now how will the bank know whether
the purchaser saw the offer to sell it in a Spam email or just by doing
a web search.

There is still an impossible issue of juristiction.  One of my spam
filters is set up to dump email that uses a character set that is not
used for the English language.  It catches a ton of spam written in
oriental languages (I have no idea which languages because I can't
understand them).  These are sellers abroad pushing product to people
who live abroad - US laws won't touch them - so that junk will continue
unabated.  Also, a law limiting payments to spammers won't touch the
phishers and Nigerian scammers who are breaking the law anyway.
Existing fraud laws are more than adequate to clamp down on those - yet
we see them anyway.

I doubt a law along the lines you propose would have any measurable
effect...just as I don't expect the recent anti-gambling law to have any
effect.  (They are already working up tricks to get around it: Buy a
$1 deck of playing cards for $200 online and get a password with it that
happens to open up $199 worth of virtual gambling chips "free" on some 
seemingly unrelated website).

> I'm saying they should treat the purchase of controlled substanced with 
> more intensity.  There should be criminal prosecution of people buying 
> drugs online.

Once again, this is already illegal - how will passing another law help?

> Law enforcement should run a spam operation of their own and 
> for anyone who actually attempts to make a transaction, they should be 
> fined (initially).  Later, they should start jailing these 
> people...especially repeat offenders.  If people started seeing that their 
> money was wasted, they wouldn't buy.  If they don't buy, there won't be 
> spamming.

They *could* - but the numbers would be TINY.  They would have to behave
like spammers and send out millions of emails in order to catch just
a half dozen stupid people.  I would be just as opposed to getting fake
spam from the police as I am to getting real spam.

Just look at other areas of Internet law enforcement - the child
pornography laws for example.  The authorities *ARE* actively working
to stop that - and they have the laws to back them up - yet that
kind of junk is *STILL* all over the Internet.

I don't think legislation will ever fix spam in the same way it fixed
telephone cold-callers.