Published August 30, 2000
An assault of unsolicited commercial messages, called spam, is clogging the Internet’s email and Usenet Newsgroup lists. Citizens have asked their lawmakers to control these escalating nuisances. “It’s about time,” say some. Others say laws won’t help.
Montana Senator Burns is sponsoring Senate Bill S-2542, titled “Controlling the Assault of Non-Solicited Pornography and Marketing Act of 2000.” If enacted, it will have no teeth, only granting authority for the Federal Trade Commission to slap the wrist of an identified spammer after a hearing. The remedy for those injured is to sue, under existing laws, in the Federal District Court.
Spammers are individuals, mostly, who send email ads in great numbers, at extremely low cost, to addresses of whom they do not know. Recipients consider the in-box clutter an annoyance, abuse of resources and a waste of their time. A single spam message can commonly reach hundreds of thousands of addresses or more. Multiply this by hundreds of thousands of spammers doing their mischief daily.
The Internet is not well suited to enforcement under existing laws. Instead, the Internet can best be identified as an anarchy. It has successfully grown and flourished in the absence of external controls (laws) because the underpinnings are about cooperation, courtesy, and net-etiquette. When there were just a few who acted discourteously, the Net policed itself. Now, too many are thinking it’s okay to be rude.
Spam is a pseudo-chain letter, a pyramid scheme, which is a form of fraud. It violates Title 18 U.S.C. §1343, which reads:
“Whoever, having devised …any scheme or artifice to defraud, or for obtaining money or property by means of false or fraudulent pretenses, …transmits by means of wire, radio, or television communication …any writings, signs, signals, pictures, or sounds …shall be fined not more than $1,000 or imprisoned not more than five years, or both. If the violation affects a financial institution, such person shall be fined not more than $1,000,000 or imprisoned not more than 30 years, or both.”
The sending of mass unsolicited emails is offensive and counter to the Internet culture. It’s like sending junk postal mail postage-due or telemarketing collect. It would be easy to vow not to do business with them, but, who are they?
Spammers act with impunity. They do not want to be identified or located. They ensure that they themselves are not spammed by a flood of angry complainants. Contrary to the technical rules of email (RFCs), the spammers’ legitimate email address is hidden, misleading or fraudulent. The route that the message traveled through the Net is cleverly eliminated from the header of the message, wiping clean nearly all electronic trace to the place they perpetrate their reprehensible actions.
If a reply address is offered for the purpose of “being removed from their mailing list,” it’s for the purpose of confirming that your email address is valid. Your address is then sold to others who’s unconstrained tortuous trespass increases exponentially, like the naïve Sorcerer’s Apprentice.
Email addresses, old and new, are harvested using a variety of techniques. Posts to Usenet Newsgroups are now cautiously crafted by changing the reply-to address to something that requires a human to untangle. Spelling and spacing of <myname at spam host dot com> must be manually changing to <myname@host.com> so it can be sent over the Internet. This helps foil the wholesale harvesting.
The cowards advocating spam as unrestricted electronic direct marketing, like radio advertisements and newspaper inserts, ignore the costs and subjected inconveniences to others. System and network administrators expend extraordinary efforts while maintaining their services and guarding against this inundation to their bandwidth.
AOL reported to Congress that a third of all email messages through their services is spam, up from 5% in 1997. That same year, spam mail overwhelmed AT&T WorldNet’s outgoing mail system, delaying legitimate email for many hours. An estimated third of all posts to Usenet are spam, off-topic ads to specific subjected groups. This is down from 66% a few years ago, thanks to the worldwide technical advances in security.
ISPs are bouncing back messages from known spammers before they reach their subscribers. These go into a type of dead-letter holding bin that must be methotically cleared daily by a technician. Mechanisms to block non-subscribers from using their servers to propagate spam is also being devised with effectiveness.
An immediate remedy for all of us is to simply delete each incoming spam message and filter the recurring ones into the trash automatically. Also, never buy anything from a spammer or respond to a spam message, and discourage others from doing so.
To curtail the day to day noise level of unsolicited emails is to make them too expensive without costing the whole of the Net-users more in the process. Identifying the high-profile offense culprits is possible if government agencies with deep pockets are motivated to be involved.
The bulk of spam is likely to continue until it hurts the spammer more than it is hurting the rest of us. Legal remedies are ineffective because they cannot be effectively and universally enforced.
As for the genesis of the term, spam? Monty Python Flying Circus originally used the word to mean “senseless repetition.” In their famous sketch, a restaurant customer asks what’s on the menu. The waitress lists the seemingly endless combinations of “eggs, bacon, sausage and spam,” culminating in a chorus of Vikings chanting, “Spam, spam, spam, spam; love spam, wonderful spam.”
It’s also a canned meat produced by Hormel Foods, spelled with a capitol-S.