Will Virginia's new anti-spam law help cut down on spam?
The new statute adds criminal penalties for fraudulent, high-volume spammers. It outlaws practices such as forging the return address line of an e-mail message or hacking a computer to send spam surreptitiously. Those found guilty of sending more than 10,000 such deceptive e-mail messages in one day would be subject to a prison term of one to five years and forfeiture of profits and assets connected with these activities.Sadly, I don't think this will work. Virginia might get some high profile prosecutions, but many cases to be tied up with issues of juristdiction within the US. Imagine extraditing someone from Kreplachistan for "spamming"....
Virginia Gov. Mark R. Warner said the new law could have a significant effect on spam because half of all Internet traffic flows through the state. The passage of e-mail through Virginia-based Internet service providers, he said, gives state prosecutors the ability to reach the purveyors of spam in other states and jurisdictions, noting that an earlier, weaker state anti-spam law had survived constitutional challenges.
Given the scale of the problem (spam is currently about 45% of the mail received by AOL; nearly 2 billion messages/day this week), costs of prosecution will quickly outstrip economic benefit to the state.
Re:smoking spam
ziggy on 2003-04-30T15:43:33
There's a spam conference in DC this week, and the issue is all over the local talk radio airwaves. The stats I remember hearing are that roughly 45% of all email is spam now, vs. 8% in 2000. AOL hit the 1 billion spams/day mark 8 weeks ago, and they're about to reach 2 billion spams/day any day now.
