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The Gaffer's Philosophy:
Part 91 Internet Laws:
February 23, 2004:
Now I would like to get to a few suggestions I have for new laws. One of these would deal with what I will call illegal internet intrusions. These concern those willful acts of vandalism and intrusion into the law abiding business of internet users. Specifically I want to deal with the unsolicited e-mail, now called spam. Also in this category are Denial of Service (DoS) attacks and computer viruses. All of these are near, but not dear to me. I have been at the receiving end of two of them. Anyone who uses the internet has suffered at least one of them.
We are all familiar with spam if we use e-mail. This is the unsolicited, often vile, e-mail we get advertising usually disgusting services or products. This morning I had to deal with close to 200 of these e-mails. That is not unusual. I face that same task every day, seven days a week. It never lets up. It increases in volume every day. I have got efficient at sorting my few legitimate messages out of this filth. Even so, it costs me some 10 to 15 minutes of my precious time every day. Multiply that by 365 to find my yearly cost in time. It comes to about 90 hours of my time. That is like robbing me of more than $2000.00 per year. It is not insignificant and it is increasing daily. Needless to say, I would like to stop it.
Believe it or not, a great deal of this spam is from liars who claim I signed on for it. Part of this results from what I call the opt out dishonesty. A spammer with some kind of a newsletter will send me some spam. In fine print at the bottom of that spam will be a line telling me I can reply with an opt out message if I don't want their garbage. Through this dishonest transference, they make me responsible for their spam, at least in their minds. I don't opt out because, too often, that is just a hook to find out if they have a live e-mail address. If I respond, I will get more spam, not less. In the same category is spam from businesses that pretend they have a right to solicit me because I once bought something from them. That is just as dishonest.
Viruses and worms, so far as I can tell are both similar if not quite the same. I will use the words interchangeably to identify them. These are programs designed specifically to interfere with the operation of computers. They are transmitted by some means or another over the internet to spread to as many computers as possible. That transfer can be through e-mail, or through browsers. In many cases they enter a computer through some kind of flaw in the internet browser or e-mail software, usually called a trapdoor. Many people think these trapdoors are accidental flaws in the programs.
These virus programs, once they get in, will at least interrupt the computer's operation. Very often, the interruption will be of a highly destructive nature. They destroy files and programs requiring extensive repair even after they are removed. The programs are designed and sent out by shabby little mean minded punks who have the dishonest pretense that their destructive behavior is a prank. It is not a prank. It is willfully destructive behavior. It results in enormous costs to the victims.
DoS attacks are not disguised in any way. They are intended as deliberate criminal acts. Their purpose is to shut down the website of the victim. This is done by using the idiosyncracies of the internet to cause an overload of false page requests to a website. It causes more traffic to the site than it can handle and legitimate requests are effectively blocked out. These attacks are made by internet scum with some kind of vendetta against someone who has annoyed them.
So far, nothing useful has been done to stop these criminals from their bad behavior. If it continues, the internet will soon become useless to legitimate users. That should be obvious even in Washington. For the lack of solutions we can find two culpable groups. One is the government who, in fairness to them, are simply too ignorant to understand the problem. If they propose solutions at all, they will be of the beyond silly variety like the bill recently signed by our president. This bill is supposed to create a national no-spam registry similar to the do-not-call registry.
I am here to tell you folks; it ain't the same. If you want to guarantee yourself an overload of spam, just put your address on that registry. All that list will do is supply the scum bags with a list of victims. Here is why. The do-not-call list is effective because it is enforceable. It is enforceable because the victim can identify the perpetrator. The no-spam list is not enforceable because the victim cannot identify the perpetrator. The spammers are expert at rerouting and disguising the source of their garbage.
Now these spammers can be identified, but not by the victims. This gets us to the second culpable group. These are the internet service providers (ISP), the telephone companies, and the cable companies. I see these three as a single group in that they provide most of the services that make the internet work. The also provide the services that make spam work.
Now here is the key. Spam must have a point of origin. It does not appear out of vapor. Someone sends it. That someone, must have an e-mail server of some kind. Guess who provides the servers and the connectivity for those servers? These are the ones who know, or could know if they wished, where that spam is coming from. There are only two sources of spam and both can be absolutely traced. The service provides and the phone and cable companies have all the information and tools at hand. The sources are already identified.
If a spammer is not using his own servers, with connectivity provided by the phone or cable companies, he is using an ISP. He must use one or the other. In either case, someone knows who he is. When the industry claims the spammers cannot be traced that is simply not true. The truth is they do not want to take responsibility. What we need is laws to force these people to do what they should do anyway, what decent citizens would do without prompting. The same is true of worms and viruses. The sources can be traced. It requires the cooperation of the industry, something that has not been forthcoming to date. It also requires thoughtful laws.
The government could easily stop most spam if it wanted to. A simple law would do it. The law would require service providers to put a surcharge on e-mail above a certain amount. Everyone should be able to send a reasonable amount of e-mail, perhaps 25 to 50 missives per week. Any more than that should be taxed at $0.25 per piece, a little less than a postage stamp. If it reached a critical mass the charge could go up to $1.00 per piece. Now, in the case where the spammer had his own servers, the connectivity provides would have to apply the tax. So what? Same result.
One big problem right now is spam does not cost anything. When people send us garbage through the US mail it costs a great deal and the cost is increasing. That's why we get less and less of it. We need to tax spam so the cost is proportional to the nuisance it causes. Half of this tax could go to the government and half to the provider. This would be a bonanza for the service providers and a boon to the victims of spam. That's almost everyone. The government could use the extra money to provide internet access for school kids.
The idea that we cannot create and enforce laws to defend against these things is nonsense. We simply need to implement laws to tax spam and make viruses and DoS attacks crimes with appropriately stiff penalties for violators. The penalties should be severe. Interfering with legitimate business activity is not a prank. It is a willful act of vandalism. I have always believed all penalties should be based on the cost of recovery from the crime. Worm and virus releasers would almost always get life in prison with a law like that.
Now spammers will claim some kind of nonsensical right of free speech. In my book, spammers are scum and the scum have no rights. You do not have the right to use other peoples equipment to harass them. The first amendment does secure our right to free speech. However, there is nothing in the first amendment at all that allows for any imagined right to use other people's tools to intrude into their lives or businesses. There is nothing in the entire constitution to support that kind of nonsense.
The biggest lie we always hear is about abridging freedom of speech. This is always dishonest and those thugs using the argument know that. It's a smoke screen they throw out to obscure the real situation. They babble about constitutional rights, but they do not know anything about our rights. I suspect none of these people have ever read the constitution. Most of them would not even know how to find it.
Whenever you use other peoples resources, including their time,
for your own advantage without their explicit permission that
is not free speech, that is stealing. It is unethical, immoral,
and antisocial. That behavior needs to be firmly punished. Whenever
you willfully cause monetary or emotional damage to other people
that is a felonious activity. It should be punished in proportion
to the amount of damage done.
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