Spammercide (was: Duplicate Posts - Burst Posts...

From: Fred Cisin <cisin_at_xenosoft.com>
Date: Fri Jun 18 14:36:20 2004

On Fri, 18 Jun 2004, Vintage Computer Festival wrote:
> Sure, until the spammers and virus writers catch on.
> Look, the path of least resistance to this problem is as follows:
> 1) Lobby local representatives to pass laws allowing the hunting down and
> physical termination of spammers and virus writers
> Until these two distinct classes of people (spammers and spammees) are
> entirely eliminated from the gene pool, we will continue to suffer this
> scourge.

It seems unlikely that spammercide will be legalized,
particularly when current law enforcement organizations
refuse to even try to prosecute (under existing conspiracy
and agency responsibility laws) mortgage brokers and V1_at_GRA
peddlers for spamming, or hiring spammers to spam on
their behalf.

The FTC says that it is "impossible to track down spammers,
because they operate anonymously"! But even they have to
admit that it is trivial to track down the merchants that
the spammers work with. Conspiracy may usually be hard to
get a conviction under (except for political cases), but
these guys have a paper trail.


Something that MIGHT work:
Urban legends spread fast on the internet, and are
believed by otherwise rational people. Once word
gets out that 83 spammers have been tracked down
and terminated with molten iron, some of them might
be a little more hesitant.
Received on Fri Jun 18 2004 - 14:36:20 BST