Ending Spam, Part II. Today, AOL hilited an article, "How to Avoid Spam Avalanche" that confirms what I said yesterday.

Unwanted commercial e-mail has surged in recent months as online fraudsters, bogus pharmaceutical suppliers and others send billions of pieces of spam engineered to pierce defenses at companies of all sizes. The share of e-mail deemed junk rose as high as 80% last month from as low as 47% in September, says software security firm Symantec [Norton].

Unfortunately, it gives little guidance but to use a spam filtering program and perhaps take a temporary email address you can delete if it is flooded by spam. All my email is thru AOL (seven addresses), which itself has a spam filter, so I don't have to look for one on my own. But lots gets thru, and since I receive email from strangers who see various of my websites, I have to check the spam folder and click on "This is not spam" to allow legitimate senders to reach me.
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Individual self-defense does not work. Government needs to act. Spammers need to be fined so heavily that spamming becomes an oppressive cost to advertisers. "Fraudsters" need to be imprisoned. That would work. Spam filters merely diminish the imposition; they do not end it.
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My colleague in Durham, England today alerted me to a website, "An Anti-Spam Manifesto", that in November 2003 proposed a means by which huge numbers (tens of thousands) of private citizens, using the spare computing power of their PC's and the postal services of various nations, could deluge spammers with so many useless replies as would render their scams unworkable. Alas, that is much too demanding of private persons, and thus undoable.
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Ending computer crime is not, I repeat, not the personal responsibility of any individual. Protecting us from crime is GOVERNMENT'S job. It is, in fact, one of the prime reasons we put up with government to begin with.
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On two things, however, the Anti-Spam Manifesto is right: (1) there are forces that are delited there is spam (including malicious spams that distribute viruses and trojans), because they sell products to fite off such attacks, and (2) spammers need to give intended victims a way to contact them in order to gain any benefit from their crime. (This is, alas, not the case with malicious virus-spreaders, who deliberately hurt strangers for no apparent reason, altho some may be agents of the Communist Chinese Government testing vulnerabilities of the West.) The fact that they have to give people a way to get money to them is, indeed, as the Anti-Spam Manifesto points out, their "soft underbelly".
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I keep a word-processing file on my computer in which I have stored various messages that I can copy into transmittal emails to AOL's TOSSpam (Terms of Service-Spam) email box when I forward spams that I have had to open to make sure they were not legitimate messages from strangers. Here is the basic paragraph, with the quintessence of the matter in bold:

"ALERT [*] and Interpol, and PROSECUTE this attempt to defraud AOL subscribers! If fools can lose money by following up these emails, police can surely track down and prosecute these scam artists. You are plainly not doing anything like what you need to do in the way of prosecutions, because these things keep arriving, year after year after year!"
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* I fill in here the name Yahoo, Virgilio, MSN, OrangeHome, or other legitimate service misappropriated by fraudsters. Those services need to know what accounts to delete and, if they have a way to track these things, whom to block from opening new email accounts or websites in the future.

Only governments have the resources and physical force to remedy this problem. Police can physically attack, capture, and haul off to jail the people committing these crimes. The state can physically imprison or flog violators, even execute egregious and repeat offenders. You can't. I can't. 30,000 individual computer owners working in concert to flood mailboxes, as proposed in the Anti-Spam Manifesto, can't do any of that.
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At end, the human being is only an animal terrified of pain and death. That is the way people have always been controlled, and prevented from attacking each other: by a higher authority capable of crushing them. It can be a real authority, a government that can seize and ravage them. It can be an imaginary authority, God (or gods) in His (their) omniscience and omnipotence, who sees evildoing even when human society cannot, and whose retribution after death if not even before cannot be evaded. Be it the whipping post, a dismal cell in a dungeon, and slow starvation from bread and water over the course of years of imprisonment, or the agonies of hell upon eternal damnation, only fear of punishment controls bad people. Absent such fear, all attempts to control spam are nonsense.
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Flog ten of the bastards, and the problem drops by 80% overnite. Kill ONE, and the problem drops by 95% overnite. Kill ONE MORE a month later, and 95% of the 5% who were not scared off the first time will run for cover and hope that they have not already been targeted for death.
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We don't have to tolerate rapacity. There are vastly more of Us than of Them, and we have all the power, if only we will use it. Seize the mass-scam scum, imprison them, flog them, execute them, and we are free forever from this needless social problem, a problem that exists only because our governments are wusses who consent to it.
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(The current U.S. military death toll in Iraq, according to the website "Iraq Coalition Casualties", is 3,150 — for Israel.)
- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 4:17 PM