Small win against spam

Lee Drutman: Small win against spam

01:00 AM EST on Friday, March 25, 2005

Recently, a former AOL software engineer named Jason Smathers pleaded guilty to stealing 92 e-mail screen names and selling them to spammers for $100,000. These spammers, in turn, used those e-mail screen names to flood the in-boxes of AOL customers with as many as seven billion e-mails for herbal penile-enlargement pills and Internet casinos.

(To get a sense of how many e-mails that is, assuming you could delete one e-mail per second, it would take you 222 years to delete seven billion e-mails from your inbox.)

The Smathers case is significant in that it is one of the very first cases brought under the less than two-year-old Can-Spam Act, a largely toothless federal statute that makes it illegal to send e-mails with false header information but has done virtually nothing to stem the tidal wave of spam flooding e-mail in-boxes.

The statute is so weak that U.S. District Judge Alvin K. Hellerstein had originally rejected Smathers's guilty plea last December because at first, he wasn't convinced that Smathers' despicable activities were actually illegal under the act.

Also disturbing is that Smathers, who was low on the totem pole at AOL, was able to hand the company's entire subscriber list to spammers with what appears to have been relative ease.

If something like this could happen at a major Internet service provider like AOL, one has to wonder: What about other companies?

Although the Smathers prosecution is noteworthy, it is a mere drop in the vast and seemingly bottomless bucket of spam. Experts estimate that in-boxes are now bombarded with 15 billion spam messages a day (more than twice the 7 billion spam e-mails involved in the Smathers case), which accounts about 75 percent of all e-mails -- a time waste that costs U.S. businesses as much as $87 billion a year in lost productivity (not to mention to general levels of frustration it adds to an already exasperated society).

While it is encouraging to see a small legal victory against spam now and then, the numbers just presented tell us quite clearly that we are losing the war. Federal prosecutors need stronger laws, more resources, and tougher penalties to go after spammers. One step would be to broaden the definition of spam to include e-mail that is not just fraudulent, but also unwanted, annoying and harassing.

-- Lee Drutman

http://www.projo.com/opinion/editorials/content/projo_20050325_25smath.1a643ad.html