Spam fighting goes legal
A group called Project Honey Pot has leveled a lawsuit against a number of spammers on behalf of their clients. The way this works is you set up an email address or an entire domain as a honey-pot on your system which catches spam and relays it to their servers. The honey-pot analogy comes from putting a honey-pot out and attracting flies and such. This is a strategy that has been employed by a number of researchers to see what kind of spam and worms are running in the wild on the Internet.Â
Is it a good idea? It remains to be seen. But the research that has been done indicates that there are only a few spammers causing most of the spam. Spam, like anything else is a business. If you can hurt them where it counts, in the wallet, you might have a chance to take them down. Unfortunately, it is somewhat difficult to track down where these spammers are coming from, and who they are.Â
I’ve often thought it would be better to make it illegal to benefit from spam activity. The argument goes that if some company were making money by spam activity, you go after them with huge fines per spam mail. This would take the monetary encouragement away from the spammers. The argument against is that many of these companies are not necessarily knowingly using spam. I don’t think that argument holds much water. If a company is directly benefiting from the sales of a spam advertisement, they are liable for it no matter whether they know about it or not. It is an ethical issue that should be discussed and intentionally disallowed. If they use affiliate programs you can certainly go after the persons that are making money off of the spam that way. But these affiliate programs should be policed to ensure that they are not using spam as a venue for making the money.
 This is something our legislators in Congress will eventually have to figure out, and come to terms with. Until then, we will have to use the laws as they are written.
Nod to Bruce Schneier for these articles.
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