identity theft != spam

Bill Woodcock woody at pch.net
Fri May 16 05:10:05 UTC 2003


      On Thu, 15 May 2003, Randy Bush wrote:
    > what is wrong with this picture?
    > this exemplifies the corporate and legislative attempt to confuse
    > spam == uce with forgery.  if they can make the latter the issue,
    > this leaves the way completely clear for unsolicited commercial
    > email from the corporate sector which now fills our post boxes with
    > ground trees.

Well, the issues are perhaps a little more complex than you're portraying
them.  J.I. and I spent the better part of two years working on the
California law, which has a similar provision.

>From a customer's point of view, spam is anything they didn't want to
receive.

>From an ISP's point of view, spam is anything that was sent or
received without having been paid for.

>From a politician's point of view, spam is non-political UCE.

These are almost wholly incompatible views.

One thing that everybody can get together on is that if someone sends spam
(for _any_ of those values of "spam") using a forged source address,
that's bad.

Thus, it's easy to get a provision through which puts heavy penalties on
source-address forgery, even if nobody can agree on what spam itself is.

                                -Bill





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