I am not a lawyer. I am not aware of the law that requires uunet to go to court to prevent spammers who are not their direct customers from using their network. Spammers use many differnt means to send their spam. Most ISPs use AUP's to prevent spamming but afaik no isp has successfully sued a spammer and recovered any reasonable percentage of their expenses in fighting this same spam. When that becomes a method to pay for combating spam I am sure most ISPs will pursue it. This is a money issue. NSP/ISP have shareholders who desire a return on their investment. When I notify the abuse team at uunet of a spammer they act promptly shutting down any account that I can show is being used for spam. Chris is a very trusted and active member of the NSP community, to his credit is a detailed document on blackhole filtering one of the primary tools used by other NSP/ISP's for stopping bad traffic. AFAIK he can not authorize legal action against spammers. donald.smith@qwest.com my opinions are mine and do not reflect qwest policy. -----Original Message----- From: Dr. Jeffrey Race To: Smith, Donald Cc: nanog@merit.edu Sent: 6/24/2004 9:40 PM Subject: RE: Attn MCI/UUNet - Massive abuse from your network On Thu, 24 Jun 2004 19:26:10 -0600, Smith, Donald wrote:
Are you offering to finance ISP's legal battles against spammers?
No, it's their network and their legal responsibility to keep it clean. However I did voluntarily prepare a case for Neil Patel to file on behalf of UUNET under the Va computer crimes act, and he refused. I would have been a witness. At this point (esp when he said the matter lay with "Mr Ebbers", who is now up on other criminal charges) it became obvious what was the ethical level of this firm's management. Jeffrey Race