On 30 Oct 1997, John R. Levine wrote:
And what will the FBI do when spammers leave the US...
This is really a red herring -- any spam control law, even one of the bad ones like the Murkowski bill applies to any resident of the U.S., even if he hires someone in Moldova to send out his spam. To escape U.S. law the spammer has to move his entire business offshore. In practice we're unlike to see much offshore spam because the goal of spammers is to collect money from suckers, and it's a whole lot harder to do so if you don't have a domestic mailing address and bank account.
So (hypotheticaly, if I were a spammer) if I rent a P.O. box from some mailbox rental place using a fake ID, buy an account overseas with another fake ID, and use that account to relay spam through old broken mail servers all over the world...servers that don't insert in the header the true IP of the sender...the FBI will somehow stop me? I suppose they could steak out the P.O. box, but lots of spam doesn't involve sending money. How about the offshore area codes (I think 809 was one) spammers urge you to call to collect your free prize or avoid having your credit record destroyed? You call and the telco bills you for them. They need no presence in the US, and I'd therefore assume are untouchable by the FBI. Since none of this does my Cisco any good, shouldn't we move the discussion to a more appropriate list, or create one for it? Perhaps netop-spam...a spam discussion list for network operators? If it doesn't already exist, I'll be happy to create it. ------------------------------------------------------------------ Jon Lewis <jlewis@fdt.net> | Unsolicited commercial e-mail will Network Administrator | be proof-read for $199/message. Florida Digital Turnpike | ______http://inorganic5.fdt.net/~jlewis/pgp for PGP public key____