On Wed, 9 Aug 2000, David Charlap wrote:
"Derek J. Balling" wrote:
I dunno,... using your list as a guide, I don't find a lot that US legislators can do... last I heard, .au, .pl, .de, .pt, .uk, .sg, .tw, .fr, .nz, and .es are all outside of the "long arm o' the law". I didn't take the time to see how many of the [IP] and .(com|net|org) entries were actually in the US or were themselves foreign, but the top 6 entries in your list would "laugh at those silly American laws". That puts the majority of spam out of the reach of the law, making the law a useless waste of time. This is definitely an area that self-governance (ORBS, MAPS, et al, choose YOUR personal favorite... "let's not argue over who killed who") is best.
Keep in mind that the spam usually doesn't originate from the relay site your computer is receiving it from.
True.
Judging from the "send your money here" addresses and phone numbers that I usually find in the spam, the people sending the spam (or the people contracting to have the spam sent) are mostly in the US.
True.
With a proper set of laws on the books, law enforcement could simply read the content of the spam to get a phone number, address or PO box, and prosecute whoever owns it. The fact that they abused a foreign server in the process shouldn't change anything.
The only problem with that is the simple fact that geting innocent people in trouble is more likely. For example: "Dumb Person A" sends a million SPAMs to anyone who will complain about it. In the message, they put a note telling the recipiant to send $5 to "Innocent Victim B"'s Home/PO BOX address. Then person B gets all kinds of complaints, and if the law read the email message, then they would pay the price too. -Brad
-- David