Blogtrek

Combating Spam is an International Problem

I heard recently that the house had passed an anti-spam bill. In particular, CNN said on its web page that "The House voted overwhelmingly Saturday for a bill to outlaw most Internet spam and create a "do not spam" registry for those who do not wish to receive unsolicited junk e-mail." This may seem like a good idea. Spam resembles telemarketing calls in that both come uninvited, frequently involve scams and fraud, and usually try to sell us something. A while ago a Do Not Call list was established. This is a listing of people who said that they do not want to be called by telemarketers. There are now 50 million or so people on this list. This means that if a telemarketer calls someone from the list he can be penalized for it. To me this seems like a good idea. If you sign up and someone calls you, just report it to the authorities.

So why not a Do Not Spam list? The intention is the same. A spammer must avoid email addresses in such a list when they send out their multimillion-recipient emails. But there are problems with this. There are many ways in which a spammer can avoid detection, more so than with telemarketers. He can misspell words, use gibberish in his message, use false return addresses, and hop from one email address and IP address to another to avoid detection. The telemarketer has a few such methods available, chiefly the "unavailable" appearing on a caller ID, but not as many as the spammer. The telemarketer is forced to speak personally over the phone to his targets, but the spammer does not need to contact anyone at all. In 5 seconds, if he is lucky, a telemarketer can call one person. In the same length of time, a spammer can spam tens of millions of people, simply by clicking a mouse. So a do not spam list is not as effective.

Further, the US Congress is the wrong place to start fighting spam. No US law, no presidential order or edict, absolutely no court subpoena, summons or warrants can do anything about foreigners spamming from overseas. Many spams I get are from domains .fr, .it, .tw, .pc, and so forth, meaning France, Italy, Taiwan, China, and so forth. No US law can do anything about people from these places for the US has no jurisdiction there. For spam to be truly controlled, it needs to be treated as an international problem. It needs to be brought up before the United Nations, and the UN should take steps to help its member countries fight spam worldwide, so that a spammer in Taiwan can be caught and tried for spamming the United States. Unless this problem is internationalized, it will never be solved.