What Good has the CAN-SPAM Act Done? - What's it accomplished?
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As far as actual arrests, a few, including a high profile case where an ex-AOL employee was arrested for selling e-mail addresses. In addition, since the CAN-SPAM Act went into effect, the people involved with the SLAM-Spam Initiative have managed to identify more than 100 significant spammers; target 50 of these spammers for future legal action; engaged military criminal investigators to help identify criminal acts associated with compromised government sites; catalogued numerous exploits and techniques being used by spammers (hey, someone’s got to do the grunt work); and on and on.
The FBI is planning an initiative later this year “in which it is anticipated that criminal and civil actions under the CAN-SPAM Act of 2003 will be included,” according to the bureau’s testimony before Congress this May. The bureau is working on this with the US Secret Service, the US Postal Inspection Service, the FTC (no surprise there), the Department of Justice, and the state and local agencies that are members of the National White Collar Crime Center. It is just possible that we could see some action late this year or early next year.
So is there at least some cause for hope amid all this? The CAN-SPAM Act has energized a number of law enforcement agencies to take spam seriously. Sadly, we all know that that’s not a guarantee of effective action. And many of us find that spam is rather like a natural force: the more you try to stop it, the worse it gets. Unfortunately, while you can dam the natural force of, say, a body of water to get energy, damning spam as we all do doesn’t increase our supply of energy. Or does it? That’s what started the ball rolling, after all: enough people making a fuss about it.
Still, there are private industry attempts at solutions to the problem. Put the phrase “Spam Blocker” into the Google search engine and you will get 483,000 hits. It goes against the grain to think that none of those spam blockers do a decent job. Even so, while I would love to see all the spammers in the world blocked out of business because of their sheer obnoxiousness, I’m no longer convinced that any one path of action -- public agencies or private individuals voting with their software -- is going to get spam under control. I keep my e-mail filters up -- but I’m also keeping an eye on what the FTC and FBI hope to accomplish. Who knows? There may yet come a day when I never again see an e-mail from “Nigeria.” (But I’m not holding my breath).
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