[wordup] Tim May on unintended consequences of "anti-spam" laws

[Adam Shand]

I think this is a fairly prescient email, and I agree that letting the 
goverment decide what types of speech are good and bad is probably a 
really really bad idea in the long run.

However ... the spam is just getting nuts.  Like *seriously* nuts.  I'm 
getting in excess of 200 spams a day.  Fortunately I'm fairly tech savvy 
and a combination of razor and bayesion filtering keeps my spam to a 
tolerable level, but I'm probably getting some false positives (none 
that I've noticed yet but ...).

Blacklists ineveitably have collateral damage, and the vengence with 
which some of the owners wield their power is pretty disconcerting.

Challenge-response seem to go contrary to everything that made email good.

Changing email addresses every X months doesn't seem feasible.

That doesn't leave a whole lot of solutions for the masses.  For a while 
I thought that bayesian filtering might be the long term solution but I 
no longer do.  The spammers are already getting clever about wording 
there messages.

What the hell do we do?  The only thing left seems to be educating 
people to never, ever, ever buy anything from a spammer.  If you can't 
make money as a spammer, hopefully they'll stop, or it'll slow to a 
managable trickle.  Can we get funding for a "just say no to spam" 
compaign?  Is that even feasible?   How much does it cost to teach the 
public that spam is bad and shouldn't be supported?

Adam.

-------- Original Message --------
Subject: FC: Tim May on unintended consequences of "anti-spam" laws
Date: Wed, 28 May 2003 00:50:47 -0400
From: Declan McCullagh <declan at well.com>
Reply-To: declan at well.com
To: politech at politechbot.com



----- Forwarded message from Tim May -----

From: Tim May
Subject: Unintended Consequences of Anti-Spam (A.U.C.E) Laws
To: cypherpunks
Date: Tue, 27 May 2003 19:25:49 -0700
X-Mailer: Apple Mail (2.552)

I hate being sucked into this ongoing spam debate, but there are just
so many deeply wrong-headed memes floating around on this issue, and so
much obvious chance for government mischief and intrusion, that I
cannot resist adding more comments.

Item: State of California has just passed a law criminalizing certain
kinds of speech, that is, something some legislators and judges deem to
be "unwanted commercial messages." Other states passing similar laws.
Talk of RICO prosecutions, seizure of assets, the usual War on Some
Drugs kind of nonsense.

Item: How long before corporations cite spam laws to stop shareholders
and customers from organizing campaigns against the corporations? If
the CEO of McDonald's receives 10,000 letters from angry customers, is
this spam? (I'll bet some of the major uses of the spam laws is along
these lines, a kind of version of SLAPP suits (Strategic Lawsuits
Against Public Participation).

Item: Or is there some exemption for "political and social speech"? (I
haven't consulted the spam laws, but I assume there is some weasel
language about "nothing in this legislation shall be construed to
interfere with political advocacy....") And yet some of the most
obnoxious messages I receive are NRA spam messages--they and other
pro-gun groups have me on their mass mailing lists. Should they be
allowed to send this spam? Or will some causes be judged politically
incorrect? Is it OK to send thousands of spam pictures of aborted
foetuses to abortion advocates?

Item: How about religion?

Item: If either political advocacy or religion is exempted, then
spammers can insert religious messages into their spam. "Hello, I am
Monsignor Ubalong N'fasti, Chief Prelate of the Catholic Church in
Lagos, Nigeria. I am in urgent need of your assistance in continuing
God's work in our country..."

Item: Spammers can exploit _any_ exemption in the legislation for
religion, political advocacy, environmental advocacy, etc. Having
legislators or judges or ministerial-level bureaucrats deciding which
messages are "exempt from spam laws" and which are not would be a free
speech disaster.

And so on. There are no good reasons for letting government decide
which speech is political, which is advocacy, what is truth and what is
not.

--Tim May, Citizen-unit of of the once free United States
" The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the
blood of patriots & tyrants. "--Thomas Jefferson, 1787

----- End forwarded message -----

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