[58488] in North American Network Operators' Group
Re: identity theft != spam
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Bill Woodcock)
Fri May 16 01:11:33 2003
Date: Thu, 15 May 2003 22:10:05 -0700 (PDT)
From: Bill Woodcock <woody@pch.net>
To: Randy Bush <randy@psg.com>
Cc: nanog@nanog.org
In-Reply-To: <E19GMJA-0001Em-90@roam.psg.com>
Errors-To: owner-nanog-outgoing@merit.edu
On Thu, 15 May 2003, Randy Bush wrote:
> what is wrong with this picture?
> this exemplifies the corporate and legislative attempt to confuse
> spam == uce with forgery. if they can make the latter the issue,
> this leaves the way completely clear for unsolicited commercial
> email from the corporate sector which now fills our post boxes with
> ground trees.
Well, the issues are perhaps a little more complex than you're portraying
them. J.I. and I spent the better part of two years working on the
California law, which has a similar provision.
From a customer's point of view, spam is anything they didn't want to
receive.
From an ISP's point of view, spam is anything that was sent or
received without having been paid for.
From a politician's point of view, spam is non-political UCE.
These are almost wholly incompatible views.
One thing that everybody can get together on is that if someone sends spam
(for _any_ of those values of "spam") using a forged source address,
that's bad.
Thus, it's easy to get a provision through which puts heavy penalties on
source-address forgery, even if nobody can agree on what spam itself is.
-Bill
