The only real way to stop the flood of unsolicited bulk commercial email, commonly referred to as “spam,” is through more cooperation among countries, according to comments made during and outside the International Spam Enforcement Workshop (ISEW) held this week.
Hosted by the Office of Fair Trading with assistance from the U.S. Federal Trade Commission, the workshop atmosphere was said to include optimism because the FTC was there at all, given the widespread impression – backed by evidence enough – that the United States is one of the world’s largest starting points for spam.
OFT chairman John Vickers pressed for a moratorium on cynicism about the ISEW from the press, the Internet industry, and the average email user, at least until the effects of the workshop’s discussions and new international working group formation comes forward more fully.
For FTC chair Deborah Majoras, the workshop sent the message that building a world spam-fighting working group can begin the breakdown of problems arising from things like enforcing laws over international borders through multiple jurisdictions. "As a global community we can send a message to the spammers, telling them: 'You can no longer use a national border as a shield to protect yourself from law enforcement'," Majoras told the workshop.
One problem: little visibility from other countries considered to be major spam sources, such as China, Korea, and Russia, while Majoras refused to buy the U.S. as that big a spam contributor in spite of several high-profile legal cases and data from various anti-spam groups and security firms showing U.S. spammers either leading or in the top 10 of the worst spam packs.
Security firm Sophos, in fact, has said their research shows 43 percent of the world’s spam originated from the U.S. through August – in the first nine months since the U.S. enacted the so-called CAN-SPAM Act, a law whose preference for opt-out rather than opt-in provoked anti-spam groups like Spamhaus to call it the YOU-CAN-SPAM Act. Opt-out still allows spammers at least one legitimate entrée into inboxes, and critics say they can still dodge the law by setting opt-out links that don’t work or don’t really exist.
Majoras also told the ISEW that she isn’t buying that the identities of the most incessant spammers are well known in the anti-spam world. “[O]ur biggest problem,” she told the conference, “is tracing the origin of the spam” because of “complicated measures” spammers take to wipe their trails.
That comment was made even as Majoras’ own commission was looking to drop the hammer on one of the world’s most notorious spammers, now suspected of being involved in spyware. Sanford Wallace is now an FTC target over his Seismic Entertainment, accused of slipping popup-firing spyware into user computers surreptitiously, and SmartBot, accused of spamming recipients trying to sell them the software to remove the Seismic-sourced spyware. The FTC has sued the companies and Wallace hoping to put them out of business.
Britain’s Information Commissioner, Richard Thomas, told the conference another problem is a lack of power to get information from third parties like Internet service providers that would help trace spammer identities. And he also said the fact that regulators around the world often take “ages” before finding who the spammers are and how to hit them where it hurts provides a big advantage to the spammers.
“Spammers hide behind the cloak of anonymity provided by the latest technology,” Majoras said, “and the path from a spammer to a consumer's inbox typically crosses one border, if not several.”
