Re: anti-spam law implies laws against remailers?

[nospam-seesignature@ceddec.com]

On Wed, 6 Aug 1997, Adam Back wrote:

> 2) When the government or whoever wants to sue someone for spam they
>    will have to prove who the spammer is.  (Right?)  So now they'll
>    look at the From address at it will say remailer@foo.com.  So
>    they'll go have a chat to Fred Q Cypherpunk who operates foo, and he
>    won't be able to cooperate because he doesn't keep logs.  They won't
>    be happy with Fred, and will pass this information along to him by
>    stealing his equipment, prosecuting him for assisting in a felony
>    crime (they'll make it a felony right?), lock him and throw away
>    the key.  But what about Freds constitutional protection of the
>    speech forwarded by his remailer?  (Judge + congress-critter:
>    Constitution wassat?)
> 
> 3) Repeat step 2 x 100 and "something will have to be done" about the
>    remailers (if there are any left!)  It really isn't that far
>    fetched to have laws against remailers in the US.  Not so long ago
>    the guy from the two-man band Georgia EFF were telling us about how
>    they fought some law which had already tried to do this in that
>    state.

I suppose you could sue a local office or copier services place if I sent
one "unsolicited commercial fax" using their equipment, but it would be
impractical.

Most of the spam I get has thousands of other recipients, and none of it
has ever gone through a remailer, and always points to a "spam-friendly" 
ISP, or often already has their account cancelled by the time I report it. 

If we could get AGIS (the last of the large bandwidth suppliers) to pull
the plug on the IEMMC sites - I already have many spams from their members
violating their code - most spam would disappear.  It also seems that AGIS
is getting a bad reputation, but I don't know how many sites are leaving
or joining, but if they don't have interesting content, and don't pull the
plug on the IEMMC, adjustments to enough routing tables will accomplish
the same thing.

If we can stop the bulk spammers, things would quiet down.  The problem is
to stop the smokestack belching smoke without preventing me from using a
torch in my back-yard at night.

If remailers don't automatically do anonymous mailings to a 10,000 entry
Bcc: list, they would only be able to spam a few hundred people at a time
even using remailers.

Generally that isn't enough to be worth the time since only a tiny
fraction of a percentage will respond to generic requests.  If you can
only do 500, it would then pay to get a narrower list, or even personalize
things, and I might actually read something that interests me.  No one
considers announcements for cryptographic technology products on this list
as "SPAM".

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