August 25th, 2004
Mr. Spammer, meet Bubba your new cell mate
With a slew of lawsuits being levied on well known spammers by companies such as Microsoft, the fight is being taken to the next level by the Feds. The New York Times is reporting on project "Slam Spam" by the Feds. Slam Spam is designed to go after spammers for being the common criminals that they are. Apparently, the F.B.I. is already developing cases and going after the top 50 spammers, most of whom are probably already listed on Spamhaus. Once the top 50 are put behind bars, the bulk of the spam will likely be pushed underground and overseas (although, right now, the bulk of spam comes originates in the US). This is not necessarily a bad thing because it puts the problem in a more narrowly defined area where more scrutiny and less trust can be placed on email coming from places such as Russia.
With standards like SenderID gaining traction and the Feds putting teeth behind our new anti-spam legislation, this can put a significant dent on spam activity. Then, with Yahoo’s DomainKeys standard which I predict will ultimately need to be merged in to the SenderID standard, it will give law enforcement an easily traceable cryptographic trail right back to the source of the problem. If the spammers choose not to use SenderID or DomainKeys, all the better since most of us will (or at least should) deny safe passage to all e-mails lacking such credentials.
