Saturday, June 02, 2007
Soloway busted, so what.
Big news, Robert Soloway busted for wire fraud, credit card fraud, CAN-SPAM violations, and using a bot-net.
Big deal. The prosecutor isn't even asking for prison time. That's the strongest signal yet that the US Government doesn't actually regard spamming and creating and running bot-nets as criminal behavior. It shows how successful US spammers have been at positioning themselves as persecuted entrepreneurs, not as criminal gangs. You can thank the Direct Marketing Association, the American Civil Liberties Union, and corrupt, stupid congresscritters like Zoe Lofgren for that.
And you can thank the US "news media" for spiking the story as systematically as they have blacked out anything in the Project Censored Yearbook.
Creating and using a bot-net is one of the most destructive computer crimes. A single bot-net operation can cause hundreds of millions of dollars of economic loss to consumers and businesses. Imagine if some criminal invented an automatic way to break into a hundred thousand people's cars and misuse them. Now imagine the DMA and the ACLU said that's okay, it's free speech!
Why is that so hard to understand? Because computers are "technical" and cars aren't?
Big deal. The prosecutor isn't even asking for prison time. That's the strongest signal yet that the US Government doesn't actually regard spamming and creating and running bot-nets as criminal behavior. It shows how successful US spammers have been at positioning themselves as persecuted entrepreneurs, not as criminal gangs. You can thank the Direct Marketing Association, the American Civil Liberties Union, and corrupt, stupid congresscritters like Zoe Lofgren for that.
And you can thank the US "news media" for spiking the story as systematically as they have blacked out anything in the Project Censored Yearbook.
Creating and using a bot-net is one of the most destructive computer crimes. A single bot-net operation can cause hundreds of millions of dollars of economic loss to consumers and businesses. Imagine if some criminal invented an automatic way to break into a hundred thousand people's cars and misuse them. Now imagine the DMA and the ACLU said that's okay, it's free speech!
Why is that so hard to understand? Because computers are "technical" and cars aren't?
