Spammers, Privacy, Anti-Spam, and Lawsuits

Digital Eco Freak writes "The Washington Post is running a story about a spammer suing to keep his address and personal info private. George Allen Moore Jr. of Linthicum, MD has sued Francis Uy for posting his contact information on the web. He has gotten threatening phone calls and messages, as well as an over-abundance of unsolicited catalgs and packages as a result of Uy's actions. The spammer is getting a taste of his own medicine, but the guy's business address turns out to be the same as his home address, so there may be real safety concerns. Should spammers get some privacy protection too?"

Re:Another clueless journalist

[selan]

He was probably referring to Usenet, which fell victim to spam before email did.

Re:I give it 50 posts before.....

[Anonymous Coward]

Maryland Internet Marketing LLC aka George Alan Moore Jr aka Dr. Fatburn
300 Twin Oaks Road, Linthicum MD 21090-2154

877-655-3438, 410-963-8226, 410-691-2924, [e-mail] [e-mail], formerly [e-mail]

The info is public Domain, from the SLAPP website: http://www.barbieslapp.com/others/fatburn.htm

Uy is a slashdotter...

[heytal]

His journal can be found here [slashdot.org]

The Journal also has the address of Moore.. enjoy..

Re:I give it 50 posts before.....

[MadSwede]

Maryland Internet Marketing LLC
George Alan Moore Jr
300 Twin Oaks Road
Linthicum MD 21090-2154
877-655-3438
410-963-8226

Re:The real question is..

[evanbd]

Google is your friend.

http://www.barbieslapp.com/others/fatburn.htm

Re:The real question is..

[Anonymous Coward]

Maryland Internet Marketing LLC,
George Alan Moore Jr,
300 Twin Oaks Rd,
Linthicum MD, 21090-2154,

877-655-3438, 410-963-8226, 410-691-2924
.

Re:The real question is..

[gotan]

"Moore Linthicum Spam" is sufficient for a google search [google.com] and turns up enough sites listing his address. It also turns up some articles suggesting that any trouble Mr. Moore gets is richly deserved.

The Nuremurg Files precedent

[egoff]

The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals let the The Nuremburg Files website stay online [wired.com], which depicts pictures of aborted fetuses and had a "hit list" of abortion doctors. Even though at least one doctor on the list had been murdered, and his name was crossed out on the list, the Court still saw that this was free speech. If that could stand, surely this website is well within the bounds of the law

Doing the same thing

[Anonymous Coward]

I've been doing the same thing for a while now. Certainly not as long as Mr Uy but long enough to have accumulated a fair amount of spammer names, addresses, phone numbers and on occasion, valid email addresses. Here is the link on my site:

http://home.earthlink.net/~kspandle/main/columns /t ext/addresses.txt

I update the information once a week so the list keeps growing.

Never had any person on the list write to complain about me posting their information but I did have one person from an ISP question me as to whether these are legitimate. They are.

And for proof of fraud... (was Re:Home/Business)

[IWannaBeAnAC]

here [internet.com]

Re:Home/Business

[Dr. Manhattan]

As long as spamming and junk mail remains legal, which it likely will, as it is part of that touchy subject of the first ammendment...

The First Amendment applies only in a very limited way to commercial speech, and courts have had no problem declaring analogous postal mail and fax behavior illegal [utdallas.edu]. I wouldn't bet much that spam stays legal forever.

The main problem with spam isn't First Amendment issues, it's cost-shifting and theft-of-service. And that kind of stuff has always been illegal.

Re:Home/Business

[gurps_npc]

You MIGHT be correct. However, 99% of all spammers routinely break the law.

Specifically they:

1) Do not keep "do not email" lists as required by many localities.

2) Do not respect California's "ADV:" in subject line requirement.

3) Break truth in advertising rules.

4) 50% of the time they talk about making money at home, they are discussing a Ponzi scheme where you become a Spammer. The other 50% of the time they are not talking about becoming a spammer, they are talking about an outright Nigerian scam. Both of these are illegal in the U.S.

5) If they are spamming for Porn, they make no effort to stop kids from receiveing their spam, thereby breaking MORE laws.

What it comes down to is that they systematically break a TON of misdeamenors, and many of them systematically commit multiple felonies. Just because it is hard to prosecute them does NOT mean they are innocent.

Re:Home/Business

[Anonymous Coward]

This isn't about having the law release the home addresses of a business owner. This is about a business owner who registered and is running a business from his home. Two totally different things.
Business addresses and contact information are and allways have been open to the public. The fact that the spammer is running and registered his business from his home address is his own fault, especially considering the type of business he's running.

Re:Privacy protection?

[Bilestoad]

Don't anyone harrass this guy:

Maryland Internet Marketing LLC, George Alan Moore Jr, 300 Twin Oaks Rd, Linthicum MD, 21090-2154, 877-655-3438, 410-963-8226.

Clearly he has suffered enough already at the hands of that cruel, cruel Francis Uy!

Re:Another clueless journalist

[Jeremy Erwin]

Some Cantor and Siegel spam dates from April 12, '94, although a brief search of google [google.com] will confirm that early versions of the spam date from 3 Mar 1994. The 12 April Spam was, however, their most systematic of their attempts to spam usenet.

Email, in its current form, dates from either 1982, or 1993, depending of whether you think rfc 822: Standard for ARPA Internet Text Messages [ohio-state.edu],RFC 1522: Message Header Extensions for Non-ASCII Text [ohio-state.edu], or RFC 1523:The text/enriched MIME Content-type [ohio-state.edu] to be the most important. HTML and macro viruses are merely heretical variations on these standards.

Email spam, btw, has existed since at least 1978 [templetons.com], although you could argue that this was "before e-mail even existed in its current form", as this predates the current addressing standard.

History lesson

[Black Copter Control]

The SPAM name is older than Canter and Seigal. It came from a clueless ghit who got pissed off at members of a newsgroup and started sending dozens of articles to the Usenet with a content of:

Spam Spam Spam Spam Spam Spam Spam Spam Spam Spam Spam Spam Spam Spam Spam Spam Spam Spam Spam Spam Spam Spam Spam Spam Spam Spam Spam Spam Spam Spam Spam Spam Spam Spam Spam Spam Spam Spam Spam Spam Spam Spam Spam Spam Spam Spam Spam Spam Spam Spam Spam Spam Spam Spam Spam Spam Spam Spam Spam Spam Spam Spam Spam Spam Spam Spam Spam Spam Spam Spam Spam Spam ..........

(once again, probably taken from the Monty Python skit).

As I remember it the messages were also heavily cross-posted. The messages were many and large -- with the intent of filling up the newsgroups (this was back when a 40MG disk was considered relatively large. After that, any repetetive/excessive posting started getting referred to as SPAMMING.

When commercial bulk emailling started, then the SPAM moniker was tagged there as well. I guess that the name 'spam' would apply to bulk posting of unwanted messages.

Home address falls under 'private' ?

[MImeKillEr]

Since when?

In Texas, all you need is the person's name or address to get all kinds of info -- and free.

Wanna know how much property Michael Dell owns, its taxable value, etc?

Check out this link [traviscad.org] for info on his property within Travis County. The Williamson County [wcad.org] link hasn't worked in awhile, otherwise you could see the property there as well.

Click on Appraisal Roll
Click Search Real Estate by Owner's name
Enter "Dell M" (no quotes)

Click on any of the Owner Ids and scroll down. You can even get a plat map, suitable for stalking.

Heck, Sandra Bullock's address is in there too.

I don't know about other states, but anyone can go to the county courthouse in any county in Texas and get the info for free.

Darn, late to my own party

[frankie]

I really hope Wm James (owner of Spamreaper) isn't too upset about getting Slashdotted. Anyways, here's my story:

I arrived at the District Court in Glen Burnie a bit before 9am. My lawyer was there already. ( <plug> Jonathan Biedron, great guy, highly recommended if you need any family law or such in central Maryland </plug> ) We compared notes, made sure we had all our printouts, and went to Courtroom #4.

District Court is the first level of the civil judicial system, no serious crimes here. All the other cases on the docket were either family disputes or tenant evictions. Upon entering the room, George saw me and sent his lawyer (Cheryl Asensio, from Glen Burnie) to talk to Jon. George was kindly willing to drop the case if I took down my pages. Jon declined. When the judge got to ours he asked if we had settled; he saw that it was going to be long and bizarre, and was hoping to avoid it. No such luck, so he sent us back to wait and asked the judge next door to take our case while he finished up the usual pile of landlords.

[drat, gotta go to IT staff meeting. time passes.]

At 9:30 we were sent to Courtroom #3, Judge Robert Wilcox presiding. The plaintiff always goes first. We started out informally, and George narrated his side of the case. By 10:00 Judge Wilcox said that he hadn't heard anything to prove I was responsible for the harrassment. Jon and I are about to pack our bags when Asensio decides to go the whole nine yards with formal witness testimony. Groan.

Citizens have a constitutional right to a proper day in court (except for "material witnesses" and "unlawful combatants" but let's not go there), and that's what George wanted. Asensio examines Fatburn first, and introduces pages from Google Groups into evidence. She cited someone's signature file quoting Dave Barry advocating castration [slashdot.org] of spammers as an indication of the kind of horrible people that inhabit NANAE. (during cross examination George testified that he had never heard of Dave Barry).

Then she questioned me, apparently hoping that I would crack under pressure and confess to secretly organizing a cabal of Anti-Fatburn Terrorists. We got sidetracked for about 5 minutes in a discussion of how I contacted a guy who foolishly hired a spammer to advertise his hydraulic valves [google.com]. Eventually she ran out of ways to try asking me "yes or no, are you going to stop harrassing my client?" and rested her case at 11:30.

District cases usually take between 30 seconds and 5 minutes, so everyone else in the room sighed with relief. The judge was still unconvinced and promptly ruled in my favor. I feel bad for the poor tree that I killed printing up my un-needed defense. Ah well, hopefully it will remain that way; any District ruling can be appealed to Circuit "de novo", meaning we start all over from scratch.

George tried to send me a message, and wanted to make an example of me. Instead I had a message for him: every time you try to mess with me, I will post it on the net, and more people will learn about you. I don't encourage harrassment against you, and I don't need to. The facts speak quite loudly enough. Your best option is to crawl back under a rock and suck it up, or move to some state other than the one I live in.

Re:Privacy protection?

[Anonymous Coward]

And certainly don't stop here [mapquest.com] either.