Defending Harsh Sentences for Spammers 633
BMcWilliams writes "Russell McGuire, one of the government lawyers who prosecuted spammer Jeremy Jaynes, has published an article justifying the tough sentence recommended by a Virginia jury. He writes, 'the defense attorney argued that greed cuts both ways and the victims got what they deserved because they were trying to get rich quick. Needless to say, this did not go over well with the jury.' Still, the eye-popping 9-year sentence has even some ardent anti-spammers wondering whether 'proportionality is becoming a completely forgotten concept.'"
Proprotionality (Score:3, Insightful)
Zoo mentality (Score:4, Insightful)
considering... (Score:2, Insightful)
Two Wrongs... (Score:3, Insightful)
Punishment fitting the crime? (Score:5, Insightful)
One word: deterrent (Score:1, Insightful)
Does the 9-year sentence reduce spam? Keep doubling the sentence until spam stops.
Spam isn't victimless, and it isn't done accidentally. It is professional crime, done on purpose and with pre-meditation.
I favor the death penalty (Score:1, Insightful)
When you can serve longer for spamming (Score:4, Insightful)
Spam equivalent to rape? (Score:5, Insightful)
The problem with our society is that we can't figure out a better way to punish people than to put them in jail for a decade or so and let them think about what they did. We're not quakers, for the love of God. Why can't we just:
1.) Take all the money paid to him for spamming,
2.) Fine the companies that paid him to spam, give as much of that money back to the gullible suckers as we can, and
3.) Give him 50 lashes and tell him he's not allowed to use email for 5 years.
Should have been more (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Contribute to ridiclulous levels of spam (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Proprotionality (Score:4, Insightful)
No new laws (Score:3, Insightful)
IANAL: Why do people think the different methods of committing a crime require different laws? Is murder by using a knife versus a crowbar defined and treated differently in the law books?
Re:Two Wrongs... (Score:2, Insightful)
After all, they Never Do Any Wrong (TM) - on US soil at least. When cameras are present. Or the journalist cannot be "kidnapped".
Why not fraud (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm curious why fraud charges weren't stacked on top of all this.
I'm not complaining. 9 years for spamming. I just hope this guy isn't the last. I really want to see them go after as many of these guys as they can. Going after 1 isn't much of a deterrant. Going after dozens could be. It's not like there are as many big-time spammers as there are file sharers. You don't have to get that many convictions to start scaring them.
Re:Contribute to ridiclulous levels of spam (Score:2, Insightful)
Unlike smoking crack, this crime actually had victims. Real, honest to jebus money-losing victims.
(Admittedly, very stupid victims who would probably have given up money for magic beans.)
Re:Punishment fitting the crime? (Score:5, Insightful)
Fines don't work. When you are a professional scammer and thief, this is just the cost of doing business. Its just like thugs that work certain neighborhoods have to pay a percentage to the local mob boss.
And there are no debtors prisons in the US. If he moves his operations overseas, while still maintaining a residence in the US, the money is more or less untouchable...he'll just declare bankruptcy and move to a state that doesn't allow forclosure of primary home and vehicle for bankruptcy and drive a Hummer to his quarterbillion house and be out of reach of the authorities.
Prison sentences are the only way to go. The guy knew it was wrong and choose to do so anyways. For that, jail time is appropriate. 9 years in jail? Maybe over the line, but then again, he knew the risks...if I was told if I spit on a sidewalk I'd go to prison for life, I'd be sure not to spit on the sidewalk (or be prepared to take the consequences for doing so).
Yes, "proportionality" is long dead (Score:5, Insightful)
"There's no way to rule innocent men. The only power any government has is the power to crack down on criminals. Well, when there aren't enough criminals, one makes them." - Ayn Rand
Not that spammers don't deserve jail time, but realize that we're quickly approaching a stage where everyone is guilty of something.
Re:One word: deterrent (Score:5, Insightful)
As much as I hate spam, I would much rather see the man bankrupted, or seriously fined than server ANY jail time. At no point has my quality of life or personal safety ever been threatened by spam. Incarceration should be an option of last resort.
I find it funny that most slashdotters will cry foul at ~any~ type of fine for file trading or uncapping their modems or for warddriving, and then scream for violent dismemberment of someone who sends unsolicited e-mails.
Re:Proprotionality (Score:3, Insightful)
Cheers,
The relevance of greed going both ways (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Punishment fitting the crime? (Score:2, Insightful)
If it's say 3-4 times what came in because of the the activity, it's more than a cost of business.
punishment (Score:3, Insightful)
deliver 50 lashes.
Fines are unfair. They are nothing to the wealthy,
and the poor simply won't -- can't -- pay.
Jail is unfair. For the poor, it is free food and
housing. Oddly, the rich (see Martha Stewart) seem
to get off pretty easy too. The rich don't have
employment to worry about either.
It's always the middle class that suffers the most
from our current forms of punishment.
At least with lashes, you have to be one of a few
perverts to enjoy the punishment.
BTW, the rapist is kind of special. One could just
remove the offending body parts.
Re:Contribute to ridiclulous levels of spam (Score:3, Insightful)
The defense lawyer did a REALLY shabby job. He said "they acted like shitheads only because they were trying to get rich fast"
So yes they got a harsh sentence but if I was a jurror you can bet that would have pushed my "for maximum punishment" trigger finger too.
If a rapist had the defense of "I raped her because I knew it would feel so fucking good" you can be assured they would get the death penalty (in a death penalty state).
While a harsh sentence, I feel no pitty for the defendants. Spam is/should be illegal and those that try to make it a bussiness model should pay dearly for thier actions (which includes paying for a good lawyer).
Re:Proprotionality (Score:2, Insightful)
If they were doing this more than a year, they got off light.
Re:One word: deterrent (Score:5, Insightful)
OTOH, knowing that this guy won't be spamming for 9 years is not a terrible thing. I agree that the degree of this crime is lower than many others, but the magnitude seems extremely higher. We should be comparing his sentence to that of a mass murderer or serial rapist.
Re:Like you need to ask (Score:3, Insightful)
Yes, I want people who premeditate and execute attacks on millions of people's private property to fill up our prisons. (I'd prefer Abu Ghirab, but prison will do.) Make room by letting out the people convicted of victimless "crimes" (e.g. drug posession).
Re:Spam equivalent to rape? (Score:3, Insightful)
9 years would be an extremely high sentence for spamming one person. Conversely, 5-20 years would be an extremely low sentence for raping hundreds of thousands of people.
Re:Zoo mentality (Score:5, Insightful)
1. Although I find it an inherently cold and heartless thought, we put a price in dollars on a human life all the time. Compare the losses caused by a spammer to that, and it's quite easy to end up higher than the cost of a life.
No, I'm not talking "but a second to delete a spam message costs nothing!" Even then, time is ultimately money. (E.g., you pay over $1000 for a faster computer, yes, to save time. And how many of those upgrades are ultimately just to be able to run an even slower antivirus, spyware killer, etc? That's money costs inflicted by the spammers upon society.)
I'm also talking lots of other effects, such as the cost incurred to companies and individuals to maintain all those spam filters. The IT costs of preventing and cleaning with viruses that exist only to install spam zombies. Costs incurred to ISP's and companies just to deal with the bandwidth and storage used up by spam _and_ all those viruses trying to install spam zombies. Costs related to false positives. (E.g., a missed business opportunity because an email from a legitimate business partner was filtered out.)
Plus the insidious cost of having a valuable communication resource plundered and turned into a worthless wasteland. Whereas we all used to gladly read and answer emails from strangers (e.g., questions about my walkthrough for a game, some yes, including attached pics of where they got lost), nowadays an email from a stranger is most likely to be junked without reading. Doubly so if it contains an attachment of any kind.
I also used to freely give my email address to everyone. Nowadays if someone did that, you'd call them an idiot clueless (l)user. Nowadays if you must enter an email address, it's some black hole account just supposed to be a garbage bin for spam.
All this is not just business opportunities, but literal pollution of a valuable resource, and it affects hundreds of millions of people. Even if you put a 1$ price on that resource for each user affected, you easily end up with a monumental loss that those spammers caused to society.
Yes, higher than what we currently price one life at. Cynical, but true.
2. My favourite example: I think of it not in dollars, but in seconds. A murderer has shortened someone's life by, say, 20 years. And we can execute him for that.
Now let's look at spam. Let's say 100,000,000 users receive spam. Let's also say each user is only robbed of 1 minute per day dealing with spam, installing and updating spam filters, de-installing spam zombies, etc. (Just spending an hour on that software every 2 months, already uses up that 1 minute per day quota. So not unrealistic.)
That means in just 2 months, those users have been robbed of 100,000,000 hours out of their lives! That's 4166667 days! Or more than 100,000 YEARS!
So we can execute someone for stealing 20 years out of someone's life, but you think 9 years in prison is too much for robbing 100,000+ years from us all? Seems to me like it's equivalent to more than 5000 murders. People have been hanged tried as war criminals and mass-murderers for far less than that.
So au contraire, I think the fucktard got off disproportionately lightly. If there was justice and keeping the punishment proportional, a spammer would need to die a thousand deaths. (Which, unfortunately, is impossible anyway.)
Some math....... (Score:2, Insightful)
This IS balanced (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Zoo mentality (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Punishment fitting the crime? (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Zoo mentality (Score:3, Insightful)
A lot of you argue that the time taken away from deleting spam adds up to hundreds of thousands of years. Someone even went far enough to say that it's more time taken away then the time taken away from someone who was murdered. Time is a number, constant. It will always go on, but the time you have should be invaluable. A few seconds a day is nothing compared to 20 years of your life gone. I'm sure everyone here wastes a few seconds a day doing something that serves no purpose.
Re:Zoo mentality (Score:4, Insightful)
In 9 years (especially in a US prisson) they will not be rehabilitated, they will be angry, pissed off, without a future. They won't fit into society and be good citicens, much more likely they will have been pushed over the edge mentally and commit far worse crimes.
Re:When you can serve longer for spamming (Score:3, Insightful)
No there doesn't. There needs to be just, fitting punishment.
This isn't just spam! (Score:2, Insightful)
To repeat, 9 year sentence isn't just for spam, but for conning thousands of naive morons out of their money. The jury wouldn't have awarded the same punishment to spam coming from a legitimate online dating service, so don't lump all spam together.
Re:When you can serve longer for spamming (Score:3, Insightful)
First of all, it wasn't just a cut-and-dried spamming cause. The guy was committing fraud. Think of it as a fraud case, not a spam case.
And second of all, there exists such a thing as "mitigating circumstances." There is not some absolute, gradient scale of crime/punishment proportionality whereby each successively worse crime automatically warrants punishments of correspondingly increasing severity. Genuine repentence, age, prior record, victim impact, motive, intent, and more can and should all be taken into account when determining sentencing. Would you prefer a completely "zero-tolerance" system where a punishment is simply automatically looked up in a book at sentencing time? Where your kid, getting pulled over and caught with 5 grams of weed on the floor in the back seat of your car (that his friend accidentally dropped when he was back there, unbeknownst to your son), gets the same punishment as a lifetime, habitual heroin dealer? Let's use some common sense here, people.
Re:One word: deterrent (Score:3, Insightful)
Depends on how you define "deterrent". It's true that longer terms do not tend to reduce the rate at which criminals reoffend after release. But they do keep criminals from committing crimes for longer periods of time, what with being locked up and all
This guy will not be spamming as long as he's locked up, and that's good enough for me. If he were merely fined, you can bet that within a year he would be running a major spam operation again.
Re:Zoo mentality (Score:2, Insightful)
1)because forced labor is cruel and unusual punishment
2)because prisoner labor competes with people trying to earn a living
3)because stinkin spammers should rot in jail with no worldly contact other than spam email
Re:Spam equivalent to rape? (Score:3, Insightful)
You're comparing apples and PCs. 5-20 years is for _ONE_ count of rape, not (say) 25 million.
What would be a typical sentence for 25 million counts of rape? Compare that to 9 years.
Re:Zoo mentality (Score:5, Insightful)
I call bullshit.
Whilst I agree 9 years for a first offence of spamming (assuming no fraud/attempted fraud) is over the top.
However, a sentence serves 4 purposes: First and foremost it's about punishment. Second it's about convincing the victims and society they've been punished: so they don't feel the need to take the law into their own hands, and so that they can move on. Thirdly it's about proecting society: both the individuals and the collective group. And fourth, by a big margin, it's about rehabilitation.
Investment, deterence, sentancing, proportionality (Score:3, Insightful)
This requires long term investment in the police forces.
Crime is not detered by heavy sentancing since if the criminal believes the chances are he will not be caught, the sentance is irrelevent.
Heavy sentancing however can be enacted instantly, by act of law, unlike long term investment in police forces (which is also, of course, expensive and has little immediate effect).
Over the decades, there has been a general failure to invest in police forces because of the cost and lack of immediacy and, due to the consequencial lack of decrease in crime, a general turning towards increasingly heavy sentancing.
This does not work. It also gradually leads to penalities become entirely disproportional to offence, leading to institutionalized injustice.
Such is the current state of affairs.
--
Toby
Re:Zoo mentality (Score:1, Insightful)
One component of the justice system is to make people afraid to commit a crime, to make it so that it costs more to commit a crime than it does to play it straight. The though of spending a decade in jail might be enough to make people think twice about spamming. Then again, nobody ever thinks it will happen to them, so this method often fails.
Side note: many people push for a corporate death sentance. I'd like to see corporate jail time. i.e. For 2 years the corporation will be taxed 100% of their profit, and they cannot give raises or bonuses or stock options to anyone making more than $10/hr (you don't want to hurt the lower class and those who don't have any decision-making power). They are allowed to invest in research, but not capital. I think that sort of thing would hurt a company and its directors enough to make them not break the law, but without hurting the economy.
Re:Contribute to ridiclulous levels of spam (Score:5, Insightful)
the USA already incarcerates a greater proportion of its population than any other nation in the world because of sentencing practices harsher than any other industrialized country. If prison actually prevented crime we should have a low crime rate, but no, we have more crime than any develpoed nation.
What everyone seems to miss... (Score:5, Insightful)
If he was just sending unsolicited email advertising a real product that actually worked, then 9 years would indeed be too harsh. Creating an annoyance, even to many people, should not be punished more harshly than some murders and rapes.
But, he deliberately worked to deceive people in order to steal their money by selling a product that didn't work and that he knew didn't work. This is theft, and when done on such a grand scale ($400K - $700K per month), deserves to be so harshly punished. It could be argued that this is too light, considering the several year sentences typical for car theft.
I'd also be inclined to punish him for stupidity. Having raked in several million dollars in a few months, he should have been long gone sunning himself on a beach in Brazil under a new identity, not sitting around waiting to be busted.
Re:Zoo mentality (Score:5, Insightful)
The same homophobic people will then turn around and chuckle at the thought of men raping men in prison. It's got to stop. That is not the punishment that judges hand out, but it is definately one that gets handed out in all serious prisons.
Re:When you can serve longer for spamming (Score:4, Insightful)
Have you heard the expression: "you might as well be hung for a sheep as a lamb"?
Translating this into modern terms: You've just crash into another car whilst drink driving. The other driver has just got of his car and is standing in front of your car yelling at you. A conviction for drink driving will see you in jail for 10 years. The punishment for causing death by dangerous driving (the worst you'd get as long as they can't prove it was deliberate) is 10 years in jail: but there's a chance, with no witnesses left alive, that you'd get away with it. Did I mention he's standing in front of your car and your engine is still running?
It isn't some silly liberal sentimentality that says the punishment should fit the crime, and this isn't the only argument for it: it's just the one most appropriate to refute your absurd assertions.
Re:Zoo mentality (Score:4, Insightful)
Here here! I actually talked to somebody who said that all punishment is wrong. I asked "So if somebody murdered your entire family, you wouldn't even want them locked up?" "No, I would want to help them, because they obviously are not well." "But what about the other people he could kill. Putting him in jail would prevent that" "So we should sacrifice his freedom for the supposed safety of some hypothetical person? That's not justice"
As for your first comment, there was fraud involved. Above and beyond the forged headers, they were selling $39.95 "FedEx Refund Processors". "Make $75 an hour working from home" and all that. That is why his lawyer made the comment about how it was the victims fault for being greedy.
Deterence (Score:3, Insightful)
Historically, punishment has been done for two reasons simultaneously. The first is to end the cycle of revenge - if you kill my brother I'll kill you and your cousin will kill me and
The second reason is to act as a big cautionary tale to others thinking of doing the same thing. Money (fines) is just money and suitable for small crimes (misdemeanors), but serious prison time will make others think twice about what they're doing.
Is spamming really a serious crime? I haven't RTFA but I haven't seen spam from a legitimate but clueless company in years. Everything I see is a form of fraud. Some of it is just this side of legal (a "genuinue faux imitation Rolex" is not advertised as a real Rolex), most of it is not. We lock up the guy who hustles hundreds of people on the street corner, so damn straight we can lock up the guy who's hustling millions of people online.
Re:punishment (Score:3, Insightful)
You could scale the fines to be proportional to income. The idea is that the same offense should result in the same approximate level of pain. Norway does this; occasionally it results in a wealthy individual receiving a ten thousand dollar speeding ticket.
Community service might be an appropriate substitute. An hour is an hour to everyone.
Re:Zoo mentality (Score:3, Insightful)
Do we *want* them comitting more crimes when their sentences end?
When I think of the importance of rehab, I don't think "oh, those poor little criminals, won't someone help them," I think "oh crap, what are we going to do with them when they get out?"
Re:Proprotionality (Score:4, Insightful)
I'm sorry, but this idea make as much sense as the arbitrary method of assigning sentences that we have now.
1st, I'm dissapointed in the
Sentences for crime and many of the "crimes" themselves are arbitrary. I don't want to get philosophical here, but there simply really isn't a right or a wrong, its only popular opinion (thanks 12 Monkeys
I know of someone that was found guilty of stealing abour $40,000 from her employer. It was a cut and dry case, because she was responsible for collecting payments at a doctor's office, and she just told the people to leave the "Payable to" field blank, and she would stamp it, but instead she just put her name on it. A pretty easy paper trail for the crime. Anyway, she got 6 months in jail and has to do pay $50 a month in restitution. To me that is not a punishment at all, and if I were in a similar situation, I would take 6 months in jail and a $50 payment for a $40,000 interest free loan. Maybe, but what I'm getting at is the punishment would not be a deterant for doing this, now my silly sense of morals would probably prevail.
Look at the drug laws and punishments. In 10 states in our country, possession of marijuana in personal quanities is not a crime at all, and only has a fine associated with it like speeding. In the other 40 states, its a misdimeaner from about 30 days to 1 year of jail time.
Look at the differences between different drugs. Especially powder vs rock (crack) cocaine. That makes no sense whatsoever (except its pretty effective in controlling poor uneducated inner city people).
Also, the government is not very good at estimating losses. The estimates of losses from drug use (between 50 and 100 billion a year, depending on which week the question is asked) were based on calling a few people in North Carolina and asking them: 1) do you smoke pot? 2) how much money do you make? Being that a majority of the people that smoke pot are under 30, including many students, one can easily see that these people are going to be at the bottom of most pay scales.
Re:No new laws (Score:3, Insightful)
On the other hand, there is a school of thought that the act of sending the spam--in and of itself, regardless of whether it is fraudulent or not--is also destructive to society. It makes email a less valuable tool for everyone.
Telemarketers have restrictions on who they can call and when, so that our telephones aren't rendered useless by a barrage of marketing. They can be fined heavily for not following the rules, even if their practices are entirely honest. In that case, new law was required to regulate telemarketing, because existing law didn't cover the new technology. The same goes for junk faxes. With those, my time and other resources are wasted at relatively low cost to the advertiser. New law was required, because old law didn't cover the abuse of the new technology.
Similarly, spam wasn't regulated within the old framework. New law was required to address it. (If one believes that spam is detrimental to society and should be addressed in law at all.)
Re:When you can serve longer for spamming (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Proprotionality (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Zoo mentality (Score:1, Insightful)
1) Protecting society
2) Rehabilitation
3) Convincing victims and society
4) Punishment
SHUT UP, SPAMMER (Score:3, Insightful)
ONE SINGLE SPAMMER IN PURSUIT OF $200-$300 COSTS UPWARD OF $100,000 IN LOST TIME AND PRODUCTIVITY.
Life is finite, and I do not need to waste even one second to hear your pitches for third-world vigra or lame-ass fake rolex watches.
Re:Deterence (Score:3, Insightful)
Actually, the ancient greeks had fines as a punishment. One of Socrates possible punishments that was mentioned in the plays was a fine. Assuming that he plead guilty I think. So there is a third, Fining.
Re:Proprotionality (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Zoo mentality (Score:3, Insightful)
We had a medium, email, used by millions of people for meaningful discourse. Over time, a very small percentage of users (spammers) have all but trashed email for all users. We are using the legal system to make this small handful of individuals pay for their pollution. These few dozen persons have ruined a medium used by hundreds of millions the world over.
Does this punishment fit their crime? Absolutely.
Cheers,
-- RLJ
this may be due to the unusual nature of spam (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:first post? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Proprotionality (Score:3, Insightful)
Just curious.
Was it actually rape (which involves penetration) or was the indictment listed as "sexual assault"?
Up here everything from touching someones clothed breast to violent sodomy with a police baton is called sexual assault. There is no crime of "rape". Consequently as a result the word "rape" is frequently misapplied to practically any unlawful sexual act no matter what allegidly took place.
The only point I'm making is that I see accurate descriptions of unlawful acts being thrown away in favour of the more cynical (but more popular) fear mongering. It is certainly unjust (to the victim as well as the perp) to report that a non-rape sexual assault is a rape.
No doubt some "Law and Order" types would argue they are the same thing. The same people who call copyright infringement "piracy".
"proportionality" does not compare leaving people to die to writing bad cheques. It compares 1 instance of leaving someone to die with other instances of leaving someone to die. 1 rape with another rape. Presumably in your jurisdiction, writing bad cheques is taken to be a more serious offence than rape or leaving the victims of your driving accident to die.
This is the fault of law makers (who legislate minimum/maximum sentences) rather than the judiciary who compare like crimes with like crimes.
Just putting blaim where it belongs.
If law makers legislated a mandatory death sentence for writing bad cheques, it would not cause the punishment for rape to increase or decrease.
It would not be a failure of the justice system. It would be a failure of the political system.
Re:Zoo mentality (Score:1, Insightful)