PARAPHRASING [Boing Boing Blog]
I am rewriting the content to try to better understand the process of what happened, and how we are all at risk from misapplication of a system to try to fix a big problem. Spam is an extremely serious pain in the butt. Software to try to block it is flawed, generating false positives. People dream up flawed systems and policies in which people are used like robots to enforce the flaws, and we end up having more problems instead of less.
There is also a relevant story on this kind of problem from [Dan Gillmore] on the problems that faced writer Steve Outing.
Ed Felten, spam-vigilante martyr.
- Ed "Tinkerer" Felten setup a new webblog at www.freedom-to-tinker.com containing his commentary on various issues.
- News of Ed "Tinkerer" Felten's new blog was shared with a mailing-list, by an enthusiast, someone other than Ed sent the e-mail.
- A subscriber to that list made a mistake and reported the posting as spam to SpamCop.
- On that "evidence" SpamCop declared Ed guilty of spamming and decreed that Ed's site should be shut down.
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Never mind that Ed had never sent a single e-mail message from the site. Never mind that Ed's site was not selling anything. Ed was not allowed to see the e-mail, mentioning his site, that did not come from him, that was used to label him as a spammer. Ed could not even to communicate with an actual human being at SpamCop. They're not interested in listening to complaints from spammers.
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But you know, that is how spammers operate.
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Ed's ISP shut off Ed's account, because it had appeared on a list of "spammers" published by SpamCop, who blackballed his email address with no appeal. -- it was that or have their mail-relays on everyone's blacklist. Why did his ISP shut Ed down? According to the ISP, SpamCop's policy is to put all of the ISP's accounts on the block list if the ISP does not shut down the accused party's site.
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With help from his ISP, Ed eventually learned that the offending message was sent on a legitimate mailing list, and that the person who had complained was indeed subscribed to that list, and had erroneously reported the message as unsolicited. Ironically, the offending message was sent by someone who liked Ed's site and wanted to recommend it to others. Everybody involved (Ed, his ISP, the person who filed the complaint, and the author of the message) agreed that the report was an error, and they all told this to SpamCop. Naturally, SpamCop failed to respond and continued to block the site.
Note the similarities to the worst type of Stalinist "justice" system: conviction is based on a single anonymous complaint; conviction is based not on anything the accused did but on favorable comments about him by the "wrong" people; the evidence is withheld from the accused; there is no procedure for challenging erroneous or malicious accusations; and others are punished based on mere proximity to the accused (leading to shunning of the accused, even if he is clearly innocent).
Note also that the "evidence" against Ed consisted only of a single unsigned e-mail message which would have been trivial for anyone to forge. Thus SpamCop provides an easy denial of service attack against a web site.
The only bright spot in this picture is that our real justice system allows lawsuits to be filed against guys like SpamCop for libel and/or defamation. My guess is that eventually somebody will do that and put SpamCop out of business.
Link Discuss (Thanks, Bruce!) [Boing Boing Blog]
Al's guess is that it will take several lawsuits, and bad publicity.
Let's suppose they do this to a journalist with BBC or New York Times. That institution fights back with a court injunction to shut down SpamCop, which makes an exception for the complainant with the clout, but continues behaving this way against all the little guys.
The basic problem is that SpamCop has a good idea but incompetent implementation.
Meanwhile [Dan Gillmore] relates that Steve Outing wrote an article on what NOT to include in e-newsletters if you want to avoid becoming a false positive from the anti-spam software, giving examples, which meant that his e-newsletter was bounced all over the place due to brain damaged filters, proving that he was right about the problem, but wrong path to communicate it. Dan talks about some spam fighting software that does a better job, and asks people to share what we do with spam, for him to share on [Dan's Weblog]. The good news is that Computer-Science Professor Ed Felten's weblog (www.freedom-to-tinker.com) is back up.
4:27:44 AM 
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