Does it bother anyone else that the Direct Marketing Association is now playing a central role in funding government anti-spam enforcement activities? It sure doesn't sit right from my point of view.
As the nation's foremost proponent of direct marketing, the DMA has been a major player in the spam debate for many years. Along with a few of its more influential members like Microsoft and AOL, it virtually dictated the atrociously counterproductive Can Spam Act of 2003 to Congress, in large part to pre-empt much stronger state anti-spam laws. Over the last few months, it has been dribbling out information about Operation Slam Spam, an "industry/law enforcement cooperative effort" with the FBI that the DMA is funding to the tune of $500,000.
Now, most of the publicity that Operation Slam Spam has garnered so far suggests that the DMA's money is earmarked primarily for bringing the perpetrators of phishing scams to justice. Since my readers and I have been whooping and hollering for some time now about the need for more enforcement action against phishing, how can I possibly object to this? After all, beggars can't be choosers, and it's clear that our law enforcement agencies are woefully and chronically underfunded when it comes to fighting all manner of Internet fraud. So if the DMA wants to throw some money at this very serious problem, why not let them?
Well, they can. But while I would have no problem if it was, say, Operation Fillet Phishers instead, there is still something about the DMA proposing and funding Operation Slam Spam that makes me uncomfortable. Phishing and spam are really two fundamentally different problems, even though phishers use spam as the delivery vehicle for their identity-theft ploys. And while the DMA and its members have every reason to dislike phishing as much as the rest of us, I think we have a right to question whose side they are on when it comes to the spam issue.
And we have that right because of their foisting the Can Spam Act on a compliant Congress and President last year. Note that the Department of Justice's big announcement last week of Operation Web Snare, originally touted as a coming-out party for the Can Spam Act, turned out to be focused instead on violations of much more traditional criminal laws. And you can bet that if and when Operation Slam Spam actually does start reeling in some phishing scam artists, it will be the fraud, computer hacking, and identity theft laws that matter in prosecuting them -- not Can Spam.
We didn't need the "Yes, You Can Spam Act" to make phishing, or computer-hijacking viruses, or even your average everyday fraudulent spam message illegal, because they already were. So what has this supposedly anti-spam law accomplished? It's given us a whole brand-new category of legal spam - spam that we must theoretically opt out from receiving after we get the first message. Of course, I say theoretically because you should never, never, ever follow the opt-out instructions you receive in a spam. After all, even if the message appears to be from a fine upstanding member of the DMA, it could in fact be a phishing scam of some sort.
The DMA is not a neutral party when it comes to spam. It worked very hard to design the Can-Spam Act to ensure DMA members can send unsolicited commercial e-mail to prospective customers. In so doing, it opened a huge hole for every small-time huckster to legally deluge us with spam that we cannot possibly opt out from receiving. The DMA didn't care about the consequences of its actions when it was lobbying for the Can Spam Act - why should we assume it will do otherwise as it advises the feds on who is and is not a spammer?
Read and post comments about this story here or write me directly at Foster@gripe2ed.com.
12:02:19 PM 
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