Re: making mail traceable
2004-01-19 11:44:48
Keith, I fear you're still fighting last year's battle when you write:
Also, for lots of reasons I don't think that giving law enforcement a
way to track down spammers is a desirable way to solve the spam
problem. It would get the government too involved in mediating
people's communications, it would invite favoritism, it would require
too many LE resources, and for that reason it would be hard to limit
abuse. I'd far rather find a way for the net to be self-policing
by....
I don't find it desirable either, and I too would rather have seen the
community find a self-policing solution. (For the record, I would also
prefer for people to be so loving and compassionate that violence never
reached the level of requiring police or governments.) However,
CANSPAM represents the official rejection of our preferences by the US
government, and I see little gain in dwelling on battles already lost.
Washington today is full of people trying to figure out their new
mandate of regulating email. They're going to do it, regardless of our
preferences, and I think some of us who understand the complexities
should try to play a constructive role in fleshing out that mandate. I
consider it virtually inevitable that they will require some form of
enhanced tracability in the name of stopping spam -- it's just about
the very first instinct of a bureaucracy -- so the question I am trying
to pose is, essentially, what is the least harmful way of doing this?
Preserving anonymous email is very important to me, and a battle worth
fighting very passionately in the long run. The architecture of any
anti-spam tracing facilities will be critical to that battle. I think
we need to accept that we've lost the "whether" battle -- e.g. whether
or not there will be police on the net trying to trace email -- and
try to respond in a strategically intelligent way, by helping define a
tracing architecture that is anonymity-friendly. I expect that some
people I respect enormously may choose to fall on their swords in total
opposition to the "email police." But I hope that some of the many
great minds of the IETF will focus on the challenging design question
of how to preserve interpersonal anonymity while facilitating spam
tracing. I'm not sure I would want to live with the result of forcing
that to be an either/or choice. -- Nathaniel
---
Nathaniel S. Borenstein <nsb(_at_)cpsr(_dot_)org>
President, Computer Professionals for Social Responsibility
http://www.cpsr.org
<Prev in Thread] |
Current Thread |
[Next in Thread>
|
- Re: making mail traceable, (continued)
- Re: making mail traceable, Dave Crocker
- Re: making mail traceable, James M Galvin
- Re: making mail traceable, Al Costanzo
- Re: making mail traceable, Keith Moore
- Re: making mail traceable, James M Galvin
- Re: making mail traceable, Al Costanzo
- Re: making mail traceable, Keith Moore
- Re: making mail traceable, James M Galvin
- Re: making mail traceable, Keith Moore
- Re: making mail traceable, william
- Re: making mail traceable,
Nathaniel Borenstein <=
- Re: making mail traceable, Keith Moore
- Re: making mail traceable, Nathaniel Borenstein
- Re: making mail traceable, Keith Moore
- Re: making mail traceable, James M Galvin
- Re: making mail traceable, Nathaniel Borenstein
- Re: making mail traceable, James M Galvin
- Re: Re: making mail traceable, Dave Crocker
- Re: Re: making mail traceable, James M Galvin
- Re: making mail traceable, James M Galvin
- some message bullet-proofing, Dave Crocker
|
|
|