Chuq,
To me, it has to be national legislation to be useful, for that very
reason: the chance of both you and the spammer being in washington
jurisdiction is tiny, and even if you get washington small claims to
issue a judgement, collection is problematic.
*Identification* is often problematic. How do you identify the individual
responsible for sending you a piece of spam? This is a non-trivial problem.
What happens when the person is in China? Do we ("we" meaning Americans)
really want to try to subject the rest of the world to US laws?
Sidestepping the issue of whether we can ethically and legally do that (note
the furor the DMCA arrest of a Russian caused), I would argue we shouldn't
even bother trying, because it is going to be ineffective.
The idea of battling spam by criminalizing it seems a little bit to me like
leaving all your doors and windows open and trying to prosecute everyone who
steals things out of your house. Sure, you might catch them all. (I doubt
it, but OK.) You might even get your stuff back. But you're going to spend
all your time doing that, when surely you have better things to do. Why not
lock the doors and windows? We can do this by requiring strict
authentication.
-J
_______________________________________________
Asrg mailing list
Asrg(_at_)ietf(_dot_)org
https://www1.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/asrg