From: Kee Hinckley <nazgul(_at_)somewhere(_dot_)com>
> Telephone numbers and drop-boxes can be and are routinely connected
to the people responsible.
The success rate is not that high, the cost of the investigation
is high, unless you know the exact time the person is going to
collect the info the cost of a stakeout is prohibitive.
Even a number of the high-profile ebay fraud arrests depending on
serious detective work by people who had gotten nailed. In at least
once case all the police did was show up to make the arrest. It's
hard to find people willing to put that much effort into tracking
down a spammer.
Yes, and digital authentication schemes would do nothing to reduce
the effort required to track down a spammer or to motivate people to
exert themselves track down a spammer. Say something bad has happened,
whether spam, eBay fraud, or something else, and you have one of the
following used in the crime:
1. an IP address
2. a cert
3. a telephone number
The effort to get the authorities to show up to make an arrest or
whatever is no less for the cert than for the other two. In fact,
one might hope that privacy laws will make chasing the cert more difficult.
For completeness, contrast using a cert with one of:
4. a URL
5. a postal adddress
6. a contact email address
Vernon Schryver vjs(_at_)rhyolite(_dot_)com
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