From: Markus Stumpf <maex-lists-spam-ietf-asrg(_at_)Space(_dot_)Net>
If using foreign computers would be a shield, then a new American
Blastfax could use FAX machines (computers) in China and VoIP to dial
U.S. fax machines and escape the FCC and the TCPA.
Traceability is the keyword.
If I can hunt down the originater I can sue him. (Ab)using FAX machines
anonymously is rather hard, hacking a few workstations is easy.
Yes, traceability is the keyword, but the rest of that is mistaken.
It is just as easy to abuse a fax machine as a mailbox. In either
case, the abuse consists of sending junk.
21st Century and the later American BlastFax junk faxes were less
traceable than any spam. With spam you always have the IP address of
the SMTP client and. Unless your fax machine does caller-ID, you have
paid your telephone company for caller-ID, and the junk faxer is not
using any of the several tactics that turn off caller-ID (e.g. a PBX),
you will have no idea from where a junk fax comes. In practice, at
least one of those conditions is not met, and so you have no idea of
the source of any fax.
The fact that junk faxes are much less traceable to the originating
computer than spam does not affect success of the FCC or various
private organizations in tracing them to their sources. That an
unsolicited bulk email message comes through an open proxy is as
irrelevant to its useful traceability as the fact that even with
legitimate faxes you probably have no clue about the telephone number
of the sending fax machine. It might not even have a telephone number.
The traceability that matters is that the 21st Century junk included
their name and 1-900 numbers that suckers were supposed to call. The
relevant traceability of the ABF junk was in the names, addresses,
and telephone numbers of the businesses that hired ABF to advertise
them. That is why ABF is out of business and the last I heard,
21st Century was fighting 6 or 7-figure fines, despite their lack
of technical traceability.
This illustrates a major problem with this and similar efforts to deal
with spam. Most of us are interested in hammering computer nails,
and so we see the spam problem purely in those terms.
Vernon Schryver vjs(_at_)rhyolite(_dot_)com
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