September 14, 2008War Against Spammers Takes a Step Backward
Comments (4) Jeremy Jaynes, the first spammer to be sent to jail after being convicted of sending spam emails, just got a bit of a reprieve. He was reported to have at one point been sending out hundreds of thousands of emails per day and was originally convicted of spamming under Virginia law. However, lawyers claimed that the law in question was unconstitutional as it prevented Jaynes’ right to free speech. This all happened several years ago.
A few days ago (September 12, 2008) that law was struck down by the Supreme Court of Virginia for that very reason. The court decided that the law was too broad, and therefore would be too easy to apply in cases other than what it was intended. In an interesting footnote: Jaynes lived in North Carolina but was prosecuted in a Virginia court because that was the location of the servers that he used (abused) to send out his spam. Here’s part of what the court said in issuing its decision:
The justices declared Virginia’s tough Anti-SPAM Act of 2003 unconstitutional because it bars all anonymous, unsolicited bulk e-mails, including those containing political, religious or other protected speech.
Jaynes won’t be let out of prison just yet, as he’s still serving time for a fraud case that was apparently unrelated to his original conviction for spam. Here’s another bit of a quote from the news article:
The Virginia attorney general’s office argued that Jaynes did not have standing to challenge the constitutionality of the law and that, in any case, deceptive speech, as opposed to anonymous speech, is not constitutionally protected.
I don’t know how far-reaching this will be, as this has no impact on the Can Spam Act of 2003 since his conviction took place before that law was passed. Still, it is more than a little frustrating to have so much documentation (he was caught with compact discs with millions of email addresses, the domains in question were registered with a credit card belonging to his sister) and yet not have any justice. At one point he was listed as the 8th most active spammer in the world.
I guess that’s something his mother can be proud of.
Related Links
- Virginia Supreme Court strikes down state’s anti-spam law
- Wikipedia article on the CAN SPAM Act of 2003
Comments (4)
I thought this sounded familiar. Though I thought he and his sister were both arrested. At any rate, at the time, Virginia had one of the toughest SPAM laws in the nation and they were proud of that. What about my freedom to have my inbox free of his filth? What about my freedom of speech when I say I don’t want spammers to be free? I think the justices need a bop on the head. Because you said, there was actually a mountain of evidence against him, and they are letting him out on freedom of speech? Whatever happened to “your right to freedom of speech ends at my nose?” His right to freedom of speech ended when he sent out millions of spam messages.
Comment by Micheal — September 14, 2008 @ 9:09 am
Hi, Micheal, you raise some valid points. I think the main point of the court ruling is that the law itself is the problem. Since he was convicted under the law as it was then written, and that law has now been stricken from the books, his conviction is by default revoked as well. By the way, his sister was also arrested but didn’t do any jail time; I think she was fined a whopping $7500 or something like that. The Wiki article contains more details.
So in this case, the intent of the law is something that I think we all want, but the scope of the law was called into question and resulted in it being overturned.
Comment by Dave Rathbun — September 14, 2008 @ 3:24 pm
It seems rediculous to me that at this point in time there´s still no effective anti-spam law in place in that part of the world. That being said I don´t even know what the anti-spam laws in my country of residence, Spain, are like.
It´s a shame an internet-pig like this guy gets away with everything, this case must have scared the sh*t out of his fellow spammers.
Comment by dogs and things — September 14, 2008 @ 4:19 pm
Dave: Yeah, after I posted I looked at the article. Still, I don’t see how freedom of speech could even apply in this case. That sets a very, very, very bad precedent, and I’m disappointed in Virginia.
dogs and things: At an underground spammer site I used to frequent, spammers were commenting about how they and their friends were moving out of the US because of the laws. Sadly once out of the US, there is little that can be done except tear down their servers and such.
Another problem is that there are, believe it or not, ISPs that will actually cover for the spammer. One such example was when I filed abuse reports to Geocities and a certain unnamed ISP in the UK about Robert Soloway. Geocities immediately did the takedown and thanked me. The ISP in the UK, however, did not. Quite the opposite actually. They basically asked me to not send them reports like that, as how the person operates their computer is up to them, even if that operation meant spam. I could not get through to them the fact that a) Robert Soloway was using their services for spam, b) for fraud (this particular campaign involved wire fraud), and c) the computer in question was actually compromised, or at least appeared to be.
Comment by Micheal — September 14, 2008 @ 10:22 pm