Virginia Court Overturns anti-spam law
On Friday the Virginia Supreme Court threw out the state's anti-spam law, and with it the 2004 conviction of large-scale spammer Jeremy Jaynes, on the grounds of First Amendment overbreadth. While not disagreeing that Jaynes was guilty as charged and convicted, they found that the law could place too great a burden on non-commercial speech. CAUCE president John Levine commented in this blog entry.
While CAUCE is dismayed at this outcome, we see little practical effect beyond this single case. This case predates the Federal CAN SPAM law, which does not have the First Amendment issues of the Virginia law, which would clearly apply if Jaynes were to do the same things today he did in 2003. Nor do the other state anti-spam laws have similar overbreadth issues. CAUCE believes that it is possible to create more effective anti-spam laws than the weak CAN SPAM without running afoul of First Amendment issues and will continue to work to help pass them.
FBI and Romanian police break two phishing rings
In a press release today, the FBI said that in cooperation with the Romanian Prosecutor General they'd arrested 38 people who'd been running phishing rings. According to the FBI, the people arrested had sent out millions of phishing spam messages which tricked recipients into providing personal financial details.
Romania has for many years been a major source of criminal spam, and it is encouraging to hear that the Romanian authorities are cracking down on it.
CAUCE joins in anti-spyware amicus brief
In a friend-of-the-court brief filed today, CAUCE joins the Center for Democracy and Technology to argue that anti-spyware vendors should be protected by the liability protections afforded other filtering companies under the Communications Decency Act. CAUCE joined a broad spectrum of Internet and technology industry groups, public interest organizations, civil liberties groups and individual companies that are all committed to the proposition that users should be empowered to control their own Internet experiences. The brief urges the court to protect anti-spyware vendors from liability in cases brought to intimidate anti-spyware vendors into ignoring spyware.
Amicus Brief [PDF].
Colorado has a new spam law
CAUCE director John Levine notes:
The governor of Colorado recently signed a new anti-spam law into effect. Since CAN SPAM draws a tight line around what states can do, this law is mostly interesting for the way that it pushes as firmly against that line as it can.
Read the rest of his comments on his blog.
Megaspammer Robert Soloway pleads guilty
Large scale spammer Robert Soloway, whose criminal trial was scheduled to
start next week, pled guilty to most of the criminal charges against him
CAUCE board member John Levine comments on the case in his blog.
