ESCOM Corporation's business is building e-mail spam filtering solutions. We do not usually get involved in politics, but when we do it is usually because some candidate or politician takes a lawyer's view of the Internet (fine or imprison spammers) as opposed to a technical view of how the Internet actually works and how from the beginning administrators have been protecting their networks. For example, see our discussion of the Can-Spam Act of 2003. We believe spam laws have been a disaster and that the only thing keeping the Internet usable has been spam filtering technology.
I voted for Jeannemarie Devolites in the previous election, after expressing these views to her staff and, eventually, to the candidate herself. I regret that vote, and I believe it is time to replace State Senator Jeannemarie Devolites Davis in the Virginia 34th Senate district.
I come to these points after reading a brochure distributed recently by Senator Devolites Davis. One of the three items she chose to highlight was the following:
Fighting SPAM and online identity theft Jeannemarie sponsored the first in nation anti-SPAM law-- a law that resulted in jail time for one well known email spammer.
First of all, the word "SPAM" is a registered trademark of Hormel Foods Corporation. Hormel apparently does not object to the common use of the term "spam" (lowercase) to refer to unsolicited electronic mail, but requests that their capitalized trademark "SPAM" and images of their SPAM product not be used in a derogatory sense. Knowledgeable people in the spam filtering business using the uppercase word "SPAM" with respect to unsolicited electronic mail. It might be too much to expect then-Delegate Devolites to understand this convention, but it indicates that perhaps she was surrounded by people that also did not understand. I mentioned this to Devolites' staff during the previous election, but they apparently didn't listen or don't care.
Devolites Davis' paragraph also contains a factual inaccuracy. The anti-spam law sponsored by then-Delegate Devolites in 2003 (Virginia H.B. 2290) was the second Virginia spam law. The first Virginia spam law (Chapter 886 of the Virginia Code) was introduced as SB881, Virginia Computer Crimes Act, and signed into law in March 1999.
And so, consequently, since then-Delegate Devolites' law was the second in Virginia, it could not possibly have been the first in nation. In addition, there were also spam laws in other states (e.g., California) that predated the Senator's legislation. If this is an oversight, then it is a rather large oversight. But if Senator Devolites Davis actually believes this, then it raises other issues.
Finally, Senator Devolites Davis claims that the law she sponsored "resulted in jail time for one .. spammer". How can this possibly be viewed as a success? Would any ISP, company, government office, or church in Fairfax County continue to use a spam filter that only blocked spam from one particular spammer and let all the other spammers send straight through to their users? As good as it may feel to know that one spammer did jail time, a law can be effective only if it is enforced uniformly. I would guess that there have been tens or hundreds of thousands of spammers forging headers to recipients in Virginia in violation of this law since it was passed. Why aren't all of them doing jail time? There's two primary reasons:
There are various technologies (including, but not limited to, ESCOM products) that successfully block offshore spam and zombie spam with a high rate of accuracy. I do not know of any spam laws that are effective with these spammer tricks.
If Senator Devolites Davis' spam law made a difference and delivered for us, then you would expect to see several things happening by now. First, there'd be hundreds or thousands of spammers behind bars in Virginia. Second, the remaining spammers would be very careful not to spam the residents of the Commonwealth of Virginia. And, third, the overall amount of spam would have decreased dramatically since her law was signed into effect at AOL headquarters in July 2003. But the amount of spam is continually increasing, and now spam comprises well over 95 percent of all electronic mail. This is probably true in the Commonwealth of Virginia as well as worldwide. In my opinion, Senator Devolites Davis' law has made pretty much zilch difference in the spam delivered to users in the Commonwealth of Virginia. It is only spam filtering technology that keeps the electronic mail system useful today.
Senator Devolites Davis' brochure states "She keeps fighting until she delivers results for us." But who is the us she refers to? Her spam law makes almost no difference to ESCOM.COM. We still block hundreds or thousands of spams per day. It probably does not help most other Virginia businesses or organizations that run their own servers. If I quarantine a spam with a forged address from China or from an infected PC on the Verizon network, then will anyone in Richmond follow up and bring charges against the spammer? I don't think so.
But the law does make a difference for the large ISP businesses (e.g. AOL) headquartered in and operating in the Commonwealth of Virginia. Under the law sponsored by Senator Devolites Davis, the Commonwealth of Virginia takes over prosecution of big spammers, thus relieving the big ISPs of their big legal expenses. All you need to know is that her bill was signed into law at AOL headquarters.
I am not aware of Chap Peterson's views on e-mail spam, but he surely could not be any worse than Senator Devolites Davis has been in this area of internet technology. If Senator Devolites Davis is as successful with her other priorities as she was with her spam law, then the transportation system in Northern Virginia and the local schools for our children are in big trouble.
Albert Donaldson
President, ESCOM Corporation