from Moore's Lore by Dana Blankenhorn
July 16, 2005
America's Shame: Spam War Heats Up Again

us flag.gifThat's the title of the most "popular" spam in my inbox right now, and maybe in your inbox as well.

It represents a new form of brazenness by U.S. spammers against the Net, because when you input the phone number in the message into Google you find the same message, as comment spam, attached to a host of different topics.

When you publicize a phone number like that, and get away with it, it's pretty obvious that the authorities are simply not interested in pursuing you. The CAN-SPAM act has gone from sick joke to tissue paper, a dead letter, and the entire Internet is now under attack from American spammers.

So am I.

spam.gifI wrote the other day about how my address is under a major Joe Job attack. At the time I thought the spams were originating with some hoser in South Carolina.

I can now reveal that, following a deeper investigation, they actually come from one of the largest spam gangs around, the iMedia empire of one Michael Lindsay.

Lindsay does his business completely in the open, from an office-warehouse park just minutes from the San Jose Airport, and he has been in the business of illegally selling prescription drugs (or spamming for someone who does) since at least 2003.

Why he has chosen to try and drive me out of my e-mail box I can't say. Thanks to Mailwasher from Firetrust, he won't succeed. That program is able to pre-wash all incoming e-mail so his spams never hit Outlook Express. (Although when I see 400 bounces come in overnight, in under 10 hours, all accusing me of being a spammer, it's starting to get ridiculous.)

The fact that these spammers are able to act with such impunity, publishing their phone numbers, Joe-Jobbing at will, and selling drugs illegally, puts all defenders of U.S. Internet control on the defensive.

Let me ask my conservative and nationalistic friends this question. Why should the UN or ITU buy into continued U.S. Commerce Department control, through ICANN, of the DNS root systems, when they are under continued systemic attack from spammers that the same U.S. government refuses to rein-in?

Is the U.S. an outlaw nation?

On the Internet, we are.

As an American, I'm ashamed to write those words. If you're an American, you should be ashamed to read them. If you're a patriot, you need to start working to disprove them. And if your government won't cooperate, get to work on getting another government that will. Because I don't know how long the rest of the world will wait for the U.S. to get its spam act together.