Dateline tracks down a porn spammer

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/8841299/

Spam costs billions of dollars and wastes people's time. Instead of spending money on filters and anti-spam software, why not spend it on task forces to track down and prosecute spammers?

I know it's difficult with international laws, but even then laws are usually broken and/or someone can be held responsible.
It was fascinating to watch this spammer being tracked down and finally identified. It CAN be done!

Makes for fascinating reading, thanks for the link.

As you said though, each country has differing laws on freedom of speech and privacy. It's strange (even ludicrous) that you can use that freedom of speech to breach the privacy of others by sending unsolicited spam then use that same privacy law to conceal your identity and attempt to avoid any consequences.

As a Brit I'm tempted to say "only in America" but it's become almost universal, even here in the UK Data protection here means that even two branches of the same government department cannot share information! If you have business with both, you have to complete forms with duplicated information that you know will be held on the same computer system!%-)

Legislators need to clear up these major discrepancies before anything can improve. Considering the privacy laws, I'm surprised that 'commercially sensitive' information was obtained by Dateline, I expect if it had gone to court, the 'victim' - poor hard done by spammer - would have sued his cut-out company for giving the investigators the information linking his trading ID with him.

Like I said, it's a crazy world where criminals have more rights than victims of their crimes. The more such programs do to redress the balance, the better.

Without going too much off-topic, let me share this with you.
My brother-in-law opened a small business a year ago, and they have been robbed maybe 3 times by teenage kids. Nothing major, but still annoying. I believe it's called petty-theft.
The police have told them that they can't press charges and that they don't have the resources (e.g., space, personnel) to deal with teenagers. In addition, they have concerns about lawsuits by these teenagers.
My brother-in-law took the matter higher, police were sent once again to his place of business, and now they tell him there's nothing to do since too much time (I believe it's been 3 weeks) has elapsed.
Other businesses have been victimized by these teens in a similar way. These teens live in the area, and the message that authorities are sending to them is that the teens can get away with it because they are minors and police does not want to bother with their crimes. No wonder these people choose theft as a way to make money.
By the way, the crimes were caught on tape!!!!

Just to keep you company in being off topic ...

Here, most shops have signs that such petty theft will be dealt with under civil (as opposed to criminal) law and that allows them to recover damages from the thief even for a chocolate bar. Thus, a chocolate bar might end up costing a kid £1,000's Could be expensive but would think your b-i-l and the other businesses should take that route.

Afraid I'm on the side of 'zero tolerance', especially by the police - if you get hauled up out of the blue for dropping a sweet wrapper or cigarette butt, are you going to risk doing something more serious when you don't know who is going to be looking?

Thanks for the information. I will let him know about it. A couple of days ago a store next to his got robbed (again). These teens are now taking the "jars" that have donations. I don't know their exact name and English is not my first language, but there are some "containers" for people to donate some of their spare change for good causes (e.g., fighting cancer, helping a school, etc.).
I'll share with him the idea about civil vs. criminal law.

They are called charity collection boxes Eddie, and stealing them is despicable Much the same as mugging a blind man ... surely that gives them negative street cred? They'll graduate to stealing candy from babies next!