An open letter to new US FTC Chairman Jon Leibowitz

[AlphaCentauri]

Brian Krebs is having a live chat today at 11 am EDT (-400) by the way. He's accepting advance questions here:
http://discuss.washingtonpost.com/wp-sr ... _krebs.htm

add: Faith -- great point that article made about the "perfect storm." Of course a lot of the little elements that go together are chronic problems, not happenstance events, and the bad guys have got them cataloged pretty well.

[meep]

Good find, faith, thanks for posting that.

[spamislame]

more mentions:
http://www.spamzy.com/2009/04/09/an-ope ... leibowitz/
http://mrrockford.blogspot.com/2009/04/ ... s-ftc.html
http://technorati.com/r/tag/phishing
http://www.spamtrackers.org/index.html#leibowitz

add: and it actually is fairly pertinent to Brian Krebs' column today, so I left a comment:
http://voices.washingtonpost.com/securi ... r_911.html

Wow!

It blows my mind that Spamzy routinely scores slightly higher than my actual blog in page ranks, and now in terms of aggregators like technorati. Spamzy merely gathers whatever I post on my blog and re-present it on their domain. They must have an insanely high readership.

Nice to see the word getting out!

SiL

[tex.writer]

Kudos. This is such an excellent and well-written letter, hope it gets a lot of attention.

Spam is like a flashing light alerting us to far more serious criminal activity beneath the surface. By minimizing the severity of spammers' offenses, you lose the ability to expose and investigate much deeper risks to the US, even impacting on national security.

This is one of my favorite paragraphs, it states so concisely the fact that spam is more than offensive text in an email box and that we now need strong legal remedies that match the level of damage done by spam operations that vandalize the property and financial assets of hundreds of thousands of individuals and business operations in the course of commercializing worthless, dangerous, or illegal content and products.