I was reading one of my course books last week (probably Civil Procedure) and one of the minor notes mentioned a British case (early in the development of the jury system- 1200s? 1300s?) where a judge ordered the death penalty for a defendant despite a hung jury. The king responded by… literally hanging the judge. I’m sure that was the first and last time the King had to tell a judge to pay attention to the jury. Relatively speaking, some early product liability judgments were also huge- it got the attention of companies and helped focus them on the creation of safer products. Clearly, penalties we would now consider wildly disproportionate have at various points in the past helped establish precedent (both moral and legal) that certain things Just Aren’t Done.
So here is the thought that crossed my mind as I read that hanging case- do we need to do the same in spam? Life (or death) sentences for mass spammers until it is communicated that it is just not acceptable to spam? I realize, of course, that this would never fly constitutionally, and practically it is hard to define ‘mass’ spammer. But it really seems like it is a shame we probably couldn’t get away with killing a few spammers- because surely you wouldn’t need to do more than 1 or 2 before the point got across very clearly. To put it another way: I don’t think all spammers should die; I just think that enough spammers should die so that the rest stop doing it. :) We’re clearly in a fairly interesting historical situation, where some of the things we all hate have no clear moral or legal antecedents, and the penalties we’ve set up so far are clearly not discouraging enough.
So anyway… I’m really curious to do more reading and research about how, in times of historical change, precedent is set- because it seems like we need to do some precedent setting. Something else for the ‘papers to write’ file, I guess :)
58 vi 16 more 15 ./restore 14 ssh 12 du 10 rm 6 ps The clean_blog comments and restore are more troubling. Restore is the script I use to restore a the openMosix and IBMnetstation Wiki’s when they have been attacked by spammers.. Spammers should be punished !!!
Apparently, Luis Villa of GNOME fame wants to kill spammers. Dude, spammers aren’t worth the time and money it takes to kill them. However, taking every last penny they made and investing it into worthwhile endeavors might be a better deterrent.
We certainly do have moral antecedents : don’t annoy your neighbours. Even less annoy your strangers. The Golden Rule applies, too.
Have fun with your legal research. I’m old enough to remember when there was no junk-mail (paper) to speak of. Somehow, consumer culture, junk-information, commerce as excuse, motivated ignorance, all grew up together.
I think you may find, going back say eighty years, that there were useful (to some social classes) laws regarding nuisance and harassment, but none regarding commercial (per se) harassment, simply because the lower classes had little surplus income and less facility for commerce at a distance. Also, of course, electronic databases and aggregation thereof hardly existed. Even so, I think people were conditioned slowly to accept commercial harassment.
Your remarks about ethics in business school and the effects on corporate politics applies equally to the politics of corporations vis a vis their customers and innocent bystanders.
I liked very much your analysis GPLv3, its motivators and its critics. You outlined RMS neatly.. it worries me that people seem genuinely surprised. I remain somewhat suspicious of IBM, having been in this business when Satan lived in Armonk, before he moved to Redmond. I expect the motivations of the kernel developers can best be explored from a psychological perspective.
I expect also that the final resolution will be political, depending more on backroom estimations of popular will than on any direct struggle in court or legislature.
[…] Luis suggests an approach to the spam problem: [I]t really seems like it is a shame we probably couldn’t get away with killing a few spammers- because surely you wouldn’t need to do more than 1 or 2 before the point got across very clearly. To put it another way: I don’t think all spammers should die; I just think that enough spammers should die so that the rest stop doing it. We’re clearly in a fairly interesting historical situation, where some of the things we all hate have no clear moral or legal antecedents, and the penalties we’ve set up so far are clearly not discouraging enough. […]
An anonymous entity could set up anonymous escrow accounts that are tied to a spammer’s activity. If a spammer’s activity stops (whatever creative act that may take to be accomplished is left to the imagination of the spammer), the stopper gets the cash. Those spammed can chip in cash to up the bounty. If noone claims the money after the spam stops, give it away to charity.
Ah, right, all of that has been thought up before, by a guy named Jim Bell, and written up in a series of essays called “Assassination Politics”. He seems to be still serving jail time for that idea.
Oh, don’t get me started on actual assassination. Killing leaders of non-democratic states is soooooo much more just (and I would believe more effective) than waging war on their populace it isn’t even funny. (NB: only holds true for non-democratic states; if you kill the leadership of a democratic state, they’ll just elect someone of similar belief again and you’ll have accomplished nothing.)
[Edit later: having now actually skimmed the Jim Bell piece… while interesting theoretically as a check on government, it presumes non-democracy. Would be really interesting in communist China or in kleptocratic Russia; it is less interesting (and completely unjustifiable from a philosophical and moral standpoint) in a democracy, even one as deeply flawed as ours. And it is clear from reading the indictment of Bell that he wouldn’t be in jail if he’d just written the essay; instead, it was doing other things (like lying to the IRS) that got him in trouble, with the essay as icing on the cake.]
The IRS case was the first Bell trial. When he got out of jail, he had a fixed idea or two about taking revenge on IRS agents, and ended up being sentenced to 10 years in 2001 on charges of interstate stalking. His essay played some role in reinforcing the argumentation that he’s out to harass the people he stalked in no harmless fashion, but there was a lot of other circumstancial indicators (see the google groups posting history). As you say, icing on the cake. Not a very tasty one, though.
Theorethical fascination with socially-endorsed/sanctioned murder aside (look where it got Jim Bell …), I think bribe is a much more efficient way to align expected with actual behaviour of leaders of regimes. In the spammer case, using the funds from the escrow account in exchange for his cooperation in the prosecution of other spammers, for example, would seem to be more promising than committing illegal acts. That’s why I used the word ‘creative’ up there. ;)
I find your extremely casual approach to human life disturbing. I’d say spamming would have to be at least, oh, fifty thousand times more annoying that it actually before I could even _understand_ someone having the impulse to actually kill someone else over it, let alone CONDONE it.
AdamW: second that.
Hi Luis,
Apart the moral obsenity that is Capital Punishment, it would not work. No criminal ever thinks they’ll get caught. The US is the only Western country with Capital Punishment and it has pretty close to the highest murder rate.
Another example is closer to my home. Inodnesia and Singapore both have EXTREMELY well publisized policies of mandatory Capital Punishment for drug smuggling. But still extremely stupid Australains have been caught smuggling drugs into Indonesia recently. They’re all facing the death penalty. Another Australian was hanged in Singapore a few months ago for drug trafficing.
I guess you were really asking about realistic penalties for spammers. Maybe seizing 100% of all assets? That probabally wouldn’t work because of off-shore havens and frankly just burying cash somewhere.
I like the idea of Dailbor of employing convicted ex-spammers to bring down unconvicted spammers. I think it would nicely use the sociopathic in our society against each other rather than against society.
Here (in Soviet Russia) we already got one #1 spammer killed. Although it was doubtely done for spam, but it becames a top of local internet news. And no one regrets.
You could read about it here: http://www.pcpro.co.uk/macuser/news/75585/russian-spam-kind-bludgeoned-to-death.html, or just search [Russian spammer killed] in Google News Archive.
It’s certainly over-reacting to kill a spammer on the basis of the annoyance done to one individual. While ten million paper cuts to one person may kill them, a cut to each of ten million people does little harm.
So a single person has little justification to claim serious harm, but isn’t society justified in considering ten million cuts to its citizens equivalent to murder?
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