http://www.csmonitor.com/2005/0414/p02s01-usju.html
Byline: Patrik Jonsson Correspondent of The Christian Science Monitor
(RALEIGH, N.C.) From the outside, it was just another middle-class
tract house with a fountain in the front yard. Inside, it was anything
but homey. Instead of family pictures on the mantle, computer servers
were stacked in closets, 12 high-speed wires snaked into the house,
and monitors were stacked on top of one another.
Welcome to Exhibit A in the nation's intensifying fight against spam.
From here, Jeremy Jaynes, a Raleigh businessman who rose to No. 8 on
a list of "spam kingpins," broke the nation's toughest spam law by
churning out more than 100,000 unsolicited e-mails a month. In fact,
he was moving closer to 10 million a day. He was sentenced late last
week in Leesburg, Va., to the stiffest penalty ever given to a
spammer: Nine years in a state prison.
'They're no longer ghosts'
In part, it underscores Americans' changing attitudes about the
sanctity of the inbox. And even as the unsolicited e-mail flows on,
experts say the case sends a potent message to would-be Internet
solicitors: We know where you live.
"If there's ever going to be a deterrent effect, it's not in the
potential for [a long] jail sentence, but the fact that spammers can
in fact be found, that they're no longer ghosts," says Anne Mitchell,
director of the Institute for Spam and Internet Public Policy in San
Jose, Calif.
Still, the junk keeps coming. In 2001, only 8 percent of e-mail was
junk; today, that number hovers near 75 percent, and could jump to 95
percent, thanks to new methods where "spam gangs" hijack servers to
churn out huge amounts of e-mail at one time.
The consequences are dramatic. One study from Nucleus Research, a
technology-research company in Wellesley, Mass., figures companies
lose around $1,934 per year per employee on spam. Even David Oblon,
Jaynes's lawyer, admits his firm had to hire an outside company to
sift through the thousands of daily spam messages.
A change in public attitudes.
Still, new spam-sifting programs, a slew of civil lawsuits, and
antispam activists are having an impact -- if not on the volume of
spam, on the stakes.
Michigan and Utah, for instance, will launch statewide registries this
summer that put children on "Do not spam" lists; a similar proposal is
on the table in Illinois.
And attitudes toward the Internet are changing, as revealed by a new
Pew Internet and American Life Project study that finds that fewer
Americans today are suspicious of the Internet because of spam than a
year ago. One reason: fewer pornographic messages. Though critics say
the federal CAN-SPAM law, signed into effect on January 1, 2004,
simply legitimized the practice by regulating it, the law has helped
dramatically curb the number of pornographic messages being sent.
Spam filters, which have become a competitive edge for the big
Internet-service providers, are vacuuming up a large chunk of
unwanted ads. Marketers, too, have grown more concerned about a
consumer backlash.
"There's been a huge paradigm shift in the direct-marketing community
when they finally got that there was a real spam problem, and that if
they didn't police themselves, their own business model would just go
away," says Ms. Mitchell.
The loss of anonymity -- and innocence.
At the same time, anonymity seems a little harder to maintain as
spammers appear in handcuffs on the evening news -- or, like Jaynes,
in squinty-eyed mug shots.
In Raleigh, he was just another young businessman riding a rising tide
of technology investments. Millions knew him -- though they didn't know
it -- because they'd seen his his web alias, Gaven Stubberfield, in
their inbox.
A former restaurateur and direct mailer, he earned $750,000 a month as
a spam magnate. His lawyer insists his services were legitimate -- and
claims that the government broke interstate commerce agreements and
trampled on his First Amendment rights to speak freely.
The judge in the case allowed Jaynes to stay out of jail until the
appeals courts can sift through the case. One caveat: Jaynes has to go
back to using paper and stamps if he wants to write a note to someone.
"Without warning or a cease and desist letter, the government swept in
and wanted to make a statement," says Oblon. "This prosecution is going
to have no effect on email advertising around the world."
Much of the focus is on the Virginia case, because the state claimed
jurisdiction based on the fact that more than half of all Internet
commerce flows through servers in the Old Dominion. Florida just filed
a case against a spam house registered with 350 domains and 75
websites hawking cigarettes and pharmaceuticals. The two men were
caught by a Microsoft "trap" set up to identify and isolate spam
messages.
Earlier this year, Microsoft sued 213 alleged spammers, many of them
anonymous "John Does," in 97 separate lawsuits -- all while a growing
number of spammers are getting in touch with their lawyers.
Oblon says the Jaynes case is about a loss of innocence -- with plenty
of blame to go around.
"There was a time, when e-mail first started being used, that there
shouldn't be any commercial activity, that it was all about exchanging
ideas, and let's all smell the roses," says Oblon. "Now it's all
commercial."
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