Posted on 12/22/2002 3:19:12 PM PST by Drew68
Sunday, December 22, 2002 - Judy Sikes' 12-year-old grandson came running into the living room.
"Grandma! Look at this."
On the computer screen, where he was playing video games, were pictures of naked women consorting with animals.
"I nearly died," said Sikes, 55, of Pueblo. "I was so embarrassed I didn't know what to say. It was disgusting."
Like a growing number of Americans, Sikes is infuriated over the pornographic spam sent to her without her consent.
She has deleted hundreds of the e-mails over the past year. She's even deployed software filters to block them. Yet they keep arriving. And there are not yet any explicit laws or resources capable of stopping them.
The graphic nature of some of these e-mails is shocking: naked women performing oral sex with guns pressed to their heads, women in pigtails pretending to be daughters having sex with their fathers, naked men sprawled on the floor, and website links promising pictures of gay young boys.
Spammers send the e-mails to tout adult websites and questionable products or simply to rip people off.
"You could be a 50-year-old grandmother who never says darn in front of your grandkids; you open one of these pictures, and it will curl your toes," said Joyce Graff, an analyst who has researched the topic for the Gartner Group, a business consulting firm.
"Porn spam is on the rise, and it's getting raunchier by the minute."
Adult-related spam has grown along with "regular" spam for wrinkle cream or get-rich-quick schemes, which doubled in volume this year.
About 38.8 billion porn messages poured into American e-mail boxes in 2002, touting a variety of porn websites, products that enhance body parts and colognes that promise to attract women.
Those messages made up 15 percent of all spam this year, up from 5.3 percent last year, according to BrightMail, which sells anti-spam filters.
Experts say such explicit e-mail, sent indiscriminately to people of all ages, threatens to traumatize children who stumble upon it and could prompt people who inadvertently open the messages at work to lose their jobs or companies to be sued for sexual harassment.
"It's irresponsible," said Frederick Lane, author of "Obscene Profits: The Entrepreneurs of Pornography in the CyberAge."
"Porn spam is playing a role in changing our social mores - it alters how we view sexuality in society," Lane said. "I'm wondering, how far does this go?"
As far as the dollar will carry it. Spam is cheap, it's easy, and more people take the bait than one would think.
Porn at the workplace
A survey by MSNBC said one in five men and one in eight women admitted using their work computers to view sexually explicit material online.
Online pornography is a big business, reeling in $1.5 billion a year through more than 150,000 porn websites. The online auction site eBay, by comparison, had $800 million in revenues so far this year.
The online pornography industry was one of the first on the Internet to actually generate a profit. It's still expanding rapidly.
And with no access to TV or newspaper advertising, e-mail is its calling card.
Large porn operators pay spammers to turn e-mail recipients into paying customers, Lane said.
The porn operators "are the ones cranking up the volume because e-mail is just so cheap," said Lane. "And there's a sick factor where each generation (of ads) needs to be a little bit more startling or shocking to continue to profit from what's going on."
In some cases, it costs a spammer just one penny per e-mail. If just 0.1 percent of those nearly 39 billion recipients respond to the e-mail pitches, there is money to be made.
Some spammers say they can make $1,000 to $40,000 a week, just sending out e-mails.
Also, because the products embarrass people, few recipients report fraud or ask for their money back.
"It's a cutthroat business," said one California adult-products salesman who declined to give his name.
The 30-something surfer lives by the beach and plays video games, taking time out to hire spammers to send out millions of messages touting vitamins that promise to add inches to one's manhood.
He takes his business seriously, preferring to focus on product development and fulfilling customer orders. He vigilantly protects the identities of his spammers. He grew nervous about revealing too much to The Denver Post and cut the interview short.
Yet while he and others profit from spam, experts worry that society may pay the price.
Danger to children grows
The biggest fear is for children. Experts argue that kids will undoubtedly be exposed to more such graphic images than previous generations. And that could increase their chances of becoming victims of sexual violence or sexual addiction or could incite them to act out sexually against other kids.
"Kids have no clue, and next thing they're losing their innocence in their own living room," said Steve Ossello, whose 10-year-old daughter stumbled on a porn website when searching online for information on the White House.
That incident drove Ossello to become president of Children's Technology Group, a Golden firm that makes kid-oriented Web browsers and a parent-controlled e-mail service.
"Something has to be done," Ossello said.
Parents are not the only ones worried about the consequences of Internet pornography.
Companies risk litigation if such spam offends workers, said Graff of the Gartner Group.
In fact, companies have been sued for far less offensive materials circulating in e-mails.
Case in point: ChevronTexaco Corp. settled a 1995 lawsuit for $2.2 million after four female employees claimed an e-mail created a sexually charged workplace. The e-mail circulated by employees listed 25 reasons why beer was better than women.
More recently, Graff said, she knew of three workers who threatened to sue if their employers did not improve their ability to block porn spam.
Business concerns
Spam is a huge problem for companies, making up 40 percent of most of their incoming e-mail, according to BrightMail.
"We thought we had taken down all the girlie posters, but with spam, they're in your face no matter what," Graff said.
The ever-present images threaten individual workers, too, who could be reprimanded or even fired if they click on website links or forward the e-mail to friends.
"Someone may not have set out for pornography, but they get an e-mail and think, 'Oh well, I will just click,"' said Harold Kester, chief technology officer for WebSense, which monitors workplace Internet usage.
Nearly one-quarter of the 220 companies surveyed in 2002 by WebSense had fired employees for inappropriate Internet use. The majority of them lost their jobs due to porn surfing.
Yet stopping the onslaught of unsolicited messages is a complex task despite a wealth of better spam filters.
Local officials often don't have the resources to track down spammers who operate in an international arena, and whose activities often are not illegal.
Additionally, spammers are not easy to find. They hide behind multiple computer servers, fake e-mail addresses and offshore operations.
And there's confusion over jurisdiction: Where was the crime committed, in the state of the recipient or the sender's? Which agency tracks down the violators? Who prosecutes them? And when suspects reside in foreign countries, do U.S. laws apply?
"The Internet has outstripped traditional law enforcement and policy," said Kenneth Lane, spokesman for the Colorado attorney general's office.
Some officials promise to take on porn spammers nonetheless.
"I find it totally disgusting," said John Suthers, U.S. attorney for Colorado. He plans to pursue obscenity charges against spammers who send some of the most graphic images and is encouraging local police to pursue such investigations.
"If you don't have some level of enforcement," Suthers said, "you're going to have worse stuff over the Internet."
One group, Morality in Media Inc., wants to help. Its website, Obscenitycrimes.org, has collected 9,500 complaints of obscene spam since June - including 212 reports from Colorado. The group forwards the reports to U.S. attorney's offices.
A tough case to make
Yet winning those cases is getting harder these days as society gets more sexually explicit, said Suthers.
"In today's world, it is very unlikely that prosecutors would be able to convince a jury that your run-of-the-mill sexually explicit material would constitute obscenity," Suthers said. He said sexually violent images, as well as bestiality and child pornography, would be easier to prosecute.
U.S. Rep. Melissa Hart, R-Pa., promises to attack the problem with federal legislation.
She introduced a measure that would address porn in an anti- spam bill, but the bill failed last year. She will introduce another bill next session that imposes fines and criminal sentences for porn spamming, said her press secretary, Brendan Benner. The congresswoman was not available for an interview.
Her bill, like other anti-spam proposals, however, faces free- speech hurdles.
"Just because something may be pornographic, it doesn't mean it's stripped from its First Amendment right," said Marv Johnson, an attorney with the American Civil Liberties Union, which will likely lobby against such a bill.
That same argument has been raised with state anti-spam laws. Twenty-seven states, including Colorado, put their own laws on the books.
Yet Colorado's law, passed in 1999, has been no help in curbing the onslaught of spam and porn messages, said Kenneth Lane, the Colorado AG's spokesman.
Colorado's law requires spammers to label messages with ADV for advertisement and to disclose the sender's real e-mail address, among other rules.
Yet the law requires that individuals or businesses - not police - enforce the law, tracking down spammers and serving them with lawsuits. Successful prosecution nets just $10 per message.
Not one person has used the law, said Lane.
"The law has no teeth," said Lane. "It's terribly frustrating when people complain, and there's not a thing we can do about it."
People such as Sikes, the grandmother, hopes that will change.
"It seems like it should be violating some law," she said. "I don't know the answer, but I do know it's disgusting."
My brother has maintained a Hotmail account for several years. I asked him why he wasn't getting spammed to Hades and back, and he said: "look at my address."
He's right. It's not a name, it's a location, and the only part of it that's derived from a name doesn't use "common spelling."
Few "spambots" can find it, and he's largely unbothered.
Now I hate spam also. I get 50 to 90 a day on Yahoo. Yahoo puts in in the bulk folder and I just delete entire folder. Some get through 10 a day probably. But having said that, I am not sure I think it is wise to involve the government. They want their hands on the internet and this sort of thing is the best way for them to do it. Just think if we ask them to protect us from porn or direct marketing - what else will they feel we should be 'protected from'. Don't forget it is mind boggling at the number of people who can be offended by a number of things.
I am not sure the government is the answer. Maybe someone could invent a software program that could 'return' these every 5 minutes to the sender until the server is closed down. Maybe then the servers would be a little more discerning about their clients.
LOL - a woman who searches for porn.
Like you, I've never gotten a porn spam, and I get about 1 non-porn spam a month. What am I doing wrong?
I have two yahoo email addresses. One of them (as I mentioned) is constantly filled with spam. The other address never receives spam. I don't know what to make of it.
I have surfed "adult" sites (some porn, some just raunchy) and I don't know why one address gets spam and the other does not.
My mother (who is the only user of her computer) never surfs porn sites and still gets tons of porn in her email. She shops online and plays online games and jigsaw puzzles.
The spam doesn't really bother me as I just delete it without opening it. However, I don't have any children who use my computer. I would be more bothered if I did. And while I believe that porn has a right to exist on the internet, it should never be forced on anyone who does not wish to view it (as these spammers are doing).
As an old Nethead from the '80's I agree that the Government is the last resort. But I have commercial sites, and am at the point where spam is causing so much harm to online business in general (That is, REAL business with real products of value), that I believe we are at the point where it is needed.
We cannot bounce the spam back because they all have forged headers. Some innocent third party will then have a crashed server. There have been successful lawsuits regarding these forgeries, but most spammers are just white trash with no assetts, who have already failed at selling Amway.
I run Mailwasher at home, which does bounce spam back..to _somewhere_, but never to the actual spammer.
If various agencies really wanted to shut these scum down, there are plenty of statutes already in existance they could use, or new interpretation of state laws regarding obscene phone calls, sexual harrassment, etc.
But the DMA bribes are just too good right now.
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