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."
This happened to a friend of mine who had a technical site for his compnay. A squatter waited for his registration to expire, had a bid waiting, then loaded it with porn and told him it would be $1,000 to get it back.
Fortunately, he was a stubborn Scot. The porn is still sitting on his old site, and it can rot there till Hell freezes over.
From what I could find out; the reason some of the pages come down so fast is that when you access a page they put into your computer a html file for the next page. It probably goes into temp internet files. That way when you click for the page it doesn't have to get it from the server it is already in your computer.
When you consider as a group they are getting more traffic than anyone else, and still deliver the pages there is something to be learned there for any website webmaster.
What they are doing is wrong but the way they are doing it is right. - Tom
Seriously... What idiot would buy something from someone who will not let you know who they are, will not let you contact them by return e-mail, forges their identity to try to make you think you know them, and, if you have the know-how to see where the SPAM came from, normally sends their advertisements from Brazil, Asia, the Carribean or some other place where laws have no meaning. People buying from scum like this must be total idiots!!!
I don't know Mr. Pardek! Talk to the folks that get inundated :~D
I sortof think it is like something I heard about a sexually transmitted disease... - They said "We have pretty much isolated this as an STD. Of course, there are always a one or two nuns and preacher's wives that get it "innocently" somehow, and we just nod politely and smile", and we leave it at 99% just for them. ;~D
I have never once gotten a pornographic email.
If you had MSN you would get plenty.
I have a bigger problem with "funny" attachments sent by friends- much of the stuff isn't even humorous, but merely witless scatology. Having survived two elbow-bending years during Bennett House's (ISU) glory days, I once thought I had seen/heard enough "great moments in obscenity" to render me impervious to most anything.
Alas, I was unprepared for the internet.
It is free and does a good job. Allows you to see the mail in the box before you get it. Then you have the options of bouncing it back, deleting it, or banning the sender or any combination of those three or just leaving the options alone.
Then you can hit another button and bring down the mail to the computer.- Tom
And if you don't regularly get W32 Klez viruses sent to you, I have to conclude you lead a very conservative internet life. - Tom
Which of the following are porn sites: www.atilla.com
www.atillathehun.com
www.mature.com
www.sanfransisco.com
www.whitehouse.com
www.mature.com
www.carpet.com
www.thehun.com
You can't tell by the URL. I accidently hit one of these sites and work and couldn't stop the windows from popping up. I finally unplugged the PC. My boss was out of the office. I met her at the door to tell her what had happened. But someone could get into real trouble that way.
Either they're emailing Mars, or they've found away to email the future.
Could someone email me the winning lotto numbers for next week, please? Thanks.
Lots of fun to think about, huh?
Patently untrue.
And I should know :)
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