Spammer Scott Levine Convicted 266
bani writes "Spammer Scott Levine was convicted of massive data theft from Acxiom Corporation. Prosecutors say his company, the now-defunct Snipermail.com, stole 1.6 billion customer records from Acxiom and sold the data. He faces a maximum of 640 years in prison under the law, though he will likely be sentenced to far less. One spammer down, several million to go?"
Sentence? Just Hit Delete! (Score:5, Interesting)
He didn't? Let's assume (conservatively), that he sent out one spam per customer record he stole. 1.6 billion spams. Let's further assume that it takes a human being one second to "Just Hit Delete". 1.6 billion person-seconds wasted. 444,444 person-hours wasted. 18,518 person-days wasted. 50 person-years if you're working 24/7. At 8 hours a day, that's the entire productive lifespan of three people. Three lives - stolen just as effectively as if he'd killed them.
> Maybe he should have gotten something more brutal, like 64000 hours of community service...as a tech support operator!
64,000 hours, at 8 hours a day, is 40000 days, or 218 years, so you're not too far off the 640-year mark.
640 years ought to be enough for anybody, but what I'd really like to see is to have him locked in a cell, "Just Hitting Delete", once for every spam he sent, for 16 waking hours a day.
Four or five times a day, an email with a From: line like "Your Warden", "Health Services", or "Cafeteria" with a Subject: line such as "Extended recreation hours!", "Take a break!", or "Lunchtime!" will appear.
He has to reply to this mail to get an hour of exercise, have his medical checkups, or his meals.
Hey, it's just spam, right? Doesn't hurt anyone, right? Just delete it, right? Well, if he hasn't starved to death when he runs out of 1.6 billion spams on which to Just Hit Delete, he can walk away a free man.
What happened to Axciom? (Score:3, Interesting)
The article seemed to imply that the snipermail spammers initially got access to more records than they were supposed to have because of something Axciom did (this isn't clear) before they started breaking passwords to get even more data. Where are the 600+ year prison terms for the Axciom management?
95% of spam from a small number of people. (Score:4, Interesting)
"One spammer down, several million to go?"
I heard that less than 200 people account for about 95% of all spam.
Re:Meanwhile... (Score:1, Interesting)
He has wasted 190 years of resources that may have been spent on more productive or fulfilling purposes. I think that is a big deal.
Re:The problem with computers (Score:3, Interesting)
This is a good point. The law seems to be intent on treating computer-related offences identically with "physical" crimes, although the notion of number of counts makes much less sense in the electronic context.
The same reasoning that brings us a potential 640 year verdict for a spammer (yay!) also leads to kids being subjected to $100 billion lawsuits (boo!). If you can do something online once, you can set it up to be done 1000 times -- is that a single offence, or 1000 of them?
From TFA, stolen from an unprotected computer? (Score:2, Interesting)
"There is no evidence that any individuals are at risk of harm due to the breaches," the company said. "It is also important to note that only one external server was accessed, and there was no intrusion of Acxiom's internal security firewalls or internal databases."
"The 1.6 billion records included names, home addresses, phone numbers, e-mail addresses, bank and credit card numbers"
HAhaahahhahhahhaahahahaha. Yeah. what an excuse, no internal server was breached. And WTF was an "external" server doing containing all that information without any firewalls? Was thier security totally incompetent?
Comment removed (Score:3, Interesting)