e Bounty Hunt

Al Macintyre's Radio Weblog : Al's random interests while learning what can be done with Weblogging, and perhaps what ought to be done.

e Bounty Hunt

See my Ryze post 12/13 to Jason's Guest Book listing alternative paths to escaping spam and Jason's reply to Al 12/15 asking how legislation against spam might be enforced. Good question in which I think a lot of people might be interested in debating which solution is most doable.

Remember in the old west where ordinary citizens were invited, by wanted posters of criminals, to hunt down criminals and bring them to justice? I am not proposing dead or alive vigilantism against suspected spammers whose role may be the spoofed address of an innocent victim, but rather that an electronic form of bounty hunting against spammers and other e-unwelcome, enlist the e-citizenry to gather evidence sufficient to get a conviction against the people responsible for:

Computer virus creation and delivery into the e-world;
Denial of service trojan creation and distribution;
Engage in actual mass e-mailing of advertisements to people who did not opt-in to be recipients
(Set some threshold on volume, so we don't harass people who are beginners to e-etiquette.);
Mining and distribution of e-mail addresses for people who did not opt-in for unsolicited commercial advertising
(Let's not legalize against people who merely record the e-mail of another person. You have to be part of a conspiracy to put someone on a spam mailing list to be targeted by my proposed legislation.);
Spoof e-mail headers to emulate a real person then send e-mail not authorized by that person;
Additional violations and grievances may be added to this list.

I dream of e-citizens delivering e-evidence to some site like

http://www.homelandsecurity.org/
Look at some of the links that I give at Identity Protection for agencies that might be expected to help with this.

Whatever place provides the evidence collection recording service, they would date stamp delivery log, so that if and when the suspect is convicted or plea agreed, the reward for capture could be pro rated to the suppliers of the e-evidence pro-rated on the basis of quality of evidence helping with the sentencing, and which was delivered first. Frequent suppliers of bounty hunt e-evidence might have a Pay Pal account with the e-feds, for regular e-cash contributions from a nation grateful for the diligence in helping round up these e-trouble makers.

Recent US legislation seems increasingly hostile to white collar mischief, so there might be general support for electronic bounty hunting that is sensitive to civil liberties of the accused. In the old west, the citizenry often saw posters for wanted bandits with various rewards for citizen's arrest bringing in criminals dead or alive. In today's e-west, the civilian population often sees evidence of e-banditry, in the form of computer viruses, unsolicited advertising in your face, con games, and can be at a loss as to finding an e-cop when you need one, who will be sympathetic and pro-active in bringing the e-bandit to justice. The reality is that each instance of e-crime is perceived by criminal justice as akin to a flea bite, an act of e-pick pocketing so trivial as to defy justification for action, but we are drowning in these flea bites. I suggest that one solution could be to deputize the e-citzenry to assist in the gathering of e-evidence against e-bandits. Make it legally condoned for e-people to be gathering sufficient evidence to put a spammer in the slammer, put virus-creators out of business for 5 to 10, and take similar action against other e-unwelcome crackers, intruders, spoofers, cyber stalkers, etc.

Recourse against these people will vary by nation. Some are petty criminals, but some are violent. I heard one tale of e-mafia selling what seems like a bargain, insuring people's assets up for collateral, kill the customers and collect the insurance. Not all e-criminals are petty con artists.

You should be able to take the small fry to small claims e-court, to give a fair shake for e-citizens who cannot afford a lawyer. But for fighting the larger conspiracies, I think there is a population sufficiently energized by all this nonsense, that we can have armies of e-grassroots volunteers working for free to gather sufficient evidence to put these white collar e-criminals away. The software places that now try to sell anti-spam filters that don't work effectively (lots of false positives) will now sell evidence gathering software to the spam bounty hunters, and perhaps seek royalties from the rewards if the effort is successful, using their software.

I dream of a data base of suspected spammers, suspected virus creators, suspected other mischief makers, in which the people who suspect them are the people whose computers got zapped by unwanted attentions, it is the ordinary e-citizenry building the data bases of evidence, seeking to show where the unsolicited e-mail originated, the real address of the suspected perpetrators, perhaps which banks have their accounts, the laws they violated. My proposed legislation spelling out what constitutes sufficient evidence for action by the e-sheriff, would also authorize judges to issue e-warrants against ISPs of suspected spammers and other white collar e-crminals, based on some thresh hold of collected e-evidence, to gather more damning e-evidence.

Various outfits could host these data bases on behalf of the army of e-bounty hunters, provided they met some e-feds standards of computer security. As the effort to put the virus makers and spammers out of existence in our world, the software providers who have helped us cope prior to this legislation, will have a new source of profits, helping the e-citizens clean up the wild west Internet.

If US Legislation can permit Hollywood to plant viruses in computers of people who are merely suspected of digital piracy, then what I am suggesting with respect to e-vigilante evidence gathering, is tame by comparison.

For similar topics written to this weblog by Al Macintyre, see: Banking Stories, Identity Protection, Stop Identity Theft, and Stop Phone Spam; Security and e-law categories. Sometimes a link to one of my stories gets inexplicably broken (with the title in double quotes not being properly translated into a hyperlink, and I cannot figure out how to fix it on a timely basis. Use this directory of my stories as a backup if need be. http://radio.weblogs.com/0107846/stories/ You can also use the envelope at bottom of column to the left to send me an e-mail. I have additional Word documents detailing topics of personal security issues, that can be sent upon request as e-mail attachments.