Bruce Schneier is critical of Lycos attempt to combat spammers by organising what is effectively a DoS attack on their sites (more on the Register). From his earlier article on the subject he has a choice quote:

Our society does not give us the right of revenge, and wouldn’t work very well if it did. Our laws give us the right to justice, in either the criminal or civil context. Justice is all we can expect if we want to enjoy our constitutional freedoms, personal safety, and an orderly society.

Anyone accused of a crime deserves a fair trial. He deserves the right to defend himself, the right to face his accuser, the right to an attorney, and the right to be held innocent until proven guilty.

Vigilantism flies in the face of these rights. It punishes people before they have been found guilty. Angry mobs lynching someone suspected of murder is wrong, even if that person is actually guilty.

What’s more is that vigilantism in this case is not only ethically questionable but legall probably on the wrong footing. Spamming may be unpleasant but its probably not illegal (the content of spam however sometimes is). Retaliation is a factor in all of this too.

All the ethical and legal issues aside its probably an ineffective means to combat spam. Resources can be moved, networks can be changed and a new volley of spam ejected to do so would be a less than ideal outcome from taking down a spam site.

The cure to spam seems to be (in order of most effective / least acceptable):

  1. Introduce transaction charges
  2. Gate off communication to only trusted parties
  3. Gate off communication to only humans or those bots capable of fooling Turing type tests
  4. Filter by content, ideally with software that learns through heuristics as well as databases.

As someone who has received 8,000+ spam messages in the last 30 days and seen perhaps a few hundred of them in my inbox I’m not entirely ecstatic about the situation but its certainly better than it was before I had these tools.

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