Senator Leahy (D-Vt) introduced his version of an anti-phishing bill in Congress. The increased numbers and economic damages of phishing has only made it necessary for a federal legislation to answer this threat.

The Anti-Phishing Act of 2005, sponsored by Sen. Patrick J. Leahy
(Vt.), would allow prosecutors to impose fines of up to $250,000 and
jail terms of up to five years against anyone convicted of creating
fake corporate Web sites and fraudulent e-mail messages designed to
fleece consumers. The legislation would prevent online parodies and
political speech from being prosecuted as phishing.

It is interesting that in addition to phishing, the bill would also apply penalties to what is called "pharming" [maybe we need to create a separate post category for this term] where carefully crafted code can trick Internet users from one site to another without the users’ notice.

Leahy is the ranking Democrat on the Judiciary Committee in Senate, the committee that is to decide whether the bill should go to a full vote in the US Senate. Hopefully when and if the bill finally comes out as a law, it would not provide the loopholes and ineffective enforcement tools that the CAN-SPAM Act did.

[Via Washington Post -]

A Virginia judge dismissed the conviction of a North Carolina woman on felony spamming charges. Jessica DeGroot was tried and found guilty together with her brother Jeremy Jaynes. During trial both DeGroot and Jaynes were convicted on felony spamming charges for spamming AOL’s customers. Jaynes received a sentence of nine years which was upheld.

The reasoning of the judge - Circuit Judge Thomas D. Horne - was that he thought the jury, tasked with sorting through complex technological evidence and navigating a new Virginia anti-spam law, might simply have gotten "lost." Horne said he could not find "any rational basis" to find DeGroot guilty.

What is the moral of this story? Should presecutors try both co-conspirators separately so that the jury may not get confused? This would be very taxing on the already limited DA resources. It is interesting how juries can sort through multimillion, year-long cases with highly technical evidence and they cannot sort out a simple issue of how used a credit card to purchase domains used in illegal spamming operations.

[Via Washington Post -]