DMA anti-spam effort really focused on phishing, not spam

• Does it bother anyone else that the Direct Marketing Association is now playing a central role in funding government anti-spam enforcement activities?
• As the nation's foremost proponent of direct marketing, the DMA has been a major player in the spam debate for many years.
• Along with a few of its more influential members like Microsoft and AOL, it virtually dictated the atrociously counterproductive Can Spam Act of 2003 to Congress, in large part to pre-empt much stronger state anti-spam laws.
• Over the last few months, it has been dribbling out information about Operation Slam Spam, an "industry/law enforcement cooperative effort" with the FBI that the DMA is funding to the tune of $500,000.
• Now, most of the publicity that Operation Slam Spam has garnered so far suggests that the DMA's money is earmarked primarily for bringing the perpetrators of phishing scams to justice.
• After all, beggars can't be choosers, and it's clear that our law enforcement agencies are woefully and chronically underfunded when it comes to fighting all manner of Internet fraud.
• But while I would have no problem if it was, say, Operation Fillet Phishers instead, there is still something about the DMA proposing and funding Operation Slam Spam that makes me uncomfortable.
• Phishing and spam are really two fundamentally different problems, even though phishers use spam as the delivery vehicle for their identity-theft ploys.
• Note that the Department of Justice's big announcement last week of Operation Web Snare, originally touted as a coming-out party for the Can Spam Act, turned out to be focused instead on violations of much more traditional criminal laws.
• And you can bet that if and when Operation Slam Spam actually does start reeling in some phishing scam artists, it will be the fraud, computer hacking, and identity theft laws that matter in prosecuting them -- not Can Spam.