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Considering sending spam? Read this first.

2019-03-18 07:00 by Karl Denninger
in Editorial , 577 references Ignore this thread
The Digital First Amendment Enforcement Act *
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Whereas the First Amendment guarantees the right to freedom of speech.

Whereas the Internet has taken over from print and other traditional media in the distribution of speech, both on an individual, one-to-one basis and on a one-to-many basis.

Whereas Internet distribution encompasses what was traditionally considered "printed words", live and recorded speech, along with live and recorded video, and likely will encompass further means of communication not yet envisioned.

Whereas the First Amendment's guarantees, unless extended and secured by the dominant media distribution methods of the day is rendered meaningless, an outrage that neither the Founders or contemporary Americans should tolerate.

Therefore it is enacted:

Definitions

  • Utility Internet Services (UIS) are those which are now and become in the future essential to participation in and publication of material on the Internet.  Said services include but are not limited to Domain Name Registration, Domain Name Resolution, Packet-Switched Routing, Dedicated Fixed Wired and Wireless Packet Service (irrespective of whether the wires involved are copper, glass, or other materials not yet invented), and CPU, Disk or Network Resource that are attached to or reachable by the Internet, whether provisioned with an operating system and application software or "bare" and whether provided on a dedicated, leased or "cloud" and shared basis.

  • Application Internet Services (AIS) are those services built upon or run within UIS that are (1) branded, (2) present a consistent presence to a consumer that are distinct from other AIS and do not provide the services of a UIS.  Examples of an AIS include but are not limited to Facebook, Snap, Twitter, The NY Post's online web presence and others.

  • Financial Internet Services (FIS) are those services that are built upon or run with UIS that are (1) branded and (2) primarily provide the functionality of transferring funds to or from one party to another, whether as part of an AIS or separately.  Examples of a FIS include PayPal, Square and Venmo.

  • Viewpoint means any and all political, personal or commercial perspectives, expressed beliefs or statements, whether factual or opinion and irrespective of the means of expression whether verbal, via imagery or otherwise, that is lawful to express under the laws of The United States.  A viewpoint does not encompass depictions or acts that constitute per-se violations of United States law, including but not limited to child pornography or exploitation and the transmission of "spam" in violation of applicable law (e.g. the CAN-SPAM act.)

Prohibited Acts; Penalties and Exceptions

  • Neither a UIS or FIS may enjoin, refuse to provide services to or refuse to transact, interoperate with or otherwise discriminate for or against any person or entity who desires to or does transact with same on the basis of Viewpoint.

  • UIS shall not tamper with, inspect, modify or filter any lawful transmission of content through, by or to a customer, nor shall any such entity intercept, monitor or sell data pertaining to same to third parties for any purpose whatsoever except as specifically directed by a court of competent jurisdiction and subject to a warrant requiring same.  By way of example filtering, diverting, sorting or otherwise tampering with domain name lookup results is a violation of this section as is the examination of stored or in-transit data for any commercial purpose including targeted advertising.

  • An AIS may enjoin, refuse to provide services or refuse to transact on a Viewpoint basis, provided that said refusal does not violate any other federal non-discrimination statute in the United States, including but not limited to discrimination on the basis of race, color or creed and the rules upon which said conduct will be judged are both published and consistently applied.

  • FIS that violates this section shall have any linked federal money transmitting or banking charter suspended for six months upon the first violation, and permanently upon a second or subsequent violation.  Any aggrieved party may bring private civil suit for enforcement of this section and, upon prevailing, is entitled the the greater of $50,000 or treble the actual damages incurred and shall also recover all reasonable attorneys fees and costs.

  • UIS that violations this section shall be fined not less than $100,000 or more than $1 million for each person so injured or impacted for the first violation with the penalties doubling for each subsequent violation without limit.  Any aggrieved party may bring private civil suit for enforcement under this section and, upon prevailing is entitled to the greater of $50,000 or treble the actual damages incurred and shall also recover all reasonable attorneys fees and costs.

  • Nothing in this section shall prohibit content and viewpoint neutral constraints on customers, such as billing for the data, CPU or space consumed, limiting the rate of transactions (e.g. posting) or imposing, on a non-discriminatory basis, fees for service.

  • Nothing in this section shall prohibit the employees of a UIS, FIS or AIS from performing legitimate troubleshooting or investigation for the purpose of correcting "bugs" or other operational problems, or in the furtherance of investigating suspected fraudulent or illegal activity while using or facilitated through their services, provided that the interception and monitoring undertaken is performed only for that purpose and all copies of stored and intercepted data used therein are destroyed when the incident to which same pertains has been resolved.

That should pretty-much do it....

No, PayPal cannot refuse to allow people to send money to someone it considers a purveyor of "hate speech", as such is not illegal under the laws of the United States.

No, GoDaddy cannot refuse a domain registration provided the operator is not violating an actual law of the United States, nor can they terminate an existing registration except for non-payment of their fees or a proved violation of law.

No, the cable company cannot refuse you an Internet connection if you happen to have a picture of yourself in a white hood in your High School or College yearbook.

No, a hosting company cannot refuse to sell service to Glenn Beck on the same terms as it sells service to a LGBT organization.  It can, however, prohibit both from spamming people -- but cannot prohibit Glenn from spamming while allowing the LGBT people to do so.

If you get "deplatformed" or harmed by such a firm you can sue, and if you win not only will they get fined on an escalating basis if a financially-linked firm their federal banking connections will be severed on any second or repeated offense and the amount due to you is large enough to obtain both diversity jurisdiction in Federal Court and to make it hurt the entity who tries to do it.

Facebook or Youtube (for example) can ban people for whatever reason it wants. So can Twitter or, for that matter, The Market Ticker.  However, neither those firms nor any other collection of firms can get together to stop Gab, as a potential competitor, from establishing and maintaining service including taking money through and by it, and if they do all who are so-involved are exposed to ruinous fines and, in the case of a financially-related firm, the extinction of their business.

This does not address the monopolist concentration of power by, for example, Google and Youtube, nor Facebook and Google in the digital advertising realm.  It does, however, address firms and other parties attempting to destroy competing services such as Gab by targeting their ability to transact financially and connect physically to the Internet along with provisioning the services they need to operate on a non-discriminatory basis.  This act will instantly neuter the grievance industry attacks on those who might otherwise provide a legitimate competitive threat to those firms that are "AIS" types of providers yet go far down the road of censorship, and by doing so re-open the marketplace of ideas that so many are trying their damndest to slam shut.

Time to introduce and pass this folks...... right now.

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Comments on The Digital First Amendment Enforcement Act
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Analog 1k posts, incept 2010-12-29
2019-03-18 10:16:43

i think all it needs is a public nuisance provision
No common carrier lets one passenger harass all the others. They throw you off the plane.

A means for JQPublic to direct spam to a database
which providers must monitor
and use statistics to eliminate offending clients.

Similar provision for telemarketing robocalls.

Free Speech doesn't include the right to ring my phone twenty times a day.
Existing laws are useless without a means to enforce them.
I had to track down Elite Marketing in Casselberry
send copies of my FTC complaints
and my robocall logs
along with links to hundreds of internet complaints about them
and the google earth coordinates of their building
and the names of the principals
to FTC, FBI, Governors and Atty Generals of Florida and Arkansas
I think it was my congressman who got things moving.

But i'm helpless with the VOIP clowns from India and Pakistan.
We should cruise-missile the call centers there. Worked for Reagan on Quaddaffi .


a.

Inline

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Never trust a computer with anything important.
Tickerguy 195k posts, incept 2007-06-26
2019-03-18 10:21:05

Quote:
i think all it needs is a public nuisance provision
No common carrier lets one passenger harass all the others. They throw you off the plane.

Remember that you can't pass a US law and actually fix it if the issue is the clownfaces in China, which to a large degree is what's going on in this instance.

The big problem right now is that while you can try to set up an alternative to Twatter, for example, the grievance industry can and WILL target your providers of utility services -- as happened with Gab. That shit has to be stopped; you can bet that there's plenty of interlocking interference from places like Twitter in organizing that, but proving it is very hard if not impossible.

The water company can't refuse me a water connection for any reason other than my refusal to pay the bill for my consumption; ditto for the power company. The unbranded utility-style services that form the necessary components of digital utilities should be treated the same way.

This doesn't prevent a content-neutral policy (e.g. "if you spam you're gone".)

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The difference between "kill" and "murder" is that murder, as a subset of kill, is undeserved by the deceased.

Bodhi 5k posts, incept 2008-02-23
2019-03-18 10:38:23

Quote:
But i'm helpless with the VOIP clowns from India and Pakistan.


That's the biggest problem with VoIP, the ability to spoof your caller ID. I can do this on my own SIP trunks. It seems it should be trivial for SIP trunk providers to require you only send a valid number, but very few do.

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"The purpose of life is not to be happy. It is to be useful,
to be honorable, to be compassionate, to have it make some
difference that you have lived and lived well."
~Ralph Waldo
Tickerguy 195k posts, incept 2007-06-26
2019-03-18 10:40:00

Yep -- there's a simple answer to this, which is for US interchange carriers to have required as a function of LAW that you cannot set Caller ID to a number you do not own.

That doesn't stop the (very valid) reason to override it; we used to do it at MCSNet on traditional DS-1 service in that when you dialed out you want the person you call to get the "main" front desk number, not the number on the trunk which won't ring anywhere if someone calls it.

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The difference between "kill" and "murder" is that murder, as a subset of kill, is undeserved by the deceased.
Bodhi 5k posts, incept 2008-02-23
2019-03-18 11:40:49

The way it works on my system (Nortel BCM50) is you program each telephone extension for the outgoing number string. Mine are all set to my main number, but they can each be a different number if I want.

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"The purpose of life is not to be happy. It is to be useful,
to be honorable, to be compassionate, to have it make some
difference that you have lived and lived well."
~Ralph Waldo
Tickerguy 195k posts, incept 2007-06-26
2019-03-18 11:41:57

@Bodhi -- Correct -- but the answer to the spam problem is for US carriers to be required to (1) check against a database that you own the number you send and (2) if not replace it with either one you do or omit it entirely.

Then require on exchange with other carriers that the same provision be implemented there or exchange is denied, effectively putting a stop to this bullshit.

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The difference between "kill" and "murder" is that murder, as a subset of kill, is undeserved by the deceased.
Analog 1k posts, incept 2010-12-29
2019-03-18 12:10:35

Quote:
Remember that you can't pass a US law and actually fix it if the issue is the clownfaces in China,


i've learned to set email filters that trigger on the first two or three fields of the IP in "Received From" header line

sure wish i were savvy enough to just block everything - emails, web pages, whatever from Russia Greece India Pakistan and China .

I can set my phone to disallow outgoing calls outside US, and have done it
would be great to disallow incoming as well.


I like "If you spam you're gone"

a.

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Never trust a computer with anything important.
Bodhi 5k posts, incept 2008-02-23
2019-03-18 12:10:45

I agree this needs to be stopped. People should either be required to send their actual number, or be allowed to send no number and appear as private or anonymous at the receiving end. Just letting all know what I can do on my system, which means anyone else with VoIP or PRI can probably do the same.

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"The purpose of life is not to be happy. It is to be useful,
to be honorable, to be compassionate, to have it make some
difference that you have lived and lived well."
~Ralph Waldo
Tickerguy 195k posts, incept 2007-06-26
2019-03-18 12:13:36

Oh absolutely. We could and did do this with DS-1 service in the 1990s!

But the phone switch we had cost a shit-ton of money, and so did DS-1 service; that was the inhibiting factor. Nowdays you can buy a SIP subscription for almost nothing and run Asterisk or similar on a Pi, so the hardware is $25. Add to that some off-the-shelf free software to encode the voice stream and it's very, very easy to build a phone spam system that spoofs the outgoing number.

They're traceable with some effort by the telcos but if the trace goes to some butthole place in India what are you going to do about it?

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The difference between "kill" and "murder" is that murder, as a subset of kill, is undeserved by the deceased.

Analog 1k posts, incept 2010-12-29
2019-03-18 12:28:29

Quote:
The water company can't refuse me a water connection for any reason other than my refusal to pay the bill for my consumption; ditto for the power company.


but if you pump fentanyl in backward through your water meter
or hack the smart electric meters to mess with your neighbors appliances
they ought at least to help law enforcement track you down.

my phone company absolutely refused to help when Hilgar was calling me twenty times a day for Medical Alert.




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Never trust a computer with anything important.
Tickerguy 195k posts, incept 2007-06-26
2019-03-18 12:29:55

Again the issue here is lack of enforcement.

There actually ARE standards on interchange, just as there need to be when it comes to the Internet. Start nailing the telcos on this, including the mobile ones, and watch how fast that shit stops.

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The difference between "kill" and "murder" is that murder, as a subset of kill, is undeserved by the deceased.
Bodhi 5k posts, incept 2008-02-23
2019-03-18 12:38:06

Quote:
They're traceable with some effort by the telcos but if the trace goes to some butthole place in India what are you going to do about it?


Maybe calls could be blocked by providers based on the SIP headers. If an abusive IP address is detected the call gets dropped. But it would be quite an undertaking to compile such a list, especially once the transition to IPv6 is complete. Also there's the problem of morphing IP addresses. I can easily pull a new public IP address by restarting my router, much like changing one's outgoing CLID.

It will likely be left to the end user to harden their own systems. Perhaps routers that drop connection attempts from blacklisted blocks of IP's programmed in CIDR Notation. Still a major PITA to ferret out the bad guys.

----------
"The purpose of life is not to be happy. It is to be useful,
to be honorable, to be compassionate, to have it make some
difference that you have lived and lived well."
~Ralph Waldo
Tickerguy 195k posts, incept 2007-06-26
2019-03-18 12:45:23

@Bodhi -- Not really, because when we're talking about PHONE CALLS there is a BILLING issue.

Nobody takes a VOICE call inbound without knowing where it's coming from because carriers pay each other for the interchange.

So the premise that these folks know nothing about what is going on is horseshit. They know exactly where it's coming from.

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The difference between "kill" and "murder" is that murder, as a subset of kill, is undeserved by the deceased.
Analog 1k posts, incept 2010-12-29
2019-03-18 16:25:14

Quote:
Start nailing the telcos on this, including the mobile ones, and watch how fast that shit stops.


exactly, and i've written my congressman to that effect. Trouble is all politicians use telemarketers in campaign season so they're not going to hurt their own urchins.

Quote:
So the premise that these folks know nothing about what is going on is horseshit. They know exactly where it's coming from.


i'd got that far trying to look into how telcom works. But the consumer has no way to get that far in, that i could find.

"Blue Boxes" need to make a comeback . Surely one could get into their system with a DTMF equipped Pi ?
I have a tube of TP5088 4 bit parallel to DTMF tone generators
but am clueless how to establish a handshake .

"Where have all the hackers gone, long time passing ?"

a.


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Never trust a computer with anything important.
Themortgagedude 12k posts, incept 2007-12-17
2019-03-18 19:30:09

It seems easy enough for the carriers to catch the spoofing of caller id numbers. Fuck the other day my phone said it was calling itself. I actually was getting called for some scam from my own number.

It should grab the caller ID and if it isn't correct the caller id should read Likely Spam.

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I think its time we ask ourselves if we still know the freedoms that our founding fathers intended for us. Ronald Reagan 1964
Mtdm 1k posts, incept 2009-07-23
2019-03-19 09:29:39

Thoughts on ways to address costs of DDoS to small UIS? Since DDoS targets are often correlated with Viewpoint they wouldnt simply be able to pass the cost to their customer who is targeted, or be able to ask them to leave. (Im not saying these are the best solutions anyway, it theyre basically what is done today). Big UIS can eat the costs, knowing that its all part of raising the barriers of entry for small UIS.
Tickerguy 195k posts, incept 2007-06-26
2019-03-19 09:58:38

@Mtdm - Having a DDOS result in someone being "asked to leave" is identical to asking someone to leave because they're black and a KKK convention is in town; you're concerned by the white hooded people out front who you think might burn your business down.

The problem with throwing the black guy out is that you just told the mob that showing up in front of your business works. If BY LAW you can't throw the black guy out then the KKK dudes get nowhere with their threats, and now people can turn their attention to identifying them and imposing sanction.

We had people try this sort of crap back when I ran MCSNet; there are things you can do at your edge that greatly attenuate the ability of people to "get" you other than by raw packet flood (e.g. overloading of circuits.) Raw overload attempts are best dealt with through billing and acceptance policy (in other words you throw the issue as a matter of contract back at the people where it's coming from.) That in turn suddenly gets them REAL interested in not accepting and passing that crap themselves since they can't get paid for it.

High bitrate pipes into individual users make them "attractive nuisances" if providers to those users are not proactive in their network design, but being proactive isn't very difficult. There's simply no reason for a provider to allow high-bitrate UDP or control (e.g. SYN/FIN, etc) to come out of an edge device OTHER THAN in very specific cases (e.g. the ports for a VPN or similar) and such policy-rate enforcement is not hard to do at the edge level.

At the end of the day a DDOS attack is mostly NOT about actually taking the target offline, since that requires continual action and, with continual action you can be traced and prosecuted. The damage for which you can get tagged in such a situation is enormous -- enough to bankrupt ANYONE and ANY provider under joint and several liability. The problem is that the KKK hooded dudes don't actually have to maintain their vigil in the digital space if you let a UIS throw people out; they only need to threaten. Making it unprofitable goes a long way toward making a DDOS attack worthless and increasing the risk of engaging in one, and technical mitigations exist that as a matter of best practice can be required in order for a provider who gets used in propagating one to be held harmless -- otherwise the liability is theirs on a joint and several basis, and it doesn't take many of those instances to bankrupt any firm that refuses to implement them.

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The difference between "kill" and "murder" is that murder, as a subset of kill, is undeserved by the deceased.
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