Jail Sentence for Phone Line "Denial of Service"

Fascinating ... could this be extended to spammers? Please? Looks close enough to be worth a looksee ...

"Ex-GOP Party Head Charged in Phone Jamming"

"By ERIK STETSON Associated Press Writer March 10, 2005, 1:23 PM EST"

"CONCORD, N.H. The former executive director of the New Hampshire Republican Party was sentenced Thursday to seven months in prison for jamming Democratic telephone lines during the 2002 election.

"Chuck McGee pleaded guilty to federal charges of conspiring to make anonymous calls with the intent to annoy or harass. He was also fined $2,000 and ordered to perform 200 hours of community service."

...

"The computer-generated calls -- more than 800 in all -- lasted for about an hour and a half and also disrupted a union phone line."

rest at (watch for line wrap):

[TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: I am not sure if they would warrant _jail_ time or not. It would depend on the judge's interpretation of the facts; most spammers and/or telemarketers simply go through a list of email addresses and/or phone numbers. A nusiance yes, but not the sort of willful and deliberate behavior of Chuck McGee. Or even if you say that spammers/telemarketers are a little bit deliberate and willful, they do not single out one person or organization as this man did.

I am reminded of the same situation happening to Jerry Falwell's "Moral Majority" organization, in Lynchburg, VA several years ago. Someone living in the Atlanta area programmed his computer to dial the

800 number for Falwell exactly once per minute, around the clock for several weeks. The phone room operators in Lynchburg kept receiving these 'dead calls' (total silence) but because of the volume of calls, no one detected anything unusual, just that they had a 'lost call', i.e. a call where the caller 'hung up' (so they thought) before an operator was available to take the call. Finally an operator during the slower overnight hours wised up to the fact that these spurious 'lost calls' were coming once per minute at times when there was absolutely no reason for them at all ...

Their first thought was to blame the 'telephone company' and a call to the Bell repair techs brought a couple of techs out to investigate. This was a very large account for Bell, after all, with inbound 800 traffic totalling several hundred thousand dollars per month. The techs wanted to appease the customer, and they got in that centrex ACD (automatic call distributor) cabinet and over a couple days tried to isolate the problem. Their main hassle was it was very difficult to 'busy out' certain lines to test; the volume of 'regular' calls was so heavy the techs had a hard time getting a line isolated to busy it out, there was one seizure after another, often times several seizures at the same instant. Finally, Bell came to the conclusion there was nothing wrong with the customer premise equipment. About the same time, someone on Dr. Falwell's staff in charge of reconciling and paying the phone bill each month noticed that the same phone number was showing up 'quite a lot of the time', and Bell started looking in that direction, still trying to appease the customer.

Telco back-tracked it through AT&T to Atlanta, and telco there filled in the blanks, and when telco security representatives and Atlanta Police showed up with a search warrant, they found the computer busy at its task, dialing 800-MoralMajority once per minute, sitting there several seconds, then disconnecting and doing it again. Bell told Falwell they would write it off as long as he (Falwell) okayed them filing charges. If he would not file charges, they they would sue him for payment instead. Falwell agreed to let the telco handle it for him (obviuously!) and the total damage was a little over a million dollars in bogus 800 charges, over the several months it had been going on. I guess the guy wound up getting a jail term of six months or so, and had to make a couple thousand dollars in restitution as part of his parole agreement. PAT]