Spammer Gets ... _Eight Year_ Jail Sentence

( the jail term isn't directly related to the spam itself, but close enough for gummint work )

" Bulk e-mailer gets 8 years in prison for Acxiom theft BY BRIAN BASKIN ARKANSAS DEMOCRAT-GAZETTE

" Boca Raton, Fla., e-mail marketer Scott Levine was sentenced to eight years in federal prison Wednesday for orchestrating the theft of

1.6 billion consumer records from Acxiom Corp.

" Levine will also pay a $12,300 fine, in addition to a $250,000 forfeiture ordered in September, for money his firm, Snipermail. com Inc., received in the only known sale involving the stolen data. U.S. District Judge Bill Wilson Jr. said he would later this week order Levine to pay damages to Acxiom somewhere between the defense estimate of $224,000 and the government's estimate of $6.8 million. Federal prisoners are not eligible for parole....

[ rest at (watch for line wrap) :

may be power, but communications is the key snipped-for-privacy@panix.com [to foil spammers, my address has been double rot-13 encoded]

[TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: If Mr. Pariser (with the moveon.org people) want to do something _useful and worthwhile_ it would be to testify _for the government_ on behalf of small organizations like themselves, the cancer people and other small publishers similarly situated on the horrible effects spam has caused for the net, rather than sending petitions around encouraging netizens to become spam-enablers and foisting off the costs of filtering spam onto the bigger ISPs willing to pay instead of those who caused the problem to start with. NO MORE SPAM! NO MORE SPAM-ENABLING! PAT]