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An American ISP allegedly involved in distributing spam and images of child abuse has been thrown off the net.The US Federal Trade Commission asked for Pricewert LLC's net links to be severed after it had gathered evidence of the firm's 'criminal' connections.
The FTC alleges that Pricewert had created one of the "leading US-based havens for illegal, malicious, and harmful content".
Pricewert denied the allegations and said it would fight them in court.
It is very unfortunate for the collateral damage of any legitimate sites that happened to be hosting there.
the SPAMMERS will quickly move to another ISP
Correct, but isn't this a way to plug up some of the proliferation of abuse, attack the sources that enable them? They'll still have access to compromised computers, but if every ISP around the world gets the message that this could happen if they don't run a clean house, it's going to close a LOT of doors. True, it will drive them underground (see "drug industry") but doing SOMETHING is better than doing nothing.
Should the ISPs be private police
I think it should act when notified (spam reports, etc), but not be forced to police. However, going the extra mile and putting in place some measures to detect abusers before getting reports would be a commendable behavior as a responsible netizen.
If they were really deliberately helping distribute child #*$!, why have no criminal charges been brought against the ISP, its staff or its customers? That is the right way to deal with it: the courts, not the executive should decide who is a criminal.
Unfortunately some ISPs AUP it exactly just that or is there just to be visited by a Bot. They put a $ sign before the word “Here” and then we expect the 'IT Clueless Judge' that has 'Other things' to worry about like a 'half backed MySpace-aware' lawyers from ISP company. And that just takes time. But it is tooooo late by then. Someone already got the *ill/*orn/*irus, what ever.
hmm.. new letter combination: ill-orn-irus!
The problem with this is that it is punishment without trial.
The shutdown was ordered by a federal court, not by the FTC.
Kinda sucks for the innocent people involved with them though.
Instead they find an ISP and take them offline, resulting in nearly instant teaching of two lessons to the bad guys:
- they learn to move their operation fast.
- they learn to spread their "assets" better.
I for one rather have the bad guys behind bars instead of learning these lessons.
[pcworld.com...]
The ISP was ordered shut down by a court, not the FTC. More info here:
[scmagazineus.com...]
Who to believe at this time? Though it does seem that the ISP was cut off from the net either slightly before or at the time of court.
[ftc.gov...]
Pricewert is complaining that it wasn't alerted ahead of time, which sounds a bit like a suspected drug dealer complaining that he didn't have a chance to contest an arrest warrant before the cops showed up with handcuffs and interrupted his business transactions on the streetcorner.
I for one rather have the bad guys behind bars instead of learning these lessons.
Shutting down an ISP that harbors criminal activities and seizing its assets doesn't mean the bad guys can't be arrested and tried. It's just one weapon in the arsenal.
So far, the FTC has not been able to identify who was behind Pricewert. Although its servers are based in the US, it is registered as a business in Belize and many of its employees are thought to be located in Eastern Europe.
Kaled.
My objection is to the decision lying in the hands of the executive rather than the judiciary.
Having said that, any decent host should monitor server activity (not necessarily content) and notice when several sites send out a gazillion emails. This should cause some red flags to go up.
