Stupid Advocacy Watch: CAUCE Should Know Better

The Coalition Against Unsolicited E-mail has sent a letter to Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper supporting the passage of Canadian anti-spam bill C27 that employs what has to be some of the silliest reasoning in the history of Internet advocacy.

Wait a second. What? What was that? Oh yeah. Right.

CORRECTION: The Coalition Against Unsolicited E-mail has sent a letter to Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper supporting the passage of Canadian anti-spam bill C27 that—with the exception of every syllable ever uttered and/or written by members of the online privacy movement—employs what has to be some of the silliest reasoning in the history of Internet advocacy.

The letter argues that the U.S. is the leading source of spam in the world because the Can Spam Act does not ban sending unsolicited e-mail.

“An opt-out regime is what is made legal in America, by way of the CANSPAM act, and the United States is by far the main source of spam on the Internet today,” the letter said. “On the other hand, the drafters [of Canada’s bill C27] have carefully considered the laws of Australia and New Zealand, and the results are clear: neither of those countries now has much in the way of a home-grown spam problem after having adopted opt-in anti-spam laws.”

What? The U.S. is a leading source of spam and Australia and New Zealand are not because of the structure of their anti-spam laws? Are they kidding with this? Apparently not.

Consider the following:

Australia has 22 million people, according to the Australian Bureau of Statistics.

New Zealand has 4.2 million people, according to the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency’s World Fact Book.

This is compared to 305 million in the U.S.

According to Internet security firm Symantec, in the third quarter of 2009, botnets—or networks of infected computers—were responsible for 87.9% of all spam.

According to figures published by the Economist, computer ownership in 2008 in the U.S. was 76.2 per 100 people, computer ownership in Australia was 60.7 computers per 100 people and computer ownership in New Zealand was 50.2 per 100.

This pits 15.5 million computers, or opportunities for infection by botnet, in Australia and New Zealand combined against 232.4 million computers, or opportunities for infection by botnet, in the U.S.

Are we to believe that botnet operators consider countries’ anti-spam laws when trying to infect people’s computers with spamming malware?

That the U.S. leads the world as a source of spam isn’t about law. It’s about sheer numbers and the well-meaning folks at CAUCE are smart enough to know this.