Cash Bounties For Spammers Win Limited FTC Backing

The Federal Trade Commission yesterday gave limited endorsement to offering cash rewards to people who help track down e-mail spammers, suggesting that such
bounties might work but in fewer circumstances than had been pushed by some anti-spam activists.

The agency said that although Internet-savvy sleuths often can crack the technical disguises used by spammers to hide their identities and locations, the
amount of information they could gather that would lead to successful prosecutions would be limited.

Instead, the FTC said that if Congress decides to set up a bounty system, it should reward only whistle-blowers inside or close to spam operations, who
could provide detailed evidence that would lead to the operations being shut down.

With spam continuing to bedevil businesses and consumers, Congress asked the FTC to study two possible techniques as part of the first federal anti-spam law
passed late last year. In June, the FTC recommended against a do-not-spam registry that would have mirrored the popular do-not-call list for telemarketing, saying it would not work and might lead to more spam.

The idea of bounties for finding spammers has long been fodder for chatter on the Internet, where a loose corps of activists works to identify and disrupt
spam operations. The notion drew particular credence when it was pushed by Lawrence Lessig, a Stanford University law professor and one of the country's
foremost thinkers on cyberspace law and policy.