Thursday, April 9, 2009

Dear Jon, An open letter to new US FTC Chairman

rockford I don't know about you but my email box is still being flooded with spam.  Yes, there are some laws out there that try (notice I said try) to stem the flow but they just are not working.  It would be nice if the Governments, State, Federal and International, could get together and do something about it.  The grass roots fighters are being left to hang.  They collect information for all levels of law enforcement but it seems like it just isn't being reacted to.  Now it's time to go to the top and I agree with an online colleague of mine that penned the following open letter.

An open letter to new US FTC Chairman Jon Leibowitz

We very much support the efforts the FTC is taking to educate consumers about Internet fraud and identity theft, and we recommend that everyone view the excellent materials online at ftc.gov. However, those types of problems require a level of coordinated effort beyond what any one individual or business can accomplish. We urge the next head of the FTC to see the big picture. And one obvious part of the picture is spam.


Spam is like a flashing light alerting us to far more serious criminal activity beneath the surface. By minimizing the severity of spammers' offenses, you lose the ability to expose and investigate much deeper risks to the US, even impacting on national security.


Spam -- unsolicited commercial email -- is a nuisance. Because it is so inexpensive to advertise through email, spam volume has ballooned to comprise the vast majority of email messages. And the majority of the spam being mailed advertises products that are fraudulent or illegal, whose sponsors do not care about building a positive brand image. Most users have little idea how much spam would be arriving in their inboxes if their Internet service providers were not using strategies to block the worst of it

Please read the entire letter here and pass this along.

With that info,

Safer Surfing!

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