22 September 2006 - extortion spam

Advertising spam has become old-fashioned; it’s almost information superhighway. Today, spam is more about fraud, phishing for your financial details with a disguised lure. The next steps will be automated blackmail, and when that grows dull, automated extortion where computers plant lies in your credit report. We need to prepare now. These attacks can be defeated in advance if everybody understands that credit reports are full of junk data. My plan is simple: Open-source the no-fly list and other secret terrorism databases. Richard Stallman will crow with glee while data-greedy corporations vacuum up the so-called information, never admitting that it has too many mistakes to be meaningful. To change the secrecy policy we’ll have to forge a few electronic White House memos, a simple matter for any botnet operator.