A blank check for Microsoft. Tom Zeller's A1 piece on email spam this morning—which celebrates the first birthday of federal anti-spam legislation by making the (dubious, under-evidenced) argument that the law has actually encouraged a junk email surge—begins and ends by showing readers a Web villian they ought to recognize:
A year after a sweeping federal antispam law went into effect, there is more junk e-mail on the Internet than ever, and Levon Gillespie, according to Microsoft, is one reason.
Lawyers for the company seemed well on the way to shutting down Mr. Gillespie last September after he agreed to meet them at a Starbucks in Los Angeles near the University of Southern California. There they served him a court summons and a lawsuit accusing him, his Web site and 50 unnamed customers of violating state and federal law - including the year-old federal Can Spam Act - by flooding Microsoft's internal and customer e-mail networks with illegal spam, among other charges. But that was the last the company saw of the young entrepreneur.
Mr. Gillespie ... did not show up last month for a court hearing in King County, Wash. The judge issued a default judgment against him in the amount of $1.4 million. In a telephone interview yesterday from his home in Los Angeles, Mr. Gillespie, 21, said he was unaware of the judgment and that no one from Microsoft or the court had yet followed up.
[big snip]
According to Aaron Kornblum, Microsoft's Internet safety enforcement lawyer, suits against spam enablers like Mr. Gillespie are an important, if incremental, new front to pursue. "Microsoft's efforts in filing these lawsuits is to stop spammers - and in this case hosting services that cater to spammers - from plying their trade," said Mr. Kornblum, who noted that Microsoft was working to enforce the $1.4 million judgment against Mr. Gillespie.
And no, when I say "villain" I'm not referring to Mr. Gillespie. And no, reader's won't recognize the more significant villain here, because Zeller's doing his best to whitewash them.
Why does Zeller frame his article by highlighting Microsoft's initiative in pusuit of a spammer? I can think of a couple of reasons, neither of which flatters the author. Either Microsoft is the first name he thinks of when he thinks of what he calls "the antispam crusade"—in which case Zeller is so painfully uneducated about the subject that he has no business writing on it—or Microsoft was kind enough, when it flacked the story to him, to package it up this way, nice and neat and with a pretty bow tied around it.
Placed side-by-side with an aggressive, well-informed article by Brian McWilliams that appeared in Salon two weeks ago ("How Microsoft is losing the war on spam," a must-read), one sees a suspicious pattern of excessive deference toward Redmond in Zeller's copy, one that suggests nothing so much as a hidden agenda. The Salon excerpts are bolded:
Not everyone agrees that the Can Spam law is to blame [for an increase in spam], and lawsuits invoking the new legislation - along with other suits using state laws - have been mounted in the name of combating the problem. Besides Microsoft, other large Internet companies like AOL and Yahoo have used the federal law as the basis for suits.
What of Microsoft's legal team? They've kept the company intact despite antitrust lawsuits. They've protected Microsoft's intellectual property with countless patents. They've helped convict software pirates around the globe. So when will Microsoft's lawyers get a big court decision against a major junk e-mailer?
In recent years, Microsoft has filed scores of lawsuits against spammers large and small. But unlike competing Internet service providers America Online and Earthlink, Microsoft can't claim any big trophies yet.
McWilliams notes, as Zeller fails to, that Gillespie's "bulletproof" spam hosting service is back online following the Microsoft lawsuit, operating from China. And where Zeller mentions legal action against spam based on state laws, he avoids the fact that, per McWilliams, "state lawmakers have publicly criticized Microsoft's aggressive lobbying against stringent anti-spam laws," calling Microsoft the "axis of inertia" in the spam fight after the company lobbied to defeat a Michigan proposal for a no-spam registry.
But here's the most crucial instance:
In the meantime, analysts predict, more viruses will commandeer more personal computers as zombie spam transmitters - which besides free relays give spammers a thicker cloak of anonymity. Mr. Jennings estimates that hijacked machines handle 50 percent of the spam stream, and other analysts have put the percentage higher.
Oops, there seems to be a name missing here ... Perhaps Salon can provide it:
Most junk e-mail today emanates from Windows computers that spammers have hijacked and turned into spam "zombies" using security holes in Microsoft's operating system ... The rise of Windows zombies is arguably the gravest problem facing spam opponents today. By one estimate, over 60 percent of junk e-mail now originates from home PCs that spammers have commandeered with the help of virus writers and hackers.
Yes, a toxic combination of bugs, inherent design flaws, and a mass (and thus unsophisticated) user population have rendered Windows computers uniquely vulnerable to intrusion and manipulation: that is a consensus opinion within the software industry, but Zeller apparently doesn't want his readers to know it. And where Zeller artfully (and, it seems, factitiously) arranges a quote from a corporate email filtering executive to suggest that "everything but the kitchen sink" has been thrown at the zombie problem, McWilliams makes it clear that nothing could be further from the truth:
Some security experts say the company still hasn't adequately addressed the underlying security vulnerabilities exploited by [trojan zombie] software. "Microsoft needs to lock down Windows so that rogue programs can't convert PCs into zombies or hijack applications to do spamlike things," says Richard Forno, a security consultant and commentator.
Yet Microsoft effectively created a ghetto of potential spam zombies last year when it refused to allow users of pirated versions of Windows to install a significant security update known as Service Pack 2 (SP2). According to John Levine, chairman of the Anti-Spam Research Group, Microsoft acts as if guarding its software against piracy is a more significant issue than protecting users of unpatched Windows systems against worms and hackers.
I could go on, but enough already. The point is that Zeller's article is written essentially to offer Microsoft a blank check on the spam question. McWilliam's Salon piece, and the criticisms it reports, comes to seem like the context for what the Times prints today. So much so that I can't help wondering: how aggressive has Microsoft PR been lately trying to shop around a story that might burnish the company's anti-spam image? Did they manage to find in Tom Zeller a useful idiot—and in the front page of the New York Times, some free advertorial space?
Last update: 5/9/2005; 11:46:12 AM .
