The Federal Trade Commission yesterday issued a report detailing the pros and cons of a bounty reward scheme for those who help to catch spammers. The system might work, says the FTC, if it targets whistleblowers and makes the rewards high enough.

Desperate to tackle the ever growing problem of unsolicited commercial e-mail, Congress included a provision in the recent CAN-SPAM Act (Controlling the Assault of Non-Solicited Pornography and Marketing Act) requiring the FTC to look into the practicalities and problems of a system that would reward members of the public who helped in the tracking down of spammers.

The FTC has now completed its report, but its findings suggest that any such system will have to be very tightly controlled.

The FTC has identified three hurdles involved in a spammer bounty system: identifying and locating the spammer; developing sufficient evidence to prove the spammer is legally responsible for sending the spam; and obtaining a monetary award.

The FTC is firm in its belief that the persons most likely to identify a spammer and provide evidence, what it terms "high-value" information, would be whistleblowers or insiders – personal or business associates of the spammers themselves. The reward system should be limited to these individuals, says the report.

Some have suggested that so-called "cybersleuths" – persons with above-average technical skill and knowledge of computers and the internet – could track down spammers, but the FTC concludes that this is not likely.

According to the report, cybersleuths may be able to employ their talents and expertise to construct educated guesses linking seemingly unrelated spam to a common source, but much of this sleuthing is based on intuition, does not definitively identity the spammer, and would not constitute admissible evidence in an enforcement action.

The report further explains that because cybersleuths do not have the power to issue or enforce subpoenas, in most instances they would not be able to legally obtain and supply to the Commission admissible evidence of a spammer's identity, whereabouts, or level of illegal activity.

Insiders, says the FTC, are often privy to this kind of evidence and would not need compulsory process to obtain it.

But insiders would have to balance the possibility of a reward with a variety of factors before coming forward: the likelihood of the information submitted actually being used, and whether the use would result in a successful legal proceeding; whether they would lose their own income; whether they would incur personal legal liability for their own part in the scheme; whether they would lose their anonymity; and whether they would become a target of retaliation by the spammer.

"The Commission is unable to establish with any degree of certainty the dollar amount that might be high enough to overcome these countervailing considerations, but believes that reward amounts in the range of $100,000, and in some cases as much as $250,000 are reasonable estimates," says the report.

The rewards themselves would have to be paid out of agency funds, warned the FTC, as it is unlikely that sufficient money would be recovered from the spammers to pay for it.

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