Blackslists are terrorism?

Filed in archive Anti-Spam Tools on August 30, 2006

Is putting ISP's on blacklists, marking them as spam friendly and blocking their traffic an act of terrorism? Overstock from TechRepublic certainly thinks so:

Terrorists? Yes that's right. One definition of "terrorism" is "attacking innocents in the name of your cause". Nowhere is this more ironic and extreme than in the deeds of my old nemesi, the anti-spammer zealotry collective, some of whom are now known as spamhaus and spews. The terrorism they practice is implemented in the form of "mail blacklists".

In his post later on overstock describes a small ISP whose server space has been bought by one spammer, while the other thousand of its customers are normal, no-spam people, trying to communicate with the rest of the world. As anti-spam community blackslists all IP ranges from this ISP, many mail servers will block any traffic coming from that location. In the end, the small ISP looses all of its clients and closes its doors, while the spammer just finds another ISP to torment.

Overstock concludes:

1. In my opinion, blacklists are bad.
2. The anti-spammers are resorting to clearly criminal activities to further their goals: extortion, restraint-of-trade, terrorism.
3. The effect the anti-spammers are trying to have by blocking innocents only works to destroy email connectivity, the cure is worse than the disease.

I for one have never thought of the blacklist phenomenon as something potentially dangerous. Could it really be? Well, if you look at it from the Overstock point of view they might be.

Think about it my friends and share your opinions.