*Five years ago Tuesday, two lawyers posted an advertisement to Internet newsgroups. The notorious "Green Card Spam" marked the beginning of a flood of spam that has since made Usenet a very different place. Antispam activist Ray Everett-Church looks back.*In 1994, I was spending my days as an Information Specialist with the Washington-based American Immigration Lawyers Association (AILA). My job was to root out news and information about the US government's immigration policies.
As the organization's resident amateur "geek," I had been assigned the task of modernizing AILA's methods of disseminating information to its attorney members by creating a sort of online immigration news wire.
Naturally, I came to be seen by the staff of AILA as the "go-to" guy for all things technological. That's why, when I arrived in the office on the morning of 13 April 1994, the receptionist handed me a stack of angry faxes and forwarded a voice mailbox full of furious calls.
All the messages were about the Internet, the Green Card Lottery, and a pair of Arizona lawyers. By the time I stumbled to my cubicle, I had met the enemy.
Their names were Laurence Canter and Martha Siegel.
Statistically speaking, just a handful of countries account for the vast majority of people seeking permanent resident status in the United States, so in the early 1990s, Congress devised the Green Card Lottery program to encourage diversity in immigration. Unfortunately, it also provided an opportunity for charlatans to charge exorbitant fees to file lottery entries for hopeful immigrants.
In truth, all it took to enter the drawing was a postcard with your name and address mailed to the designated location.
Canter and Siegel, a husband-and-wife law firm, decided to join the lottery frenzy by pitching their own overpriced services to immigrant communities. But these two were not your run-of-the-mill hucksters. They were innovators with a penchant for technology.
Canter and Siegel chose the Internet, specifically Usenet newsgroups, as their vehicle. The medium would never be the same again.
The faxes and phone calls I fielded asked what could be done to stop them and to sanction them for their activities. As a voluntary association, AILA's only recourse was to throw them out of the association. However, when I went to AILA's senior staff to ask what that procedure entailed, a director of the organization asked: "Canter and Siegel? What did they do this time?"
It seems the pair had a long and sordid history in the immigration law community. After some research in the organization's membership files, I learned that they had been the subject of disciplinary action in Florida some years earlier and had been thrown out of the association long before they fled to Arizona and discovered the art of spamming.
My crash course in spam marked a turning point: By the time I left the office late that night, I would emerge from my cubicle a man with a new mission and a chip on his shoulder.
That chip looked suspiciously like a block of pink lunch meat.
Much has changed since then. I received my license to practice law, and Canter and Siegel lost theirs. Meanwhile, spammers have gotten more prolific and highly sophisticated.
I realize now that I was one of the first computer professionals to experience the feeling of dread evoked by a flood of spam complaints. I have never quite forgotten that feeling, and it is part of the reason I have spent so much of these last several years combating Internet abuse.
Thinking back on the details of the Green Card Lottery, I recall my puzzlement when I first learned the address to which would-be immigrants should address their lottery entries.
The submission address was a post office box in a place called "Dulles, Virginia." As a resident of Northern Virginia, I knew that no such place existed. Upon further investigation, I learned that it was an address created specifically for a large postal processing facility built in the early 1990s near Dulles International Airport.
Followers of Internet business, however, will already recognize Dulles as the new mailing address for the headquarters of America Online and the location of a massive new data center to house the East Coast operations of UUNet and MCI Worldcom.
I will leave it to the reader's own imagination to assess the cosmic irony of a town created to service floods of postal mail becoming home to a large chunk of the Internet's infrastructure.
Ray Everett-Church is an Internet lawyer with the Arlington, Virginia-based law firm of Haley Bader & Potts. He's a co-founder of the Coalition Against Unsolicited Commercial Email, the nation's largest anti-spam organization. He prefers round luncheon meats.
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