"Be fast, if you want to live.".

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

Spam, spam, spam! Having been an Internet user for over 10 years, I thought I had read them all: desperate, lonely African princesses seeking honest strangers to help them move personal fortunes out of their corrupt countries; legal representatives of unknown relatives who'd perished in plane crashes in far-flung parts of the world and who had estates worth millions that needed to be transferred to sole surviving relatives; lucrative part-time job offers from Chinese companies willing to pay thousands of dollars each month for doing barely any work; Saudi businessmen dying from cancer who needed good people to help them disperse their wealth to charities; rich people around the world looking for honest people to just take their millions of dollars and invest in businesses; unclaimed prize purses of millions of dollars for lotteries that I'd never entered; hot stock tips; and on and on ad nauseam. My usual act was to simply delete the unwanted messages and move on to the business of the day.

But this one was different. It arrived in my University of Calgary email late one Friday afternoon in July. The subject heading couldn't help but catch my attention: "be fast, if you want to live." The sender identified himself as Robert Brown, a murderer who had been paid by a friend of mine to kill me and my family. His colleagues were watching my movements and the date of the killing had arrived. However, out of an act of love for my family, he had decided to inform me of the plan before going forward with it. He invited me to contact him as soon as possible and he would give me information about the people who were supposed to do the killing.

I felt more than a bit creeped out at first reading. Then I read the message again, noting the obvious grammatical errors, the odd sentence construction, and the occasional misspelled words--all of which are characteristic features of one of the bugbears of the World Wide Web: spam of the 419 scam variety. Sure enough, when I googled the first sentence of the message, the second hit I got was for a site that tracks what are called 419 scams and, in this particular instance, the hitman scare. In variations of the email that I had just received, persons were told that if they paid various sums of money, their lives would be spared. The United States' Federal Bureau of Investigation has put an alert on the Internet about this particular scam and has a site where online complaints can be made.

Most Internet users would recognize the term spare It refers to the abusive use of the Internet to send unsolicited bulk messages. These can run the gamut from promotions for various products and services to the types of messages like the ones mentioned above that invite the recipient to part with money and/or sensitive personal information in exchange for the promise of some greater financial reward or, in the case of the hitman scam, avoidance of some vague threat to one's own personal safety or the safety of one's family.

The most typical response to spam is to simply flag it as such, delete it, and trust that the anti-spam measures of one's Internet Service Provider (ISP) will operate to block the junk emailer from sending out another such message. And that is where most people leave their response to spam email, without considering that there is a cost involved to everyone. Junk email does cost an ISP in ways that the average Internet user may not necessarily be aware. The biggest cost would be the drag on the processor in the ISP's mail server. An ISP must purchase bandwidth, which is how they connect to the rest of the Internet, based on the estimated volume of use by their customer base. When an ISP's server is busy processing huge volumes of spam, the amount of bandwidth available to non-spam users is correspondingly reduced. This means that the speed at which email is processed and then ultimately delivered is reduced. Think of a clogged electronic information highway as being analogous to a grid-locked city at rush hour. With junk email consistently clogging up the bandwidth, not only is the type of service available to consumers adversely affected but eventually, in all likelihood, the price of that service will be as well. Everyone suffers when the ISP is faced with the following business decisions:

* Accept that subscribers will just have to live with slower Internet speeds;

* Eat the cost of increasing the bandwidth to accommodate junk emailing thereby affecting the kinds of services available to subscribers; or

* Raise subscription rates.

Canada enjoys the dubious distinction of being the only member of the G8 without specific anti-spam legislation, and we are reputed to be the world's sixth-largest source of junk email. This is not to say that federal authorities are uanware of the problem--a federal task force made several recommendations for legislative reform in a 2004 report. However, there has been no legislative action to bring these recommendations into law. This leaves such pieces of federal legislation as the Personal Information Protection and Electronic Documents Act, which contains provisions relevant to mass marketing through electronic means, and the Criminal Code, which has sections relevant to fraud or uttering threats, as the only tools available to combat spam. A fair question to ask, though, is even if Canada had designated anti-spam legislation similar to the other G8 countries that do, how effective would it be in combating the problem? Interestingly enough, according to a spam-monitoring website called Spamhaus.com, the worst sources for spam are the United States, China, Russia, the United Kingdom, and Japan and of those, the only one without designated anti-spam laws is Russia.

Like most other Internet users these days, Linda McKay-Panos, Executive Director of the Alberta Civil Liberties Research Centre, receives more than her fair share of junk email. However, unlike most other email users, she is intimately aware of the privacy and freedom of expression issues that arise on the Web. McKay-Panos has worked in the civil liberties and human rights field for 20 years as an advocate, educator, and researcher, so she can appreciate the nuances of the problem. "There's no question in my mind that a lot of this junk email can, strictly speaking, be considered at the very least as an invasion of personal privacy, but most of it is more of a nuisance than anything else," she explains. "I can understand why a lot of people would like to regulate the Internet so this junk can be controlled, if not eliminated altogether. But then the question that needs to be asked is whether, in more stringently regulating the Internet, do we override freedom of expression in the process?"

For McKay-Panos, the litmus test for determining whether a piece of spam is something that should be reported to legal authorities is the harm or potential for harm that might arise. "We've got laws against hate speech and it is against the law to threaten to hurt somebody," she says, alluding to the hitman scam email currently circulating around the web. "So perhaps the best we can do is rely on these laws and contact law enforcement when something odious like this appears in our inbox."

The other possible solution might be to take a cue from arguably the world's most recognizable film critic, Roger Ebert. During a panel discussion at a conference in Boulder, Colorado in 1996, Ebert came up with what has since come to be known as The Boulder Pledge. At the time, he and a few other sage minds were aware of the growing incidence of spam emailing and proffered as a possible solution the simple willingness of consumers to refuse to purchase anything that was offered via junk email and also not to respond to any unsolicited email. So Ebert proposed the following solution (The Boulder Pledge), "Under no circumstances will I ever purchase anything offered to me as the result of an unsolicited email message. Nor will I forward chain letters, petitions, mass mailings, or virus warnings to large numbers of others. This is my contribution to the survival of the online community."

However, although Ebert's suggestion for combating spam may have resonated pragmatism in 1996, the spam problem has since grown into one big ugly monster that threatens to choke the Internet as a communication tool to the point where some people are suggesting its very utility as such a tool is in jeopardy. A Can-Am anti-spam lobby group called the Coalition Against Unsolicited Commercial Email (CAUCE) North America was launched in early June of this year that brought together two separate Canadian and American groups in common cause against what was once an annoyance but now is a threat to the viable flow of information on the Internet. CAUCE's President, Scott Hazen Mueller, was one of the founding members of the organization back in 1997 when spam was viewed by many ordinary Internet users as hardly an issue worth worrying about. However, like some swiftly mutating and growing virus, junk email, whether of the simply annoying or completely malicious variety, has grown to the point where it now accounts for the overwhelming majority of the world's electronic mail. In just a few short years, spam traffic has increased from representing less than 30% of traffic on the Internet to, by the end of last year, roughly 90% of the total number of electronic mail on the World Wide Web. "Now, spam is part of a multi-pronged assault by various criminal organizations attacking the very basis of trust on the Internet," Mueller says. "If this threat is not met soon, users will continue to migrate away from the Internet for their commercial needs." Nothing less than the future viability of the World Wide Web as a means of conducting business and professional communication, let alone doing commercial transactions, is at stake.

Brian Seaman, LLB is a Research Associate with the Alberta Civil Liberties Research Centre in Calgary, Alberta.