It’s the start of an Interpol for the Internet. President Bush signed a bill that gives the commission broader authority to pursue e-crooks in other countries. The FTC had pushed for more than three years for the new powers, which will help it shut down scammers such as the polite Nigerians who e-mail thousands of people a day with tales of woe and promises of riches to those kind enough to help.
Increasingly, people operating e-mail scams or launching attacks with secretive programs that can steal personal information operate from Eastern Europe, Southeast Asia, Africa and other foreign locations. Sometimes they simply route their efforts through computer servers in multiple countries to make it more difficult for authorities to track them down.
“Commerce has gone global and so fraud follows.”
But the FTC said it had been hindered in such probes by legal barriers preventing it from sharing information with foreign countries or assisting them in their own investigations.
The legislation gives the FTC abilities similar to those granted in the 1990s to the Securities and Exchange Commission and the Commodity Futures Trading Commission to share information with foreign counterparts. Specifically, the US SAFE WEB Act — which stands for Undertaking Spam, Spyware, And Fraud Enforcement With Enforcers beyond Borders — gives the FTC the legal authority to share confidential information from its own investigations with foreign law enforcement authorities and assist them in their cases.
“These purveyors of bad applications can live in one country and affect people in 200 other countries,” said John Palfrey, executive director of the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University. The center originally had some concerns with Smith’s legislation, particularly if the U.S. assisted investigations in other countries that have more restrictions on freedom of speech, said Ari Schwartz, the center’s deputy director. “It’s one thing to say that you want to be able to cooperate, but actually cooperating with foreign governments on these types of issues is more difficult,” said Schwartz, who recently attended a meeting in Brussels of the London Action Plan, a group promoting international cooperation on Internet fraud.
http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-foreignspam26dec26,1,741752.story?track=rss&ctrack=1&cset=true