Battle Creek Responds to ISP Battle Cry

City officials agreed not to pursue charges against Ian Gulliver, ORBZ administrator. But the damage is done—what options remain for ISPs to stem the flow of junk e-mail?

by Jim Wagner of internetnews.com [March 22, 2002]

Belatedly convinced that a 20-year-old systems administrator from Ghent, New York is not just another hacker, Battle Creek, MI city officials withdrew its injunction and dropped charges against open relay block zone (ORBZ) operator Ian Gulliver late Thursday evening.

The news comes roughly 30 hours after Gulliver shut down the controversial anti-spam service to avoid handing documents over to Michigan's 10th District Court. Michelle Reen, the city's assistant to the city manager, issued a quasi-apology to those affected by the blacklist's blackout. In the statement, Reen said the city's police force takes potential hacking abuses very seriously.

"Our investigation and conversations with Mr. Gulliver's attorney have led us to believe that there was no criminal intent to cause the city harm," she said. "However, there was no way for us to know when we received the hit that this was not intended as a malicious prank."

Battle Creek's chief Internet officer and a local detective were responsible for convincing a judge to issue a search warrant and seek to seize Gulliver's ORBZ documentation.

"The detective had no reason not to believe he was pursuing a hacker when he issued a search warrant," Reen said. "The purpose of the search warrant was to determine the identity of the person who sent the email that caused our system to fail so we could then determine whether further investigation would be necessary."

Rather than surrendering ORBZ blacklist files to local city officials, Gulliver disseminated the files to several individuals located throughout the world, who would presumably continue the spam-thwarting tradition established by ORBZ precursor, the Open Relay Behavior-modification (ORBS), years ago.

Other options
It might be a case of too little, too late for ISPs tapping into the incredibly effective ORBZ blacklist, which blocks IP addresses of know servers with open relays—a frequent target of spammers and unscrupulous unsolicited commercial e-mail (UCE) mass-marketers.

Forbes Mercy, owner of NWInfo.Net, an ISP in Yakima, WA, was one of many people around the U.S. who fired off an angry letter to city officials for shutting down a service that kept spam, porn, and viruses away from e-mail inboxes.

The fact the courts are dropping charges means nothing, Mercy said in his e-mail addressed to Battle Creek's Mayor, Attorney General, and IT Administrator, if it means ORBZ doesn't come back online.

"In one step your city has grid-locked the entire Internet, as all the servers that subscribe to ORBZ are now rejecting nearly all mail," Mercy said. "As a city manager you can now say 'I upheld the rights of citizens to be excessively spammed and receive pornography.' "

E-mail discussion list forums, like ISP-Planet's sister site, the ISP-Lists, had nothing good to say about BattleCreek's handling of the ORBZ situation.

"How hard is it to call the guy and question him before forcing him to shut down?" one ISP owner asked. "It could've been blown over with a 20 minute phone call, now it's probably too late [for ORBZ]."

Bob Bevill, World Wide Online owner was an ORBZ subscriber until Wednesday. In only one day's time, he said, the increase in spam has already become almost unmanageable and can be likened to a denial of Service (DoS) attack.

"We are now experiencing a huge flood of spam on our servers," he said. "Regular e-mail is now either being delayed, or cannot compete to get access. I must regularly stop and restart Sendmail because of the number of sockets being consumed by spammers is hosing up my system. I am switching from ORBZ to Spamhaus.org today in the hope that this will clear some of this up."

— End