 |
| According to the prosecution, Booher threatened
to send Anthrax spores |
A Silicon Valley computer programmer, enraged by the mountain of
spam and pop-up advertising he was encountering regarding enlarging
the size of his penis, has been arrested for threatening to torture
and kill employees of the company he believed was behind it.
Charles T Booher, 44, was arrested on 20 November in one of the
first reported cases of "spam rage". Booher was released on a bond
of $75,000 by the US Attorney's office in Northern California, for
making threats to an unnamed Canadian company between May and July.
As a consequence he faces up to five years in prison and a $250,000
fine.
Booher is alleged to have threatened to send the company a
"package full of Anthrax spores", and to torture employees with a
power drill and ice pick. According to prosecutors, Booher said
that unless he was removed from the company's email list, he would
hunt down and castrate their employees.
Booher claims his computer was made almost unusable by a
bombardment of spam email and pop-up adverts, and had been driven
into a rage.
Booher, of Sunnyvale, California, told the Reuters news agency:
"Here's what happened: I go to their website and start complaining
to them, would you please, please, please stop bothering me. It
just sort of escalated... and I sort of lost my cool at that
point."
"Being blitzed by spam and a barrage of penis pop-up ads is
enough to send anyone a little bit loopy," said Graham Cluley,
senior technology consultant for Sophos. "However, the answer is
not to become a modern day Dirty Harry, taking the law into your
own hands to clean up the streets of the internet from spammers.
Instead, you should follow best
practice to avoid your email address falling into the hands of
spammers and run a consolidated solution to protect your computer
against both spam and virus attack."
Booher is believed to work for an encryption software company,
and it is not thought that he owns any guns or has access to
anthrax spores. He is due back in court on 11 December.
Further details of the case against Booher are available on the
US Department of Justice website 
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