A Silicon Valley computer programmer has been arrested for
threatening to torture and kill employees of the company he blames for bombarding his
computer with Web ads promising to enlarge his penis.
In one of the first prosecutions of its kind, Charles Booher, 44, was arrested on and
released on bail for making repeated threats to staff of a Canadian company.
Booher threatened to send a "package full of Anthrax spores" to the company, to
"disable" an employee with a bullet and torture him with a power drill and ice
pick; and to hunt down and castrate the employees unless they removed him from their
e-mail list, prosecutors said. He used return e-mail addresses including Satan@hell.org.
Booher acknowledged that he had behaved badly but said his computer had been rendered
almost unusable for about two months by a barrage of pop-up advertising and e-mail.
"Here's what happened: I go to their Web site and start complaining to them, would
you please, please, please stop bothering me," he said. "It just sort of
escalated and I sort of lost my cool at that point."
The Sunnyvale, California man faces up to five years in prison and a $250,000 fine on
charges of threatening to injure someone. He said he did not own any guns or have access
to anthrax.
Booher said the problem stemmed from a program he mistakenly downloaded from the Internet
that brought a continuous stream of advertising to his computer.
The object of the Californian's anger was Douglas Mackay, president of DM Contact
Management, which works for Albion Medical, a firm advertising the "Only Reliable,
Medically Approved Penis Enhancement."
"This went for a long, long time. He seemed really dedicated to this," Mackay
said from Victoria, British Columbia in Canada. "He seemed like a guy just crazy
enough with nothing to lose that might actually do something."
He said his firm does not send spam but blamed a rival firm which he said routes much of
their unsolicited bulk e-mail through Russia and eastern Europe. Mackay said such firms
gave a bad name to the penis enhancement business.
In other cases, Internet vigilantes have bombarded spammers with both unsolicited e-mail
and regular mail and phone calls, launched attacks on spammers' computers and posted
spammers' personal information on the Internet, according to reports.
Separately, lawmakers in Washington said the U.S. House of Representatives was poised to
vote for on a measure to outlaw most Internet spam. Lawmakers hope to pass a national
anti-spam bill before a much tougher California state law goes into effect on January 1.
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