Military Battling Junk E-Mail
When the 5,500 sailors aboard the aircraft carrier Abraham Lincoln in the Persian Gulf get their daily half-an-hour allotment of Internet time, they savor each precious second to connect with the world back home.
Apparently, it's a world full of folks cooking with the ultimate pasta pot, making six-figure incomes selling junk on EBay and using anti-snoring spray to sleep quietly through the night.
Such are the wares touted in millions of e-mail messages. The unsolicited advertisements -- contemptuously known as spam -- have been clogging corporate computer systems and home PC in-boxes for years, costing an estimated $8.9 billion annually, according to technology market research firm Ferris Research.
And now the ads have followed U.S. troops to the Middle East.
"Spam is bad enough when you're here in the States on a high-speed connection," said Enrique Salem, chief executive of San Francisco-based Brightmail Inc., a leading provider of anti-spam software whose clients include the military and the government.
"It's painful when you're in the middle of a war."
Even with the best software filters the military can deploy, marketing pitches for dubious products and questionable financial schemes are slipping into the mix with letters from family and friends back home.
It's not that the military hasn't tried to fight it.
Over the last few years, the Defense Department has issued guidelines to each of the branches of the armed services, advising that unnecessary communication and misuse of military bandwidth are to be avoided at all costs.
The Defense Information Systems Agency also has established general technical standards for filtering spam.
The Army, Navy, Air Force, Marines and Coast Guard are responsible for setting up and managing the filters and firewalls designed to block e-mail marketing campaigns on their own computer networks, said Pentagon spokesman Lt. Col. Gary Keck.
By obstructing spam, the barriers can prevent networks from slowing down or crashing.
"We don't tell them what programs to buy," Keck said. "Whatever they want to do is fine, as long as it works."
Military officials won't talk about the specific tools they use to fight spam, citing concerns about alerting hackers and other potential attackers. That makes it impossible to judge whether they're any better at killing spam than corporate America is.
