Stupid Bureaucrat Watch: Lots of Capital Letters Join to Fight Spam

Six international anti-spam agencies last week announced a joint initiative to share tactics and legal information in the fight against spam.

Forgive us if we don’t have a lot of faith in this new group’s ability to do little beyond issuing empty statements. Why? The group stems from an empty statement crafted at the World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS) meeting in Tunis, Tunisia, in November 2005—a statement, the sheer pompous vacuousness of which makes the mind reel.

In a 25-page document filled with so much soft-headed, bureaucratic gobbledygook, it could be used as an anesthetic for gum surgery, the WSIS stated in point 42 of 122, yep, there are 122 of these: “We resolve to deal effectively with the significant and growing problem of spam. We take note of the current multilateral, multi-stakeholder frameworks for regional and international cooperation on spam, for example, the APEC Anti-Spam Strategy, the London Action Plan, the Seoul-Melbourne Anti-Spam Memorandum of Understanding and the relevant activities of OECD and ITU. We call upon all stakeholders to adopt a multi-pronged approach to counter spam that includes, inter alia, consumer and business education; appropriate legislation, law enforcement authorities and tools; the continued development of technical and self regulatory measures; best practices; and international cooperation.”

Inter alia? What the hell is inter alia? Please tell us it means something along the lines of “punch me until I shut up.”

Turns out it’s Latin for “among other things.” Great. Nothing livens up dead prose like a phrase from a dead language.

Bottom line: a bunch of self-important gasbag bureaucrats are calling—partially in Latin—on people to do what they’ve already been doing. And it took a meeting in Tunisia to do it. The result: a new capital-letter-laden global bureaucracy and accompanying Web site that also says a lot of nothing.

Participating in the effort are the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation Telecommunications & Information Working Group, or APEC, the Contact Network of Spam Enforcement Authorities, or CNSA, the International Telecommunication Union, or ITU, the London Action Plan, or LAP, the international Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, or OECD, and the Seoul-Melbourne Anti-Spam Group.

Just imagine the layers upon layers of people in this group who will have to put their paw print on each document before it publishes. Think the WSIS statement was empty? You just wait.

Hey, maybe something good will come out of this group—like a three-day conference in Timbuktu where members craft a position paper saying, inter alia, that phishing and identity theft are problems and that “stakeholders” should adopt a “multi-pronged approach” to combat them.