ABSTRACT
Without trust in the Internet the goal of encouraging broader civil participation in the European Information Society (lPTS 2003, p. 71; Levi and Wall 2004, p. 211) is unlikely to be achieved. Spamming is a major threat to the formation of public trust in that it affects all Internet users in one way or another. Individually, spams represent little more than a nuisance, but collectively they expose Internet users to a panoply of new risks while threatening the communications and commercial infrastructure. Yet
spamming also raises important questions of academic interest because, on the one hand it is an example of a pure cybercrime - a harmful behaviour mediated by the Internet that is the subject of criminal law, while on the other hand it is a behaviour that has in practice been most effectively contained technologically by the manipulation of 'code'.
