Spitzer sues over spyware

New York Attorney General Eliot Spitzer likes attention. For quite some time now, he's been flat-out openly running as the presumed Democratic candidate for Governor in 2008, and has been getting himself a lot of press lately by positioning himself as the "scourge of Wall Street."

(How attuned is the finance community to his doings? The Wall Street Journal doesn't bother to identify him by his title or even his full name in headlines... it's just "Spitzer does this" and "Spitzer says that.")

Even a politician on the make, however, is sometimes on the side of the angels:

A broad investigation into Internet abuses led the New York attorney general to file a lawsuit on Thursday accusing a California company of clogging computers across the nation with secretly installed spyware and adware, which can vex users and impede the flow of commerce on the Web.

The attorney general, Eliot Spitzer, sued Intermix Media, a large Internet marketing firm, accusing it of embedding "several types of invasive and annoying" programs on its Web domains that can pop up, route users to unwanted sites or link them to Intermix's services and clients. The accusations were in a complaint that was filed on Thursday in State Supreme Court in Manhattan.

Go, Eliot. Go, baby, go.