24 November 2003

Federal Spam Law is Evil and Useless

By a margin of 392-5, the House approved an anti-spam bill on Saturday. President Bush is expected to sign the bill into law.

This legislation will be most ineffective in curing the tide of spam, and worse contains provisions that make it outright evil.

This bill makes it a crime to use any false or misleading information in a domain name or email account application, and then send an email. That would make a large fraction of hotmail users instant criminals.

It also makes it a crime to remove or alter information in message headers in ways that would make it harder for a police officer to determine who had sent the email. Anonymizers will be illegal as soon as this bill becomes law.

There are MANY, MANY other things wrong with it -- including the fact that most of its provisions apply to *ALL* commercial email, not just BULK commercial email -- and that it takes zero account of the FirstAmendment, attempting to list what topics someone can validly send messages about, while outlawing all other topics that relate to commercial transactions.

If it passes, I think I can make a criminal out of just about any company. Companies are liable for spam that helps them, even if they had no part in sending it.

Read the bill yourself:
http://news.com.com/pdf/ne/2003/FINALSPAM.pdf

And weep. And then call your Congressman.

An important theme on the anti-spam campaign has not been discussed in the mainstream debate - that any measure for stopping spam must ensure that all non-spam messages reach their intended recipients.

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