Posted on 06/17/2003 9:38:17 AM PDT by bedolido
A bipartisan group of legislators and some citizen groups, concerned that current legislative proposals to combat e-mail spam are inadequate, are engaged in a major push for tougher alternatives.
The moves come amid intensified lobbying and political maneuvering over the issue. With outrage over spam at fever pitch, Congress is widely expected to pass the first national anti-spam law this year.
In the House, a new bill is likely to be introduced this week that its sponsors promise is tougher than legislation offered last month by Reps. W.J. "Billy" Tauzin (R-La.) and F. James Sensenbrenner Jr. (R-Wis.). Although Tauzin and Sensenbrenner head the two House committees that any spam legislation must pass through, their bill was widely criticized by anti-spam activists after revelations that lobbyists from the marketing, retailing and Internet-provider industries helped craft it.
The new bill, by Reps. Heather A. Wilson (R-N.M.) and Gene Green (D-Tex.), contains broader enforcement powers for federal and state authorities, tighter restrictions on marketers and an anti-pornography provision, according to a draft obtained by The Washington Post.
Whereas other legislation focuses on spammers that use deception and peddle scams and pornography, Wilson said her bill recognizes that any unwanted commercial e-mail is spam.
"This is a business that is always looking for the next loophole," Wilson said in an interview. "We take out a lot of the loopholes."
The bill has the support of Rep. John D. Dingell (D-Mich.), the senior Democrat on the Energy and Commerce Committee, who in the past has combined with Tauzin on key telecommunications legislation. Dingell said he is having ongoing "friendly" discussions with Tauzin about working out differences between the bills.
(Excerpt) Read more at washingtonpost.com ...
Good point, but what about the porn spam that my son can easily see in HIS inbox?
DEATH TO SPAM!
DEATH TP SPAMMERS!
lol... extreme.. but lmao
Here are some "tougher alternatives" I would like to see:
- Enforce existing laws against theft of services (for much spam uses third-party raped relays or is otherwise fraudulently injected into the net). Spam is theft and should be treated as such.
- Enforce and toughen existing laws against fraud. Much spam also touts products and services that are essentially fraudulent in nature - go after the people who are paying money to the spammers to ply their trade.
- Get the IRS involved against US spammers - start checking to see if they are declaring their ill-gotten gains on their tax returns, then prosecute them if they're not. It worked to nab Al Capone.
- Start prosecuting crackers, creators and sellers of ratware designed to facilitate spamming, and virus/Trojan writers. Current enforcement mechanisms against these parasites and troublemakers is a joke. Track them down, expose them, use governmental resources and/or the military if necessary.
- Expand the "Son of Sam" laws to prohibit spammers from profiting from their theft. If an Alan Ralsky pops up in a multi-million dollar home in the Hamptons again and it can be proven that much of his largesse is due to profiting from spam, he should be stripped.
- If a particular country offers Internet access but can't or won't prosecute spammers using its bandwidth (such as China, Brazil, Nigeria, etc.), then shun them - isolate them in their own little intranet. This goes as well for any ISP who can't or won't explicitly prohibit spamming on its network. There is an organization called SPEWS that does this to a degree - may their tribe increase.
- Stop offering unmetered, "all-you-can-eat" Internet access to all comers and require a substantial monetary deposit on all new Internet accounts, forfeitable if spam flows from the account or is used as a springboard for third-party abuse.
Bottom line: spammers spew their poison because they can make money doing it. Make spamming unprofitable (for the injection point as well as the spammer himself), and you can reduce the scale of the problem to a mere nuisance.
| "This is a business that is always looking for the next loophole," Wilson said in an interview. "We take out a lot of the loopholes."
|
Certainly she has a brain and a little common sense, right? If not, she shouldn't use a computer.
Right now my spam to good email ratio is close to 100 to 1. The connect time required for me to download the spam is more than 100 to 1 since most of the spam emails are larger than my regular email. The background costs to my ISP for processing and storage of this spam is more than 100 to 1.
Spam is costing each internet user money. You pay not only for the spam you get but also for the spam I and millions of others receive.
BTW: Picking out the one good email from 100 is far more tedious then simply hitting delete.
Maybe your email ady has not been on the internet as long as mine has, but someday it will. Given the exponential rise in spam over time you will be facing an enormous problem that you can not even imagine.
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That's an interesting statement. The underlying premise seems to be that the natural state of all human behavior is to be banned. Any opening in the generalized Ban On Everything is a legislative "loophole."