Stronger Anti-Spam Law Proposed

NumberField writes "The fight against Spam is making for some strange bedfellows. A new bill sponsored by Senator Charles Schumer (D-NY) and the right-wing Christian Coalition that would let individuals sue spammers for $1000 per message. What isn't clear is how they will define spam broadly enough to outlaw it, but narrowly enough to avoid making it a bonanza for lawyers. For more information, see Schumer's fact sheet (PDF), or his press release." Update: 06/13 14:20 GMT by M : The draft bill (pdf) is available.

Comments

beyond reasonable doubts

[maliabu]

do we need to prove that those emails suspected of spamming are truly unsolicited? how do we prove that we never subscribed to a certain mailing list? can spammer 'fake' subscriptions?

and with the "Do Not Spam" registry of e-mail addresses, wouldn't it make it easier for spammers to request such do-not-spam list and spam it??

If you outlaw guns, only outlaws will have guns. like the article stated, it might endanger legitimate Internet services.

I'm just a Bill on Capitol Hill

[mental_telepathy]

Schumer can sponsor a Bill. The Christian Coalition, at least until they are elected as a body to a senate seat, can only support a bill (And drop fat checks on people to get it passed.)

If you'd like to see it passed, ask your Senator to cosponsor

Press Release -- Text

[zeekiorage]

SCHUMER, CHRISTIAN COALITION TEAM UP TO CRACK DOWN ON EMAIL SPAM PORNOGRAPHY

Christian Coalition endorses Schumer bill that would for the first time impose tough criminal and civil penalties on spammers; New law would create no-spam registry like highly-effective do-not-call registries that have stopped telemarketers

Political odd couple find common ground protecting children from obscene emails

Pornographic pictures appear in 1 out of every 5 spams; 1 in 5 kids are sexually solicited on the Internet; and 1 in 4 had an unwanted exposure to obscene pictures

US Senator Charles Schumer and Christian Coalition President Roberta Combs announced today that the Christian Coalition is endorsing Schumer's Stop Pornography and Abusive Marketing Act (The SPAM Act), legislation aimed at cracking down on pornographic email spam that is sent to children. Internet and email use among children has skyrocketed over the last few years, with America Online and MSN reporting millions of child users.

The avalanche of pornography being sent to kids by spammers makes checking email on par with watching an X-rated movie. Parents need to be able to keep offensive material out of the family room and I'm working with the Christian Coalition to do just that, Schumer said. The bottom line is that America's children have been under attack for a long time from violent TV shows, racy music videos, and now pornographic spam. The v-chip gave parents control of the TV. My SPAM Act will give them control over the computer.

I stand side-by-side with Senator Schumer in the fight against pornographic email, Combs said. Parents need the ability to keep their children from being subjected to lewd material and Schumers legislation will do just that. I am proud to stand with Chuck on this issue and we will continue to work together until this bill is law.

Purveyors of spam have exploited the popularity of the Internet and e-mail to gain access to millions of consumers from all sectors of the population, advertising everything from herbal remedies to get-rich-quick schemes to adult web sites. The traffic in explicit images is particularly acute according to the Federal Trade Commission (FTC), which reports that pornographic pictures appear in almost one out of every five emails that spammers use to advertise adult web sites. Many of these explicit images reach the in-boxes of millions of young e-mail users.
In a June 2003 survey by the California-based Internet security firm Symantec, 47% of children reported receiving junk email with links to pornographic web sites. According to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, one in five kids between the ages of 10 and 17 are sexually solicited on the Internet, and one in four had an unwanted exposure to pictures of naked people or people having sex but only 40% of these children told a parent.

According to a 2001 Department of Commerce study, 75 percent of 14-17 year olds and 65 percent of 10-13 year olds use the Internet. The same survey also found that forty-five percent of the population now uses email, up from 35 percent in 2000, including millions of children. As of November 2002, America Online had 16 million screen names limited by parental controls while MSN, the operator of the popular free e-mail site www.hotmail.com, had an estimated 3.6 million subscribers under the age of 18.

Schumer and Combs said that the implications of these studies are disturbing: parents are not only powerless to prevent such imagery from being sent to their childrens in-boxes, they also often d

Re:How about sanctions instead?

[$alex_n42]

I'm not proposing any tehnical solutions though... anyone have ideas on that?

An earlier article about this. (google)

But the best tactic is not having an email, period.

Legislation is not the solution

[ites]

Hmmm, after the "war on crime", "war on drugs", what's next? A government department with a "Spam Czar" who sends the troops into muddy 3rd world countries because they allow spam?

Spam is so easy to kill: add authentication to SMTP and create a new email network of authenticated email. Servers won't accept email from unauthenticated sources, and spammers will be unable to hide their tracks.

Re:Legislation is not the solution

[fmaxwell]

Why exactly do we *need* OUTGOING SMTP servers? WHy can't mail clients pull the MX record for the destination domain on their own and just send it straight there?

Obviously we don't "need" outgoing SMTP servers since many spammers already use the method you describe for sending e-mail.

But there is a very good reasons to have outgoing SMTP servers: The ISP can block access to port 25 for their residential (i.e., non-business) subscriber base. This prevents the subscribers from exploiting open relays or directly sending spam using the method you describe above.

Instead of hijacking open relays, spammers would need huge-ass pipes because they'd be stuck sending the mail themselves.

Only partially true. If a spammer had 100,000 AOL addresses he was sending to, he would not need to send 10,000 messages. He could blind copy, say, 100 recipients on AOL at a time. Then AOL's servers would increase his effective throughput 100x. That's what most of the direct-to-SMTP spammers already do. It's only when the list of recipients are not clumped on ISPs and, are, instead, one or two to a domain, that the bandwidth limitations become an issue.

By the way, that's one reason why you tend to see more spam on big ISPs than on little ones. If a spammer finds three addresses on a small ISP, he spends a relatively large amount of bandwidth sending to those three addresses than if he blind copies 100 users on AOL (assuming direct, rather than relay-rape, spam).

TPS (Telephone Preference Service)

[amembleton]

I like the sound of this. Defining Spam would be a problem.

If you could prove that there is either no way of requesting an end to the spam or that it didn't work when you clicked on the link then that might stand up in court.

If you still get spam then you should be able to forward it onto some Government organisation who would deal with the company with an army of beurachrats.

Here in the UK, we have a good system for stopping unsolicited phone calls and text (SMS) messages. It is called TPS (Telephone Preference Service). You basically register your number(s) with this organisation and marketeers aren't allowed to use that number. If they do you can report it, they can check phone records or something and fine them something like £5,000. This system does work.

I don't think it's gonna work

[asciimonster]

Spammers are smart people. You are never going to get the definition of spam such that it will block out all the forms of spam. And if there is a hole, spammers will rush to take advantage of it.

I'll illustrate with a snail-mail example:
A few years back everybody could get a sticker (the yes/no* an no/no* stickers) which we could stick on our mailbox to prevent "unadressed mail" (read: yunkmail) from flooding your mailbox. Good initiative: saves paper, time, money and irritation. BUT: Suddenly all yunkmail got addresses prionted on them and we were stuck with the same pile of paper we didn't read and had to take out to the paper recycle bins.
Nice initiative, didn't work. Wait, that's not entirely true; it still has a function: It blocks the local newspapers.

* yes/no for local (free) newspapers; no for unadressed mail.

Spammers are Brain Dead

[ajs318]

Spam merchants are brain-dead. Look carefully at my e-mail address {once you've sussed out the auto-munging that Slashdot has thoughtfully provided} and see what you notice about it. Then explain why I keep getting advertisements for products that are only available, or only work, in the USA. Like cable descramblers ..... British cable TV is digital, for crying out loud .....

Spear the spam-merchants with this! It won't stop it altogether, but at least it'll give you evidence as to who is harvesting your address and how widely it is circulating.

It isn't a problem that can be solved by laws...

[Metasquares]

People say that spam is a social problem, not a technical one. However, it is a technical problem, moreso than a social one, and that is why laws such as this one are not going to work: You can't sue someone until you identify them. The reason that spam is such a problem in the first place is because a large percentage of spammers (or, more likely, the spammers' mass mailing programs) go through great lengths to disguise the origin of the message. Obviously, if the message had a reliable source address, it would be much easier to track down and stop spammers, since they would have a finite number of source addresses to work with. Yes, it would create pandemonium for ISPs, but if ISPs responded (by threatening them with a $1000 per message lawsuit) to complaints about spamming quickly, it would not be a problem for long. Of course, this wouldn't work as well overseas, since there would be no such law, but so long as a new system that prevents email spoofing is implemented worldwide, the problem would still be largely under control.

The problem is actually replacing SMTP with something more reliable. It's like trying to implement IPv6... it's not going to happen in a day.