US moves to criminalise spam
20th June 2003 (The Star) WASHINGTON: US lawmakers took aim at "spam" messages Thursday, as two separate bills worked their way through the US Senate, including one that would make sending some unsolicited e-mail a crime. Utah Senator Orrin Hatch co-sponsored one bill introduced Thursday, the Criminal Spam Act of 2003, which targets people who hijack computer systems or use other fraudulent means to send unsolicited commercial e-mail. "The abusive practices of fraudulent spammers threaten to choke the lifeblood of the electronic age," Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Orrin Hatch said in a statement. "Current federal law does not adequately address the tactics sophisticated spammers use to conceal their identities, evade Internet service provider filters, and exploit the Internet by promoting pornographic websites, illegally pirated software, questionable health products, pyramid schemes and other 'get rich quick' scams," said Hatch, a Republican from Utah, who co-sponsored the legislation with Vermont Democrat Patrick Leahy. "Ridding America's inboxes of deceptively delivered spam will significantly advance our fight to clear electronic channels for legitimate communications," Leahy said. Their bill would make it a crime to hijack the identities of other computer uses to send bulk commercial e-mail or to conceal key information about the e-mail's source. Violators could face up to five years in prison. A separate anti-spam bill, authored by Democratic Senator Ron Wyden of Oregon and Republican Senator Conrad Burns of Montana, was unanimously approved Thursday by the Commerce Committee. Wyden said in a statement that his bill aimed to "slow the flow of spam," but another anti-spam crusader in the US legislature, said the bill, while a good start, didn't go far enough. "Any spam measure that comes out of Congress needs to go after spam as aggressively as spammers go after the public," said Senator Charles Schumer. "I'd like to see an even stronger measure that empowers e-mail users with the ability to keep spam out of their in-boxes and has stronger punitive measures," he said, adding that he would proposed an amendment to add teeth to the Burns-Wyden bill when goes to the floor of the full Senate later this year. Schumer, a New York Democrat, earlier this year introduced his own bill that would impose heavy fines for spamming, mandate jail time for repeat offenders, and create a "Do-Not-Spam" list of e-mail addresses. -- AFP |
