New spam law likely to need reinforcements

[Dave Farber <dave () farber net>]

<http://www.post-gazette.com/pg/03355/253158.stm>

New spam law likely to need reinforcements

Sunday, December 21, 2003
By Corilyn Shropshire, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

The familiar voice chimes, "You've got mail" and click, boom -- there it 
is: another solicitation for a "hot babe" or "Shed 25 pounds in 10 days."

The unwanted e-mail -- spam -- is supposed to be "canned" by new 
legislation signed Tuesday by President Bush, but experts are divided as to 
whether it will do much good.

The bill, known as the "CAN-SPAM Act," differentiates between what is 
"spam" and what is a legitimate e-mail solicitation. Beginning next month, 
its enforcement provisions allow Internet service providers, states' 
attorneys general and federal agencies to sue egregious spammers. 
Individuals won't have that recourse.

Also under the new law, solicitation must end if you request to be taken 
off the list. Until now, it has been nearly guaranteed that responding to a 
spammer meant the opposite -- an immediate increase of spam.

"The enforcement mechanisms in the law are very weak," said David Farber, a 
Carnegie Mellon professor of computer science and public policy who was the 
chief technologist at the Federal Communications Commission in Washington 
from 1999 to 2001.

As it is, Farber said, private citizens must convince federal attorneys 
that a spammer is so flagrant that he is worth pursuing.

Not everyone thinks individuals should be able to sue, however. The law, 
while restricting the ability to sue spammers, will significantly reduce 
the volume of unwanted e-mail, according to the Direct Marketing 
Association, without encouraging an unnecessary deluge of lawsuits.

"One of the things this law does very well is delineate between legitimate 
commercial e-mail and spam," said the association's director of public and 
international affairs, Louis Mastria.

Mastria's group sponsored a study that found that 46 million Americans 
purchased bedrock goods and services via e-mail in the last 12 months. The 
study, according to Mastria, also showed that consumers saved somewhere 
between $75 and $150 on e-mail-generated purchases.

"There's still a market out there of consumers who say 'we like shopping 
this way. It's convenient for us'."

The new law is "enormously" more enforceable than the 37 state laws that 
preceded it, according to Mastria. However, the loopholes in CAN-SPAM are 
significant, according to Ari Schwartz, associate director of the Center 
for Democracy and Technology, a Washington, D.C., think tank.

Despite more coordinated efforts between business and law enforcement under 
the new law, devious spammers will likely move offshore by sending e-mail 
to foreign servers, which would then distribute them.

"We shouldn't have high expectations about the bill," said Schwartz. "But I 
do think that it will make a dent."

Because tracing spammers is very difficult, experts agree that it will 
likely take more than the new law to drastically diminish junk e-mail.

E-mail filters are critical and so is reading the fine print of any Web 
site's privacy agreement before passing along your e-mail address.

"There are a whole bunch of things that help -- but spam has grown faster 
than we've been able to track it down," said Farber.

Like it or not, spam is probably here to stay -- at least for now. Schwartz 
believes another law likely will be necessary. Farber's spam has spiked 
recently and, as he said, "I have not seen any sign that it will diminish."


----------
(Corilyn Shropshire can be reached at 
<mailto:cshropshire () post-gazette com>cshropshire () post-gazette com or 
412-263-1413.)

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