Re: bulk postage fine (was Re: non-censorous spam control)

[stewarts@ix.netcom.com]

At 03:52 PM 8/3/97 +1000, Charles wrote:
>   ? the Platypus {aka David Formosa} said:
>>The best solution given so far is Cause's suggestion of modifying 
					[Cauce , by the way....]
>>the fax law so that we can sue the spammers.
>
>Thus giving gubmints the toe in the door they are so desperately looking 
>for to regulate/license/control the online world.
>
>The first thing you would see after passing such a law (if indeed the 
>original legislation itself didn't contain the provision) would be a 
>requirement for identification of all accounts and account holders. 
>Anonymous email and anonymous remailers would be the first victims.

Hear, hear!  The fax law says precisely that you can't send a fax
without correct identification of the sender, and an email equivalent
law would do the same.  (Anonymous remailers wouldn't necessarily be
banned, as long as they identified themselves correctly; if anything
this would probably encourage deployment of remailers, mainly by spammers,
which is a mixed blessing.)  Also, there are several Supreme Court cases,
such as McIntyre vs. Ohio, that strongly uphold the right to anonymous
publication; the fax law probably violates this, though I doubt it's been
taken to court.  The issue of the cost to the receipient of junk faxes
was the justification for the junk fax laws; I've heard that
Spamford himself was the junk faxer who they were a response to,
though I haven't seen any verification of that, and of course
widespread caller-id could have taken care of the problem without
requiring a Federal law.

One obvious implementation of identification would of course be a
Key Management Infrastructure...  They might not do it, not only because
it would require everyone to change their email programs, but more
seriously because it would require everyone to use encryption-capable
mailers (or at least signature-capable), and even with 40-bit escrowed
mail, it makes eavesdropping much more work.

#			Thanks;  Bill
# Bill Stewart, +1-415-442-2215 stewarts@ix.netcom.com
# You can get PGP outside the US at ftp.ox.ac.uk/pub/crypto/pgp
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