Re: Spam laws threaten remailers?

[Greg Broiles <gbroiles@netbox.com>]

>See http://www.senate.gov/~murkowski/commercialemail/
>
>   My
>   bill merely provides a means for Internet users to filter out e-mails that
>   they do not wish to receive by requiring that senders of unsolicited
>   e-mails to include Advertisement as the first word of the subject line
>   and that the real street address, e-mail address and a telephone number
>   be contained within the body of the message. Routing information that
>   accompanies the message must also be accurate. 
>
>Could this be the end of remailers?

Yes, at least within the United States. But this bill won't touch foreign
spam, so spammers will use overseas service providers to continue to spam. 

(And those foreign service providers may not mind hosting remailers if
they're already dealing with the avalanche of complaints which follow spam.
But few remailer operators will want to pay the high fees that spammers pay
for net access.)

Both of the anti-spam bills that I've seen (CAUCE and Murkowski's) are
poorly drafted - they're both overbroad and underinclusive. I don't think
they're necessarily constitutionally "overbroad", but they haven't been
written by people with a good understanding of the technical issues.

As I read both bills, they'll prohibit behavior pretty universally
considered legitimate - e.g., including a link to a web site in your
.signature which happens to sell a product or service, for example.

I think it'd make more sense to solve this problem technically, and/or
carefully think about the legal framework appropriate for governing the
flow of data between computers. (There are also sticky First Amendment
issues here.)

Ugh.

--
Greg Broiles                | US crypto export control policy in a nutshell:
gbroiles@netbox.com         | 
http://www.io.com/~gbroiles | Export jobs, not crypto.