Congressional bill will not can spam

When I come home from a long day of class, one of the first things I do is check my e-mail.

Without fail, every day I open my Mozilla Mail program and I’m greeted with at least “30 new messages!” I do not pretend to be so popular or important as to receive so many e-mails from people I care about. The truth is, most of the e-mail is spam – part of an ever-growing problem that is finally receiving a little (emphasis on little) legislative attention in Congress.

Unfortunately, I don’t need to go into a lengthy explanation of what spam is. Anyone who uses e-mail is familiar with the ridiculous number of offers for “debt management” or millionaires who are just itching to teach you how to become rich just like them. And you can’t forget the porn.

These spammers claim to have all the answers, but the answers are of a dubious nature. If someone actually found the miracle solution for losing weight and looking young forever, you would think they could find a better way to advertise than through annoying spam.

Spam, however, has become more than just a minor annoyance. According to recent studies, spam accounts for anywhere between 30 percent and 60 percent of all e-mail sent within the past year. The Federal Trade Commission reported that the economy is losing an estimated $10 billion to $87 billion each year due to loss in productivity resulting from attempts to fight spam. Small Internet businesses, such as Bruce Goldberg’s online T-shirt shop, are being forced to shut down because of the costs of trying to find legitimate customer e-mails among all the unsolicited junk. “You could say that spam finally shut me down,” Greenberg recently told The Daily Press of Hampton Roads, Va.

So what does Congress do about this problem that threatens to become even worse in the future if left unchecked? Well, the Senate passed a bill that doesn’t really do all that much. The Controlling the Assault of Non-Solicited Pornography and Marketing (CAN-SPAM) Act, which was approved unanimously in the Senate about a week ago and is expected to go to vote in the House of Representatives sometime very soon, does nothing to prevent spammers from continuing to send unsolicited e-mails. Instead, if it makes it through the House and the White House, the first anti-spam law would require e-mail users to send a response to each and every piece of spam that would ask companies to stop sending them e-mails. Only then are companies held accountable for their spamming ways.

There are several problems with this bill. First, it is much easier to simply hit the delete button to get rid of e-mails that promise to give you a bigger erection or bigger breasts than it is to open each one and hit the button that unsubscribes you. The responsibility is placed on the wrong side of the issue. It’s like passing a law that says robbing convenience stores is perfectly legal unless the owner explicitly asks you to put the shotgun down.

Second, tracking down companies that propagate spam is incredibly hard due to cutting edge encryption techniques and the fact that many companies operate from overseas.

Third, if a company is caught spamming users who have gone through the trouble to ask them to stop, it is not within the victims’ rights to sue them. Apparently Congress thinks only the Federal Trade Commission, state attorneys general and Internet service providers should be allowed to be compensated for financial damages incurred upon other people.

Also, since the CAN-SPAM bill provides no new funding for governmental agencies to enforce the new law, it is questionable how good of a job these agencies will do. It seems as if more thought went into creating a clever acronym for the bill than creating a worthwhile bill itself.

Even the lawmakers don’t seem to have much faith in their own bill. After the vote, Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) was quoted in BusinessWeek as saying, “The odds of defeating spam by legislation alone are extremely low, but that doesn’t mean we should stand idly by and do nothing about it.” Come on, Senator! Didn’t they teach you in the political world? If you’re going to vote for a bill that you know is a steaming pile of crap, at the very least don’t let on that you know it’s steaming.

Spam has been around since the beginnings of e-mail. It is an inevitable consequence of the system – just as junk mail is to the postal system and telemarketers are to telephone service – only more annoying and even more harmful. There will need to be significant technological steps taken, along with stronger and harsher legislation, in order to defeat spam. Maybe then we will all be able to go back to the days when we could check our e-mail in peace.

Vaszari is a third-year cybernetics student. E-mail him at jvaszari@media.ucla.edu.