Return-Path: Received: by massis.lcs.mit.edu (8.7.4/NSCS-1.0S) id BAA10274; Fri, 23 May 1997 01:54:16 -0400 (EDT) Date: Fri, 23 May 1997 01:54:16 -0400 (EDT) From: editor@telecom-digest.org Message-Id: <199705230554.BAA10274@massis.lcs.mit.edu> To: ptownson Subject: TELECOM Digest V17 #129 TELECOM Digest Fri, 23 May 97 01:54:00 EDT Volume 17 : Issue 129 Inside This Issue: Editor: Patrick A. Townson Re: Legal Recourse Against Spammers (William H. Bowen) Re: Legal Recourse Against Spammers (J. DeBert) Re: Congressman Wants to Ban Spam (William H. Bowen) Re: Congressman Wants to Ban Spam (Diablo Cat) Alert: Two Anti-Spam Bills in Congress; One Good, One Bad (John R. Levine) 800 Number/Spam (Steven Lichter) Netizens Protection Act of 1997 (Ed Ellers) TELECOM Digest is an electronic journal devoted mostly but not exclusively to telecommunications topics. It is circulated anywhere there is email, in addition to various telecom forums on a variety of public service systems and networks including Compuserve and America On Line. It is also gatewayed to Usenet where it appears as the moderated newsgroup 'comp.dcom.telecom'. Subscriptions are available to qualified organizations and individual readers. Write and tell us how you qualify: * subscriptions@telecom-digest.org * The Digest is edited, published and compilation-copyrighted by Patrick Townson of Skokie, Illinois USA. You can reach us by postal mail, fax or phone at: Post Office Box 4621 Skokie, IL USA 60076 Phone: 847-727-5427 Fax: 773-539-4630 ** Article submission address: editor@telecom-digest.org ** Our archives are available for your review/research. The URL is: http://telecom-digest.org (WWW/http only!) They can also be accessed using anonymous ftp: ftp hyperarchive.lcs.mit.edu/telecom-archives/archives (or use our mirror site: ftp ftp.epix.net/pub/telecom-archives) A third method is the Telecom Email Information Service: Send a note to archives@telecom-digest.org to receive a help file for using this method or write me and ask for a copy of the help file for the Telecom Archives. ************************************************************************* * TELECOM Digest is partially funded by a grant from the * * International Telecommunication Union (ITU) in Geneva, Switzerland * * under the aegis of its Telecom Information Exchange Services (TIES) * * project. Views expressed herein should not be construed as represent-* * ing views of the ITU. * ************************************************************************* Finally, the Digest is funded by gifts from generous readers such as yourself who provide funding in amounts deemed appropriate. Your help is important and appreciated. A suggested donation of twenty dollars per year per reader is considered appropriate. See our address above. All opinions expressed herein are deemed to be those of the author. Any organizations listed are for identification purposes only and messages should not be considered any official expression by the organization. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- From: bowenb@best.com (William H. Bowen) Subject: Re: Legal Recourse Against Spammers Date: Thu, 22 May 1997 05:42:34 GMT Reply-To: bowenb@best.com stbrown@nacs.net (Stan Brown) wrote: > In TELECOM Digest 17:124, our Esteemed Moderator wrote: >> The time has come for the community to begin taking a very agressive >> stance on spam. We need to begin demanding that there be enforcement >> of the laws and at the same time use our own attornies to begin >> litigation. PAT] > I agree with PAT's sentiments. However, before laws can be enforced > they must be passed. See below: a bill was introduced into the U.S. Senate today (5/21) Senator Murkowski of Alaska just today introduced a bill (S771) into the US Senate to control spam. Below is a post the Senator placed in news.admin.net-abuse.email: ------------ Knowing of this newsgroup's major interest in the issue of unsolicited commercial e-mail, also known as junk e-mail and spam, I thought you might be interested in legislation that I introduced this morning in the >United States Senate. The full text of the bill, a brief outline, and my >introductory statement are available online at http://www.senate.gov/~murkowski/commercialemail I am strongly encouraging comments on this bill from interested parties so I would welcome comments and suggestions to this email address. commercialemail@murkowski.senate.gov Frank H. Murkowski United States Senate ============ End of Quoted Post ======================== I've read the bill, and it looks pretty good. I've got a few ideas for some changes (mostly some detail stuff) but basically it looks good. It does NOT ban spam (so no 1st Amendment problems), but does mandate truth in routing info (no spoofed addresses, etc) and also mandates that the first word in the Subject line be the word "advertisement" so promail filtering would be MUCH easier. It also mandates that the name, address and phone number of the actual sender be in the spam message itself. Anyway, instead of me recounting the whole thing, check out the Senator's web site, and, if you like it, contact John Glenn and Mike DeWine and ask them to co-sponsor it. The bill isn't perfect, but it sure is a GIANT step in the right direction. Regards, Bill Bowen bowenb@best.com> [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: I would suggest they could probably ban spam without any real First Amendment problems since what is termed 'commercial speech' has never had the same protection as 'political speech'. Anyway, those First Amendment excuses are just a crock as far as I am concerned. Every charlatan in America today should get on his knees and praise God for the First Amendment; it is all that stands between most of them and a jail term. I get sick of all the bum excuses I hear in a day's time which invoke the First Amendment. PAT] ------------------------------ From: J. DeBert Subject: Re: Legal Recourse Against Spammers Date: Thu, 22 May 1997 10:18:15 -0700 Organization: hypatia.com Stan Brown wrote: > In TELECOM Digest 17:124, our Esteemed Moderator wrote: >> The time has come for the community to begin taking a very agressive >> stance on spam. We need to begin demanding that there be enforcement >> of the laws and at the same time use our own attornies to begin >> litigation. PAT] > I agree with PAT's sentiments. However, before laws can be enforced > they must be passed. The preponderance of legal opinion on the Net is > that the current law does not cover junk emails or Usenet spam. As reported elsewhere in comp.dcom.telecom and others, there is at least a draft of legislation to modify 47usc227 to ban junk email which is being justified by costs incurred by the recipient. I foresee problems with this as it stands. But if you want more law, what are you willing to give up? Would you allow unconditional monitoring of mail that you send and receive? Would you allow monitoring and tracking of newsgroups you read? Would you agree to a ban on encrypting mail, etc.? Would you allow government access (without a warrant and without probable cause) to your computer systems? Quid pro quo -- what will you trade in exchange for protection against junk mail, spam, fraud, etc.? I would love to see legislation explicitly prohibiting everything that is already banned in the real world. I especially would like to see the spammers and other perpetrators of fraud prosecuted, jailed and penniless. But I do not want to yield one bit on my liberties, on or off the net. I've been on the net since it was arpanet, when DARPA was "running the show". I've seen it change, lately for the worse... But that's enough lament -- I could go on for at least several Kb more. > There have been claims (notably in misc.legal.moderated, which I read, > and its unmoderated brethren, which I don't read) to stretch the > Telephone Consumer Protection Act's prohibition of junk fax to junk > email. But the better-reasoned opinions published there have shown > that such attempts are not adequate. 47usc227 discourages all but the most blatant and bold. What is required is to test it in a court case. Though the law seems to clearly include most computer systems, the intended definition was only to include facsimile machines. So a test case is necessary. > (I have no formal legal training. But the "not covered" arguments seem > more self consistent to me, and the "is covered" arguments seem to > rely more on rhetoric and wishful thinking. Ultimately, what matters > is a court decision; but none has yet been handed down. In fact, as > far as I know there has never been a junk-email court case relying on > the TCPA's junk-fax provisions.) > One easy argument: the TCPA requires that any fax transmission include > the phone number of the sending machine. If junk email is to fall into > the junk-fax category based on the TCPA, then every email is subject > to that requirement. Since hardly any emails include the sender's > phone number, that would make virtually all present-day emails > illegal, an absurd result. If a TCPA junk email case is successful in court, then the station ID requirements also become effective and enforceable. That means that everyone must include in their email, news posting, etc., at least their modem phone number. (There's that quid pro quo thing starting to show up!) > You can read further details in Mark Eckenwiler's article at > http://www.panix.com/~eck/junkmail.html > I agree that email spam is execrable, and I think it does great > harm to the Net. But before the Federal government can get involved, > legislation is needed to make junk emails illegal. I think the > prospects for such legislation are fairly good, because the junk > emailers are nowhere near as well organized (yet) as the junk > snail-mailers. But all of us who hate spam and complain about it need > to put a modicum of that energy into writing to our representatives in > our respective national capitals to demand legislation. (A problem > left as an exercise for the reader is what to do about offshore > spam-mailers.) You might not believe the magnitude of the problem junk emailers (aka spammers) cause! They cause serious problems for ISP's, who must work hard to protect their systems against crashing due to floods of junk mail, redesign mailers to prevent use as relays or for other fraudulent purposes, plug holes in systems to prevent these intruders from using other means to perpetrate their fraud, etc. Many ISP customers must pay for online time, time to download (via pop, etc.) mail, pay for exceeding their disk space or even mailbox(!) quotas, through no fault of their own. Some users lose mail received and/or unread or files when the system clears space to deliver new mail, so junk mail can cause people to lose important stuff, too. Spam and junk mail has done immense harm. It still does and will do even more. The consequences are going to cost everyone a lot -- except the spammers, of course -- and not just in terms of money. > Another approach, one that does not require legislation, is to use the > law of contracts and/or the law of torts. Civil actions are initiated > by private parties and need not wait for the government to act. I'm > not a lawyer, but I would think suits for the tort of denial of > service might have a fair shot. The law of contracts would come in if > all of us would offer a high-priced service, acceptance of which was > indicated by the sending of junk email. (See my signature line for an > example. No, I've not yet collected a cent that way.) I could see some > smart attorneys (*) filing a class action against AGIS, Earthlink, and > other spam-friendly ISPs. Existing law might work well. Spammers steal services and use fraud to further their activities. They use someone else's systems to send mail and post news, falsify headers and obtain accounts to use to perpetrate their fraud and evade everyone who complains or wishes to be removed from their lists. There has been a long standing agreement among ISP's and users alike that no one may use another's system without permission. At the very least, spammers are guilty of breach of contract, every time they use another's system to relay mail, whether they connect to it directly or indirectly. They cause damage to reputations of companies and individuals using such means by leading people to believe that the company condones spam or that the indvidual user is responsible by their act of falsifying headers. In some states, such acts are felonies or can be prosecuted in civil court under defamation laws. In some instances, they are also against federal laws under the ECPA. Some spammer activities, including the chain letters, pyramid and Ponzi schemes that flood newsgroups almost daily are prosecutable under federal criminal codes and postal regulations. People doing such things before NSF opened up commercial exploitation of the internet would be flamed, ostracized and even banned from internet access for years. One notable incident that I recall was a spammer who also send dozens of mail messages for a pyramid scheme from his university account. Responding to flames, he proclaimed his "Consititutional rights" and was quickly banned from computer access. He violated the ban and was expelled. (I would not be surprised if that was Spamford himself.) Though he threatened to sue, he just quietly disappeared. In addition to contract law, one may prosecute anyone who uses their systems without permission, including for mail relay or using an account contrary to the terms and conditions of service. But even these things must be tested by a court, even if you can get a district attorney or U.S. attorney to at least take a look at the matter. Unfortunately, for the vast majority (if not all) of prosecutors, this kind of thing is way over their heads. They would need a lot of hand-holding to get through such cases. (I'd rather file a civil case, personally, as most DA's and USA's don't really seem competent enough or qualified, let alone motivated to prosecute such cases.) Spammers and others whine about the "right to free speech" on the net. There is no right to free speech on the net, there never has been. It has been upheld in a court of law and by "stare decisis" in other courts of law. Some such cases have been thrown out of court before ever being heard. (If anyone has records or info about these cases, I hope they will share them with the group! I never kept the info. Some were posted in several newsgroups years ago, during the ARPAnet & NSFnet years and afterward.) Perhaps one might somehow induce a spammer to try to take their whinings to federal court so that he can get his dose of cold hard reality? onymouse@hypatia.com SPAM/Unsolicited commercial email is an unwanted expense. I think I should pass on the expense to the ones who imposed it on me and put an end their free ride in my pocketbook. [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: You ask what would I be willing to trade off to get rid of spam ... why should I have to trade anything? Simply clarify and/or adjust the current law to include computers in the existing prohibitions which apply to fax machines. Then when that law is adjusted/modified and you get spam in your mailbox you turn it over to the appropriate government bureaucrat with a request that when they have some personnel to spare -- maybe they could take someone who is searching Ted K's little shed in Montana looking for more typewriters, or maybe they could spare someone who works at the kiddie porn mail order operation the FBI operates in Florida -- they go out and give some grief to the sender of the spam. Why should I have to give up anything to get that little bit done? Simply ban it from being sent unsolicited as is done with faxes now. What did the owners of fax machines have to trade off in order to get some pro- tection? PAT] ------------------------------ From: bowenb@best.com (William H. Bowen) Subject: Re: Congressman Wants to Ban Spam Date: Thu, 22 May 1997 05:51:49 GMT Reply-To: bowenb@best.com tad@ssc.com (Tad Cook) wrote: > U.S. congressman wants ban on junk e-mail "spam" > WASHINGTON (Reuter) - A U.S. congressman Wednesday proposed a ban on > "spam", unsolicited junk electronic mail that he said was clogging up > the online baskets of internet users across the country. > New Jersey Republican Chris Smith said his "Netizens Protection Act of > 1997" would ban unsolicited commercial e-mail including get-rich-quick > schemes, unproven medical remedies and similar solicitations that can > cost recipients money by incurring online charges. > "This bill will help people not only with the nuisance of spam but the > costs as well," Smith said. > He said that anyone who chose to get the "spam" could still do so under > his bill, which would in effect be an extension of the 1991 Telephone > Consumer Protection Act banning unsolicited junk faxes. > The bill would not affect e-mail sent by friends and existing business > associates. Tad, Senator Murkowski introduced a bill today into the Senate (S771) for the same purpose. Check out his bill at his web site http://www.senate.gov/~murkowski I read the bill and it looks pretty good. The Senator's bill does not go the same way as the junk fax bill (banning it, which would most assuradly bring a 1st Amendment challange from the ACLU) but forces spammers to have their name, address and phone number in the body of the message, to use correct routing info (no "spoofed addresses) and mandate that the first word in the SUNJECT line be the word "advertisement", which would allow promail and other filter programs an easy way to identify spam and kill it, if desired. Anyway, go take a look at the bill, and, if it looks good to you, call your two Senators and get them to co-sponsor it! Regards, Bill Bowen bowenb@best.com P.S. Senator Murkowski has even provided a special link on his web site for emailed comments about the bill. [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: Someone should start sending aclu.org about six million bytes of junk mail daily. I wonder if they have ever seen what it looks like? Probably not; they have a bad habit of mouthing off about stuff they know nothing about. PAT] ------------------------------ From: brianm@ricochet.net (Diablo Cat) Subject: Re: Congressman Wants to Ban Spam Date: Thu, 22 May 1997 16:57:10 GMT Organization: Ever herd cats? On 22 May 1997 12:57:52 GMT, "Bruce Pennypacker" wrote: > Tad Cook wrote in article org>... >> U.S. congressman wants ban on junk e-mail "spam" >> WASHINGTON (Reuter) - A U.S. congressman Wednesday proposed a ban on >> "spam", unsolicited junk electronic mail that he said was clogging up >> the online baskets of internet users across the country. > There are actually two different proposals that were introduced yesterday. > This one from Chris Smith and one from a Senator in Alaska. You can find > the senators proposal at: My question, maybe someone knows, is what exactly is the definition of Spam email in this context. Is it unsolicited email, in which case how would that apply to an email which is in response to a news posting? Curiouser and curiouser ... Brian. D. Moffet, speaking for myself. But you should know that :-) [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: Read carefully Brian. Unsolicited email of a **commercial nature**. Furthermore, when you post in a newsgroup you are soliciting responses. PAT] ------------------------------ Date: Thu, 22 May 1997 17:25:22 EDT From: John R Levine Subject: Alert: Two Anti-Spam Bills in Congress; One Good, One Bad There are two anti-spam bills in progress now. One is an "opt-out" bill filed earlier this week by Sen. Murkowski of Alaska. The other is an "opt-in" amendment to the existing junk fax law to be filed shortly by Rep. Chris Smith of New Jersey. Both bills attempt to address the problems of spam, but unfortunately the Murkowski bill has several critical flaws that both make it ineffective and would impose huge extra costs on ISPs. Fortunately the Smith bill has none of these problems. The Murkowski bill: * Requires that advertisements be tagged "advertisement" and have valid contact info. * Requires that each advertiser maintain an opt-out list, with a 48 hour window permitted before acting on an opt-out request. * Requires that all ISPs provide filtering on incoming mail, with substantial fines if they don't. * Prescribes a variety of remedies, including a cumbersome proceeding before the Federal Trade Commission for ISPs accused of harboring spammers. The full text of the Murkowski bill is on the senator's web site at . This could be a disaster for ISPs. It does nothing to address the costs that spammers put on ISPs now, and adds unfunded mandates by requiring filtering of mail that nobody wanted in the first place. It also makes spam clearly legal, so the amount of spam will greatly increase. We already know the reasons opt-out doesn't work: each tiny spammer starts with an empty opt-out list, and they have an incentive to keep lousy records and lose opt-out requests. The simple filtering that the bill mandates would exclude all advertising mail, so it makes it much more difficult for existing legitimate opt-in businesses to operate since their mail would be filtered, too. The Smith bill, in contrast, is a short amendment to 47 USC 227, the existing junk fax law, to make unsolicited commercial e-mail illegal, with the same $500 civil penalty as currently applies to junk fax. It puts no new requirements on ISPs. Rather, it makes it incumbent on advertisers to sign up people affirmatively and to keep careful records of opt-in requests, so the advertisers bear the bulk of the cost. Legitimate e-mail advertisers already do these things. What you need to do: * Particularly if you run an ISP or other Internet-related business, call your representative and ask him or her to support and ideally co-sponsor the Smith bill. Tell him why the Murkowski bill would be bad for your business. * Senator Murkowski has asked for e-mail comments at commercialemail@murkowski.senate.gov. Remember, his goals are laudable, it's the implementation that has problems. Encourage him to adopt the language of the Smith bill. Incidentally, I hear that Cyber Promotions supports the Murkowski bill. Regards, John Levine, johnl@iecc.com, Primary Perpetrator of "The Internet for Dummies", Information Superhighwayman wanna-be, http://iecc.com/johnl, Sewer Commissioner Finger for PGP key, f'print = 3A 5B D0 3F D9 A0 6A A4 2D AC 1E 9E A6 36 A3 47 ------------------------------ From: stevenl@pe.net (Steven Lichter) Subject: 800 number/Spam Date: 22 May 1997 17:08:16 -0700 Organization: PE.net - Internet access from the Press-Enterprise Company It a continuing effort to let the largest amount of people know about all the new Internet options, like using your big screen TV, I am listing a 888 number that was sent to me by telecom@savetrees.com, I'm sure you all know who owns savetrees.com. The number is 888-800-4197 and the number is open between 8AM and 6PM Pacific time. I think eveyone should contact this company to find out about there new Internet options and also let them know what you think about the E-mail they send. The best way to do this is from a payphone or large PABX. Now don't abuse this as that is against the law. Any commercial E-mail to this address will be returned five million times. SysOp Apple Elite II and OggNet Hub (909)359-5338 2400/14.4 24 hours, Home of GBBS/LLUCE Support for the Apple II and Macintoch computers. [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: Thank you very much for calling this new number -- 888-800-4197 -- to everyone's attention. I also like your idea of returning the spam five million times; do you use a script of some sort to handle it? A better approach might be to start a mailing list. Every time you get spam, add the sender, his postmaster, his ISP, and other appropriate parties to your mailing list. Then send the new spam out to the entire list. Be sure and diddle up your own headers -- including the message-id line -- before you release it of course. This is just a variation of what we did years ago when all the spam came in the form of junk mail addressed to 'opportunity seekers' at our post office boxes. We would take the junk mail from one and stuff it in the Business Reply (postage paid) envelope of another. The only exception to this were the chain letters asking for money. We would take the entire thing, envelope and all, and put it in a larger envelope addressed to 'Postal Inspector at (sender's zip code)', with a note on the front of the new envelope saying 'illegal chain letter mail enclosed'. Of course we carefully obliterated any references to to our own address as the recipient of the mail; why get involved? Then just drop it in a mailbox without any postage. Don't worry, it will get delivered to the postal inspector at the town where it was mailed; why go to the added expense of adding postage stamps? If you did not want to spend the money on envelopes either, just obliterate your own name on the face of the existing envelope and use a bold, felt-tip pen to write 'Postal Inspector at ' on the existing envelope then drop it in a mailbox. If you decide to start a mailing list of inbound spam, sending it to other spammers so they can each read what others have written, you will want to automate the process as much as possible. Probably procmail or a similar package would work nicely. As each piece you see is approved for remailing to the list, you just pipe it through a script that rewrites the header after capturing what data it needs to add the sender to your mailing list. Be sure and circulate all their telephone numbers, especially 800 numbers. Now if you as the moderator of this list accidentally get the phone numbers mixed up so that the 800 number of one spammer is in the message of another equally (or more) obnoxious spammer, well it is just to bad if they call each other to complain; and they will since even spammers have some tolerance levels. Be sure to remove any commands in procmail or majordomo which allow for unsubscribing to the list. You don't want that. As a simple courtesy, be sure to add postmaster@aclu.org to the mailing list since it would appear they have never yet had the opportunity to read or get aquainted with the latest bunch of obnoxious creeps they'll be representing. Good luck with your new mailing list! And whatever you do, don't start adding a bunch of editorial commentaries to the bottom of messages sent by others. It isn't right for a moderator to give personal opinions. PAT] ------------------------------ Date: Thu, 22 May 1997 00:57:19 -0400 From: Ed Ellers Subject: Netizens Protection Act of 1997 The Associated Press reported tonight that Representative Chris Smith (R-New Jersey) has introduced a bill to extend the Telephone Consumer Protection Act to ban unsolicited commercial electronic mail as well as fax transmissions. [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: If it passes, let us just hope that the government will begin enforcing it. I understand they will be finished searching Ted K's shed sometime late this year so maybe those guys could be assigned to enforcement on this. PAT] ------------------------------ End of TELECOM Digest V17 #129 ******************************