For one thing, it's called the Stop Pornography and Abusive Marketing (SPAM) Act. For another, its chief author is a liberal Democrat who was joined to announce the bill formally by the conservative Christian Coalition. And, for a third, critics fear it opens a loophole that would still let some other industry groups keep up the spam without placing "ADV" on their messages.
U.S. Sen. Charles Schumer (D-New York) and the Christian Coaltion announced the new proposal June 12, a bill that would create a national Do Not Spam registry of e-mail addresses and give spam recipients the right to sue spammers for $1,000 per message. It would also require spam to include "ADV" in subject lines, signifying the message is an advertisement, as opposed to the dozens of benign and deceptive subject lines by which today's spammers usually practice their controversial craft.
"The avalanche of pornography being sent to kids by spammers makes checking e-mail on par with watching an X-rated movie," said Schumer in a statement after announcing the bill. "America's children have been under attack for a long time, from violent TV shows, racy music videos and now pornographic spam. The V-chip gave parents control of the TV. My SPAM Act will give them control over the computer."
Agreed, said Christian Coalition president Roberta Combs. The SPAM Act will "go a long way to stop the filth of pornography junk e-mail that our children and grandchildren are receiving every day on the Internet," she said before the formal announcement.
Schumer's may seem like only the latest in a small tide of anti-spam legislation making state and federal rounds of late, but his is the only such bill that would let the spammed hit back with litigation against their spammers. But it has people like ePrivacyGroup.com worried about whether the bill would be tantamount to inviting Jesse James to guard the nation's currency - because the SPAM Act would require the Federal Trade Commission to create the registry, which the FTC has been working toward recently, and give copies to marketers to help compliance.
That, said ePrivacyGroup consultant Ray Everett-Church to reporters, would leave too much room for the list to get into the wrong hands. "If that list falls into the wrong hands," he said, adding that keeping it out of those hands will take "enormous" resources and security, "it would be an extremely valuable list. There are a lot of practical management and security issues that would have to be addressed before people would trust a do-not-spam list."
That isn't stopping the Christian Coalition from getting behind Schumer's bill. "(We) urge all Senators to become cosponsors of this bipartisan commonsense legislation for the sake of our children," Combs said. "All American parents have to be frightened when the FTC is reporting that 47% of children do not tell their parents when the unwanted pornography appears on their computers. I urge the U.S. Senate to act immediately to end the blight of unwanted Internet pornography."
