USA: legislation tackles spam

Pennsylvania Gov. Mark Schweiker has signed into law two bills that create new offenses and penalties for computer crimes.

House Bill 2614, sponsored by Rep. Ron Raymond (R-Delaware), establishes the Unsolicited Telecommunication Advertisement Act. Under the bill, a person may not initiate, conspire with another person to initiate, or assist a transmission of an unsolicited commercial electronic mail message or fax which includes false or misleading information in the return address portion of the electronic mail, fax or wireless advertisement so that the recipient would be unable to reply to the original sender of the message.

The legislation also prohibits a person from using a third party's Internet domain name without permission to send an unsolicited commercial message. This provision is potentially the most powerful. The Anti Money Laundering Network has taken the view that its domain names are intellectual property and obtained agreement from many spam companies that they will not send spam to any domain within the network. It has used the weight of threats of criminal prosecution and civil action for breach of intellectual property laws to have ISPs cancel spam operators accounts. However, this works only where there is a degree of responsibility on the part of the ISP. Where the ISP willingly permits open relay or spam sending (or in the case of some servers in, for example, Russia are set up for the express purpose of permitting "anonymised" spam to be sent, such co-operation is rare. Indeed, on Russian operator threatened to take counter-action. Shortly thereafter, several AML Net domains began to receive large volumes of pornographic images.

House Bill 2614 passed unanimously and takes effect immediately.

Senate Bill 1402, sponsored by Rep. Don White (R-Indiana), creates a new Computer Offenses Chapter to the Pennsylvania Crime Code, which provides for the new offenses of computer theft, unlawful duplication, computer trespass and unlawful transmission of electronic mail.

It also requires Internet service providers to remove or disable access to child pornography sites on the Internet.

This legislation also passed unanimously and takes effect in 60 days.