Rep. Bob Goodlatte wants to make this email message illegal

At 12:54 PM -0500 3/24/01, Declan McCullagh wrote:

----- Forwarded message from Declan McCullagh -----

http://www.wired.com/news/politics/0,1283,42599,00.html

Use a Spam, Go to Prison by Declan McCullagh (declan@wired.com) 2:00 a.m. Mar. 24, 2001 PST

....

Goodlatte's Anti-Spamming Act of 2001 allows the Secret Service to police software that "is designed or produced primarily for the purpose of concealing the source or routing information of bulk unsolicited electronic mail messages."

Some nice implications for remailers, eh? Lawyers may argue what "designed or produced primarily" means, and may argue that remailers have non-spam uses, and they may even cite numbers of political messages vs. numbers of commercial and spam messages, but this will be an expensive battle which most remailer operators in the U.S. will not choose to fight. Also, some Reichstag Fire provocateurs may start using remailers to spam with just as they have, in all likelihood, been doing with their "How to Make Bombz" and "Lolitas Being Snuffed" messages. Ah, at least Canada is a place where there are no such laws, so ZKS is safe.... Whoops, scratch that last point.

A second section of his anti-spam measure says it's illegal to distribute software that "has only limited commercially significant purpose or use other than to conceal such source or routing information."

That could cover utilities like the Perl script below.

And this clause even more attacks the remailers and their authors. As we have been saying for many years: commercial speech _is_ just speech. America went down the wrong fork in the road when it decided that some types of speech, like promoting the smoking of a brand of cigarettes, was not as protected as other types of speech. (Lest anyone think the restrictions apply only to FCC-regulated things like television and radio, billboards and magazine ads are affected as well. Even if not banned outright, advertisers are forced to provide warnings, precisely analogous to the recent proposals that certain Web pages would have to contain links to "opposing points of view" or even to some "public.net" place where politically correct truth would be maintained at public expense.) More than just "commercial speech _is_ just speech," so is the spending of money. The phrase "to utter a check" is one such pithy expression of this (possibly coined by Eric Hughes, possibly in usage before his usage). This point is most directly relevant to Cypherpunks in the context of attempts to ban untraceable spending, but is also of direct relevance in the current "campaign financing" yipyap. Whom I spend my money on is my political speech. A remailer is just another speaker. (And lest anyone doubt this, recall my semi-serious point that remailers call themselves "re-commenters" and include a line like "Does anyone have any comments on what this article included below is talking about?" Any attempt to ban speech not traceable to a person must deal with the issue of how it then bans speech which includes such speech. A quibble, but such is the way censorship spreads.) --Tim May -- Timothy C. May tcmay@got.net Corralitos, California Political: Co-founder Cypherpunks/crypto anarchy/Cyphernomicon Technical: physics/soft errors/Smalltalk/Squeak/agents/games/Go Personal: b.1951/UCSB/Intel '74-'86/retired/investor/motorcycles/guns