----- 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
WASHINGTON -- Rep. Bob Goodlatte does not want you to read this
article.
The conservative Virginia Republican, who is co-chairman of the
Congressional Internet Caucus, hopes to punish the publication or
redistribution of columns such as this with a $15,000 fine and up to
one year in federal prison.
Why? Because I've included a short Perl program that could be used to
spam -- and it seems certain to be banned under a bill that Goodlatte
has recently introduced.
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."
It's part of a knee-jerk reaction against unsolicited e-mail on
Capitol Hill, and it follows in the footsteps of the Digital
Millennium Copyright Act, which movie studios have used in an
unsuccessful bid to rid the Net of a DVD-descrambling program.
Goodlatte -- who is chairman of the House Republican High Technology
Working Group -- has spent years lobbying to make it easier to export
encryption products, but also was a vocal supporter of the DMCA and
the Communications Decency Act.
This time around, instead of making it a crime to spam, Goodlatte has
decided to amend existing law to ban spamware, but since the bill is
worded so broadly, it might imperil other programmers instead. That's
not a surprise: Software is flexible stuff, and it's tricky to ban
some applications without going too far. Other potential problems
include that Goodlatte's bill can't remove spamware hosted overseas
and could run afoul of the First Amendment.
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. It's been
slightly altered, but it was originally written as a legitimate
autoresponder CGI script that worked by forging the From: line of an
e-mail message:
#!/usr/bin/perl
open (MAIL,"| /usr/lib/sendmail -t -oi");
print MAIL <
