----- Forwarded message from Declan McCullagh <declan@well.com> ----- 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 <<END; To: newsfeedback\@wired.com From: spammer\@spammer.com Subject: MAKE MONEY FAST! $1000 a Week, a FREE Car, and FREE Leads!!! Rule #1 PUT YOUR FRIENDS ON HOLD... do not sell to people you know until you are making money... I will give you more FREE leads than you can CALL... END close MAIL; ----- End forwarded message -----