New subject: Rep. Bob Goodlatte wants to make this email message illegal

24 Mar 2001

      ----- 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 <

[declan@well.com: Rep. Bob Goodlatte wants to make this email message illegal]

Declan McCullagh

Tim May

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