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No federal laws to slow down 'spam'

By LOU MARANO
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WASHINGTON, Jan. 3 (UPI) -- No federal law regulates those annoying and objectionable e-mails most of us are bombarded with daily, government officials said Thursday. And while reputable companies will remove you from their distribution lists if asked, "spammers" take any response as confirmation of a live address.

"We don't have any authority," Thomas Wyatt, associate chief of the Federal Communications Commission's Consumer Information Bureau told United Press International. "We often get calls from consumers, and we encourage them to contact their Internet service provider about ways to screen certain types of e-mail."

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Claudia Farrell, a Federal Trade Commission spokeswoman, said the FTC Act gives the commission authority over deceptive and unfair practices affecting commerce, but it is not written for spam. The FTC does invite consumers to forward disreputable e-mails to [email protected], however.

"The e-mails get put into a database that is keyword searchable," FTC staff attorney Jennifer Mandigo told UPI. "We've used the database to generate cases against spammers, and we plan to continue to use against those who are using the medium to disseminate false or misleading claims about products or services. The software was just installed a few months ago, and it can be tailored to what we want to do."

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John Levine, author of "The Internet for Dummies," said in a phone interview from Trumansburg, N.Y., the law does not require spammers to provide a removal option. "There's a lot of folklore" about this, he said. "Federal law says nothing about spam. The only federal law they're breaking is what they're selling is presumably fraudulent. But that's the same as if they were distributing handbills."

The spam problem has been growing for about the past seven years, Levine said. "Back when the Internet was entirely research and academia, there was no spam because there were no anonymous users.

"Spam exists because recipients pay for e-mail. So you could send a whole lot of it basically for free." Those who pay a fixed rate to their Internet service providers should not think they escape this charge, Levine said.

"Your Internet provider is actually spending quite a lot of money to receive e-mail for you. ... It has to have a server running, it has to receive the mail, it has to store it for you, it has to be prepared for you to pick it up." This requires increasingly large storage disks. "And these days a lot of providers also attempt to do filtering," Levine said.

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As much as one-third of all e-mail sent is spam. Setting up a dial-up account and sending out several hundred thousand or 1 million e-mails "is depressingly easy."

Most of the offers are scams, Levine said. "Because the stuff they're selling is worthless, they can't actually afford to spend any money to advertise it. E-mail also happens to be unusually anonymous.

"Typically, they will sign up with an Internet provider that gives you a free month, or they will use a stolen or forged credit card number. And they will pump the stuff out for a few days until the provider notices what's going on and shuts them off. They they'll come back and do it again."

How do spammers get your address?

The traditional approach, Levine replied, is called "Webscraping" -- i.e., software that picks out anything that looks like an e-mail address. "These days they're also doing something called 'dictionary attacks,'" Levine explained. Because large providers have so many addresses (AOL alone has 25 million), if one makes up some combination of four letters followed by three digits, the chances of it being a real address are about one percent. Levine termed this success rate "not bad" because undeliverable e-mail carries no penalty for spammers.

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Levine is on the board of the Coalition Against Unsolicited Commercial E-Mail, "a virtual organization with no budget and no meetings; we do everything by e-mail." The coalition has been trying to get passed a national law against spam similar to the one enacted against junk faxes.

"Ten years ago, people had terrible problems with junk faxes. You'd show up in the morning, and your entire roll of fax paper would be on the floor full of ads for more fax paper." Congress passed a short, simple law saying you can't fax an ad to someone who hasn't asked for it. "And if you do, the recipient can sue you in small claims court for $500." Enough people have sued to deter "all but the major sleazeballs."

Sometimes, in an attempt to reduce spam, Internet service providers inadvertently filter out important e-mail, such as notification of college admissions. "Sometimes they guess wrong," Levine said.

How much spam you get is a function of how long you've had the same e-mail address. Levine, who has had the same address since 1993, gets about 100 unsolicited messages daily. "I'm on every spam list ever invented," he said.

"Since spammers really don't want to get your complaints, the return address is always a fake. Occasionally, it's a way of collecting addresses of live suckers." Therefore, it's important not to ask to be removed from the mailing list of an unknown solicitor but simply to delete the message.

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Levine said he and his associates have an image of spammers "working out of rusty trailers somewhere littered with buckets full of chicken bones. The few we've been able to track down are on the fringes of society, and they tend to be people with nothing to lose."

The Direct Marketing Association opposes laws to regulate spam, Levine said.

Jerry Cerasale, senior vice president of government affairs for the Direct Marketing Association, said his group is very fearful of government regulation of "speech" on the Internet, "which is basically borderless."

He said the association agrees with legislative prohibition of fraudulent header information, which spammers insert to circumvent ISP filters. "Our guidelines say you can't lie to people, you have to tell them who you are, and you have to give them a choice to say, 'I don't want you to contact me anymore.'"

However, Cerasale said the association favors self-regulation over legislation.

What about legislation analogous to the fax law now in effect?

"I think that creates a free-speech problem that inhibits contact on the Internet," Cerasale said. "If America can ban a company from contacting me, is that any different from France or China banning a person from contacting me?"

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