When Senate Judiciary Committee Orrin Hatch (R-Utah) isn't suggesting he'd go for technology letting copyright holders destroy peer-to-peer file swappers' computers, he's joining his committee's ranking minority member, Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-Vermont) in rolling out a bill criminalizing computer hacking for spamming.
“The abusive practices of fraudulent spammers threaten to choke the lifeblood of the electronic age,” Hatch said June 19 in rolling out the Criminal Spam Act." Hatch said current federal law doesn't fully take on identity concealment, Internet filter evasion, and other spam tactics, not to mention that current federal law doesn't address spam promoting porn, pirated software, "questionable" health and medical products, and get-rich-quick scams.
The Hatch-Leahy bill would make it a crime for spammers to hack into computers, or use computers their owners make available for other reasons, to conduct spam. It would also ban bulk e-mailing that conceals its actual source, destination, routing, or authentication for the e-mail, or comes from multiple e-mail accounts or domains that fake the spammer's identity.
Those convicted if the bill becomes law would face up to five years behind bars if their spam was done "in furtherance of any felony, or where the defendant has previously been convicted of a similar federal or state offense," and up to three years behind bars "where other aggravating factors exist." And the bill would allow for enhanced sentences if the defendants in question got their target e-mail addresses by way of harvesting or data mining.
Leahy joined Hatch to say spam threatens "to undermine the vast potential of the Internet to foster the free exchange of information and commerce.
“Our bill targets the four principal techniques that spammers use to evade filtering software and hide their trails," he continued. "Ridding America’s inboxes of deceptively delivered spam will significantly advance our fight to clear electronic channels for legitimate communications.”
The bill would also give the Justice Department and Internet service providers authority to sue spammers, and would direct the White House to work with international forums and bodies to get other countries' cooperation to hunt and prosecute spammers around the world.
Co-sponsors include Republican Sens. Charles Grassley (Iowa) and Mike DeWine (Ohio) and Democrats John Edwards (North Carolina), Dianne Feinstein (California), and Charles Schumer (New York).
"Recent years have witnessed extraordinary technological advances. These innovations, and electronic communications in particular, have significantly increased the efficiencies, productivity and conveniences of our modern world," Hatch said on the Senate floor, while introducing the bill. "The abusive practices of fraudulent spammers threaten to choke the lifeblood of the electronic age. This is a problem that warrants swift but deliberative legislative action."
This was two days after Hatch fell under fire for suggesting, during questioning at a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing on intellectual property and peer-to-peer file swapping, that technology might yet be developed to let copyright holders destroy P2P swappers' computers.
Several legal and technological analysts and experts denounced the comments, some pointing out that it would be against current anti-hacking law to do so. Hatch subsequently offered a mild pullback from his original comments, saying he only favored the tactic as a last, not a first, resort.
Hatch and Leahy rolled out their bill on the same day that the Senate Commerce Committee approved an earlier anti-spam proposal, from Sens. Conrad Burns (R-Montana) and Ronald Wyden (D-Oregon), that would slap a spammer behind bars for a year with a maximum $1 million fine for using deceptive or misleading headers or subject lines.
