[lug] off topic, spam laws

[D. Stimits]

One addition. I also find that 90% of these spammers use throw-away
accounts from places like hotmail.com, yahoo, or lycos. Having them shut
down is trivial, but the same spammer gets a new name and spams again
within minutes or hours of being shut down. A lot of people probably
hate this, but I would also suggest a need to make a legal requirement
of providers of free email accounts to gain proof of identity, e.g., via
fax or mail or even a scanned driver's license, before offering the
account. I do not suggest that it has to be any form of "strong" proof,
but there needs to be some way to mark individuals that do this repeated
throw-away spam-and-get-a-new-account-within-minutes routine. Having
some requirement that would even delay the free account for 24 hours
would be a great upset; having a way to remove individuals who violate
this from any throw-away account sources would also be a benefit. Adding
a cost to free account companies would certainly get their attention,
not so much by passing such legislation, but by merely having it show up
as a possibility. The fear of this kind of legislation would itself be
some motivation to have the free account people take some kind of
preventive action instead of waiting for the same person to violate spam
rules over and over.

D. Stimits, stimits at idcomm.com

"D. Stimits" wrote:
> 
> I am considering trying to get some legislation passed that would make
> it a criminal offense to forge headers during commercial advertisement.
> I am also thinking that due to the amount of foreign spam that is
> invading with no means to cut it off (along with accelerating
> quantities), which breaks local spam laws, there should be a means to
> submit these spammers to backbone routers at entry points to the USA and
> have their domains blocked. Basically, the toothless laws need some
> means of adding weight to those who ignore them, and there needs to be
> some form of non-civil recourse against those who purposely forge
> headers intending to use it as a pre-planned evasion of spam laws. The
> Constitition says one of our most fundamental rights is the right to be
> left alone, I do not believe the issue is as trivial or petty as it
> sounds. It is already a right of the state secretary of each state to
> deny all business operations to any outside business which would be
> against the welfare and laws of that state, and I don't think this
> requires any fundamental change in existing laws, but it does require a
> way to gain recourse.
> 
> If I were to try to do this, does anyone have any advice on where to
> look up the procedures related to this? Or advice URL's on how to do it
> successfully? What makes a good proposal format?
> 
> D. Stimits, stimits at idcomm.com
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