Don’t you (Mortgage Insurance!) hate it (Airline Tickets!) when (Get Out of Debt!) your thoughts (Free Recipes!) are constantly (Government Giveaways!) interrupted?

 For millions of Americans who use email to communicate with family, friends, business associates, and customers, spam has posed a growing problem.

 The Internet company AOL blocks more than one billion messages every day.

 At possibly trillions of unwanted messages every year – spam is beyond annoyance.  Unwanted email accounts for 50 percent of the email traffic in the world – costing businesses, consumers, and email users billions of dollars each year.  Spam needlessly occupies space on servers, clogs the networks that distribute email, wastes the time of Americans at work, and forces us to buy filters to stop spam and clean up after the viruses it leaves behind.

 Unsolicited email disrupts our use of the Internet for business, education, and recreation.  Apartment dwellers get ads for mortgage insurance.  Cat owners get solicitations for dog medicine.  And, much worse, children receive spam full of lewd content. 

 A few Americans profit from spam.  They are hired guns for companies that sell everything from airline tickets to computer software to life insurance.  Operating from places as obscure as their own basements, they acquire lists of email addresses, which they use to distribute millions of messages each day. 

 Earlier this month, spammers even unleashed an email “worm” virus against anti-spam organizations.  The virus barrages computer users with crippling amounts of data, knocking the user off-line and turning computers into useless “zombies.”  Then, infected email addresses receive an email telling them that the CD of child pornography they ordered is ready to be shipped.  Sending spam is in many cases linked to other similar types of criminal activity.

 So, for those Southern Missourians who have been asking me why the government can help stop the onslaught of telemarketing phone calls but can accomplish nothing to stop spam – I now have an answer.
 

Before recessing for the year, the House of Representatives passed a bill that would send the most egregious spammers to jail while punishing offenses with millions of dollars in civil fines.  Also, similar to the new law against unsolicited telemarketing, this legislation would create a “do not spam” list.

 Instead of banning spam outright (and making a new law vulnerable to court challenges), this bill forces spammers to comply with the wishes of Americans to “opt out” of receiving unwanted email. 

 Right now, if an Internet user replies to a junk email, the response usually goes to a forged,  unattended, or nonexistent email address.  If the response to the request to unsubscribe is in fact received, it is disregarded.  The spam sender uses such responses only to compile lists of “active” email addresses, which demand a higher price in the marketplace where they operate.

 Under the bill passed in the House and now awaiting action in the Senate, junk email senders would be required to register valid email addresses as well as physical mail addresses.  Spammers who hide their email addresses or ignore the wishes of Americans who wish to “opt out” would face up to five years in prison and up to $2 million in fines, up to $6 million in fines for repeat offenders.

 The greatest deterrent to spam in the bill is the clause mandating that commercial email senders register verifiable email and U.S. Mail addresses.  Right now, junk email senders only operate because they can do so anonymously – freeing them from the same influx of irritating messages they willfully impose upon others for profit.
 As American society becomes more technologically adept, we must guard the privacy of our computer resources and prevent the Internet from slipping into inefficiency.  Spam is a 21st Century parasite, threatening the health of the Internet and the future of telecommunications.

 We must always work harder to make the Internet a safe place for Americans to work, play, and go to school.  Without the expense and interruption created by spam, we can return computers to their intended purposes – to help make us more productive!