US antispam bill is death to anonymity

[John Gilmore]

> No, it only makes it illegal to use false or misleading information to
> send commercial e-mail.  That's a rather important distinction.

So, I get non-commercial emails all the time, from topica mailing
lists and from people forwarding New York Times articles and such.
They come with embedded ads, that the sender cannot turn off.  These
ads are for the benefit of the helper site (e.g. topica).  Are these
messages commercial email, or not?  Is the sender penalized if their
email address or domain name was registered with privacy-protecting
circumlocutions (like addresses and cities of "123 Main St, Smallville")?

So, I get emails at various times from people I've never met, saying,
"I hear that you give money for drug policy reform, would you give
some to my nonprofit X for project Y?"  Is that a commercial email?
It proposes a financial transaction.  Are these people subject to the
anti-spam bill?  Do they have to do anything different in their lives
if it passes?  I think they will.

The larger point is that people in the United States don't generally
have to closely examine the content of their daily communications,
to censor out any possible mention of commerce, money, business, finance,
products, services, etc, to avoid legal liability.  We have a First
Amendment right to communicate without being penalized for our
communications.  We also have a right to speak without the government
putting words in our mouth (like requiring us to put in keywords,
or include a postal return address.  That last requirement was
deliberatly knocked down by the Supreme Court within the last few years,
building on existing precedents that protected anonymous speech.)

> Don't take my word for what the bill says, read it yourself.  It's not
> that long.

He's right.  Congress should be commended for only spending 55 pages
on the details of this important topic.

> There's plenty of things wrong with it, but outlawing all
> anonymous mail isn't one of them.

No, but outlawing anonymizers *is* one of them.  Anyone who wants to
get an anonymizer shut down can just send a commercial email through it.

	John

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