Zoe Lofgren, the Democratic congresswoman who represents parts of Silicon Valley, is generally thought to be a tech-savvy pol. Unlike some in Washington, she's long advocated a go-slow policy when it comes to regulating the Internet by opposing bills to curb online "indecency."
That's why it seemed like a bit of an about-face Thursday when Lofgren introduced a bill to control the apparent flood of "smut e-mail" being sent to kids these days. She says the bill, which requires sexually oriented e-mail ads to be tagged with a "universal electronic mark" so kids can filter it out, will go just far enough in keeping the Internet safe for kids.
But perhaps because Lofgren's measure lies somewhere in the middle of the road -- not very restrictive, not very libertarian -- there were few voices of support to be found: some said it did too little, others said it did too much.
"Currently, there is no good way parents can block (sexually explicit) solicitations," Lofgren said in a statement. "These advertisements often contain direct links to pornographic websites or sexually explicit chat rooms. These can put children at risk of being contacted by online sexual predators."
So Lofgren hit upon the idea of an "electronic tag" -- something that's electronically "indelible," and which could be recognized by e-mail software.
She has not determined the technical specifications for such a tag. Instead, her bill directs the National Institute of Standards and Technology -- a technology research agency under the Commerce Department -- to come up with such a system.
A spokesman for NIST declined to comment on the feasibility of the system, explaining that the agency had not yet seen any details.
A Lofgren staffer said that the congresswoman's desire for something to protect kids was sparked during congressional hearings over a recent anti-spam bill sponsored by Pennsylvania Republican Melissa Hart. Lofgren opposed that bill, saying it was too restrictive, but she did agree with one point that the anti-spam side made: children shouldn't get nasty spam.
Last May, a Hart spokesman said, "As it stands right now under current federal law, it's illegal to send sexually explicit material through the U.S. Postal Service. You have to have a disclaimer. Currently there's nothing to extend that to e-mail."
Lofgren's bill, a staffer said, only makes that postal mail rule apply to e-mail. She said that even the definitions of sexual explicitness are taken straight from the postal service, so there's little question here of this bill's constitutionality, she suggested.
But "the idea of this universal electronic mark is a little scary," said Lee Tien, a staff attorney at the Electronic Frontier Foundation. "It's like labeling, so we would say that this kind of use of technology is dangerous to free speech. Once you have this tagging methodology, you can say, 'We'll tag sexually explicit material,' then, 'Oh we'll tag religious material,' and then, 'Oh we'll tag X, Y, Z.' It's a general technology for permitting discrimination."
Then there was the other side of the issue, the one wanting spam stopped cold by the feds. John Mozena, the co-founder for the Coalition Against Unsolicited Commercial E-mail, said he was disappointed that "attention is being paid to the content (of a message) rather than the larger issue, which is that unsolicited e-mail is being sent out at all. We don't really care about the content of these messages -- we care about the harm in general being done by spam."
He added that the bill "implicitly codifies the right of people to send unsolicited e-mail at all. If you pass a law saying, 'When you're sending these ads, tag them a certain way,' it certainly says it's OK to send those kinds of ads if you don't have sexual content."
And there's a more practical problem, too: "This is just unenforceable," said Sonia Arrison, director of the Center for Freedom and Technology at the Pacific Research Institute for Public Policy, a libertarian think tank. She mentioned the difficulty of prosecuting foreign sex spammers, for example, or going after people who send millions of messages one day and then disappear off the face of the Net the next.
And of course, in order for this to work, a kid would have to make sure his software was blocking sexually tagged mail. One congresswoman's smut might be a 13-year-old's dream, and a kid just might not comply with the blocking directive.
Lofgren seems to know of this problem. During the spam hearings in May, a representative for the FCC informed her that it's now possible to sign kids up for free e-mail accounts that filter out dirty spam.
"Good luck on getting your 16-year-old to comply with that," she laughed.
