Two Utah members of Congress were especially proud as President Bush signed Tuesday the CAN-SPAM act. Sen. Orrin Hatch and Rep. Chris Cannon, both R-Utah, had helped negotiate and push the bill.
Hatch added amendments to it that created new felonies for various spam-related activities, including sending bulk commercial e-mail with the intent to disguise the sender, and hacking into computers.
Hatch said Tuesday, "According to the FTC, 66 percent of spam contains some kind of false, fraudulent or misleading information, and approximately 90 percent of all spam sent world wide is 'untraceable' to the sender.
"By concealing their identities, spammers succeed in evading Internet filters, luring consumers into opening messages and preventing consumers, ISPs and investigators from tracking them down to stop the unwanted messages," Hatch said.
Hatch, chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, said the bill is "an important first step, but it is certainly not the end" — and virtually all members of his committee have vowed to work together to further attack spam and Internet pornography that reaches children.
Cannon, meanwhile, was among a small group of House members who pushed anti-spam legislation for years, and helped negotiate the final bill.
"I started working on a spam bill my first term," said Cannon, now in his fourth term. "This bill does quite a bit. While I am deeply reluctant to do anything to regulate the Internet, I and about everyone else — except pornographers — saw the need to cut spam. I mean, my own wife says she hates to look in her e-mail in box because of all the trash."
Cannon was among a handful of members of Congress whom President Bush invited to the bill signing on Tuesday.