The CAN SPAM act required that the Federal Trade Commission report back after a year, which they did, releasing the report almost as an afterthought with a press release about some international anti-spam enforcement at http://www.ftc.gov/opa/2005/12/buttonpushers.htm.

The goals of the CAN SPAM act were to make life better for large bulk mailers, and to make it somewhat easier to go after the crooks. (Note that stopping UBE or UCE isn't in that list.) It did both of those reasonably well, as the FTC documents. They then go on to say that one thing it didn't do was to give them the authority to work closely with other governments to deal with spammers active in multiple countries, and they suggest some legislation to do so. We think it's fine to give the FTC better international enforcement powers, but it's no substitute for an actual anti-spam law.

One of the CAUCE board members has further thoughts in his blog at http://weblog.johnlevine.com/Email/ftcreport.html.

CAUCE Canada, CAUCE U.S., and Asia-Pacific CAUCE (APCAUCE) have joined the London Action Plan (LAP). The LAP is a project started by government consumer protection agencies like the US Federal Trade Commission, the UK Office of Fair Trading, and the our governmental contingent includes both Industry Canada and the Competition Bureau. Many European and Asian governments participate as well.

CAUCE looks forward to working with the various governments to help enforce the anti-spam laws that exist, to better understand how the laws do and don't work, and to learn how better laws might be written.

CAUCE Chair Neil Schwartzman attended the meetings in London in October, 2005.

We've also joined the Anti-Spyware Coalition, a group of makers of anti-spyware software and public interest groups. The ASC is hoping to build consensus about definitions and best practices in the area of spyware and other unwanted technologies. The group is made up of representatives from the Center for Democracy & Technology, the Canadian Internet Policy and Public Interest Clinic, AOL, Microsoft, McAfee, Symantec and many others.

While spyware isn't CAUCE's direct area of concern, the legal remedies overlap with those against spam, and the bits of the government that address spyware are the same ones that address spam. The ASC has had several private meetings to work on policy; Neil Schwartzman and John Levine attended the meetings held in Chicago and Berkeley, California in recent months.

The ASC will be holding public events on February 9, 2006 in Washington D.C. and on May 16, 2006 in Ottawa.

In late September, California enacted a new SB 97, a new version of the 2003 spam law that was overridden by CAN SPAM before it went into effect. Both spam bills and the phishing bills were introducted by Sen. Kevin Murray, one of a handful of state legislators with an interest in online commerce.

The new law basically reconstitutes what it can of the old law that isn't preempted. CAN SPAM says states can make fraudulent e-mail more illegal, so that's what it does. If a commercial e-mail advertisement uses a third party domain name without permission, or has forged header information, or a misleading subject line, it's illegal in California. More interestingly, any of the recipient, the recipient ISP, or the Attorney General can sue for $1000 per message, up to a million dollars per incident.

On Thursday the 22nd, Robert Braver, an Oklahoma ISP owner who is a long time activist against both spam and junk faxes received a default judgement of over $10 million against high profile spammer Robert Soloway and his company Newport Internet Marketing. Soloway has frequently been cited as one of the ten largest spammers in the world.

Braver originally filed his case in state court, but Soloway moved the case to Federal court earlier this year. Soloway was initially represented by attorneys, but the attorneys withdrew from the case and since then, although Solway said he'd be representing himself, he hasn't responded in the case, although he has been actively sending comments about it to usenet and mailing lists.

Did you get e-mail asking you to contribute to Katrina relief? Unfortunately, many such requests are fraudulent. After every natural disaster in recent years, spammers have always sent fake appeals, preying on the good intentions of generous Americans. It happened after the tsunami, and it was sadly predictable that it would happen now.

FEMA, the Federal Emergency Management Agency has a web page listing reputable organizations accepting donations. We encourage you to check their list before donating to a charity that you're not already familiar with.