Internetworkers: http://www.ibiblio.org/internetworkers/

["Michael D. Thomas" <mdthomas AT mindspring.com>]

CAN-SPAM (S-630) is on it's way to the senate floor:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A33907-2002May17.html

The Post says that an amendment was made to prohibit the harvesting of email
addresses:

"The committee also approved an amendment from Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.)
that would make it illegal to send spam to an e-mail address that was
harvested from another Web site. "

Looked at the amendment and don't see how it would pertain to newsgroups or
email lists. It will make it illegal to harvest emails from eBay, which was
the point.

 But still, this amendment, combined with the Online Personal Privacy Act (the
act that Senator Lott is fighting), might have a strong regulatory effect on
the spam business from the supply side. Email addresses are included under the
definition of Personally Identifiable Information (PII) and the Online
Personal Privacy Act works to, among other things, regulate the disclosure of
PII gained online.

Most all of the pending anti-spam legislation I've seen gives the FTC
regulatory authority to punish spammers that obfuscate headers and/or spammers
that don't respect opt-out requests. The CAN-SPAM bill provides this, but
doesn't give consumers the right to sue such spammers, instead deferring that
ability to state Attorney Generals and ISPs. (HR-95 gives consumers the right
to sue.)

The bill, with the amendment:

http://www.spamlaws.com/federal/s630.html

The privacy bill:

http://thomas.loc.gov/cgi-bin/bdquery/z?d107:s.02201:

Slashdot on Lott's procedural moves against privacy bill:

http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=02/05/17/1822242