X-SciTech

You've Got....Spam!

By CBSNews.com staff CBSNews.com staff

September 10, 2001 / 6:05 PM EDT / CBS

A Colorado state law intended to stop junk e-mails — or spamming — is not working, reports CBS News Correspondent Lee Frank.

Sending unsolicited ads or other unwanted e-mail to people in Colorado is illegal, but you'd never know it. The state law passed more than one year ago has not had any noticeable effect.

That's because the state government has no enforcement authority. About all you can do is complain to your Internet provider or to the company sending that unwanted e-mail.

Even the man who led the unsuccessful fight against spamming says he still gets dozens of unwanted junk e-mails each week.

Rep. Shawn Mitchell says computer users still have to manually delete unwanted mail or set up software to control it. He also admitted it would require too much government intervention to make the law work.

Stewart Levin, a concerned parent who helped get the law passed, also concedes it has not helped. Levin said he still receives up to three dozen junk e-mails per week at his home computer, including plenty of risqué ads that he doesn't want his children to see. Levin has purchased two filtering systems to screen out the junk.

"As a concerned parent with teen-age and preteen kids, I was worried that they were getting more and more crude spam e-mails," said Levin, a geophysicist from Englewood, who testified last year in legislative hearings. "I wanted to draw a line in the sand and say enough is enough."

The law made Internet service providers responsible for protecting consumers from unwanted messages by suing the so-called spammers who bombard the cyber-networks with junk mail. That hasn't happened.

"Relying on private lawsuits hasn't made much of a difference," concedes Mitchell, a Republican attorney from Broomfield.

Colorado's deputy attorney general for consumer affairs, Garth Lucero, says the law is not very practical since the government has no enforcement authority.

"One of the issues with a law like this is without some fairly hard-hitting remedies there are no incentives for private parties to take on a commercial entity that engages in a violation of a state statute," he said.

"As a practical matter, trying to track down the commercial entity doing the spamming is very difficult and expensive," Lucero said. "With limited resources, the average consumer isn't going to have a lot of luck doing an investigation and identifying the company and its officers and principles and serving papers down in, say, Miami."

Levin said he doesn't believe the law was a wasted effort. He said it paves the way for possible federal legislation or perhaps an international enforcement mechanism.