CAUCE North America Debuts - New anti-spam advocacy group combines CAUCE
Canada and CAUCE US

Montreal and Los Angeles, June 06, 2007 -- Neil Schwartzman, chair of CAUCE
Canada, and Scott Hazen Mueller, chair of CAUCE U.S., today announced the
formation and launch of CAUCE North America to build upon the work of their
previously separate organizations.

CAUCE North America is now the premiere anti-spam advocacy group,
representing the interests of the millions of Internet users in North
America. The combined group will work towards equitable solutions for the
original threat posed by spam since the 20th century, and Spam 2.0, the
21st-century blended threat posed by the merging of spam, viruses, phishing
and malware.

"When we launched the original CAUCE, back in 1997," said Scott Hazen
Mueller, founder of CAUCE U.S. and now President of CAUCE North America,
"spam was an isolated problem and it was seen by many as unimportant. Now,
spam is part of a multi-pronged assault by various criminal organizations
attacking the very basis of trust on the Internet. If this threat is not
met soon, users will continue to migrate away from the Internet for their
commercial needs."

press contact: press@cauce.org

Tel . +1 303 800 6345

We were shocked, not so very many years ago, when AOL reported that spam was 30% of their incoming mail. Now, some of the world's largest ISPs report that it's well beyond 80% -- in some cases higher -- and increasing.

Back then we knew who the spammers were, they stayed in one place and thought of themselves as "high volume" email marketers -- but now, the leaders of the email marketing industry know they must respect permission, and can't engage in the spammy behavior of their predecessors. We predicted that a private right of action in civil court would be sufficient to keep those same marketers in line, and now we know that's correct -- but today, much of the spam volume is sent by career criminals and malicious hackers who won't stop until they're all rounded up and put in jail.

Reuters reports that a UK appeals court ruled that an English 18-year old who sent five million spams to a company who had fired him had indeed broken the law. The judge said that "while a computer user might consent to being sent some e-mails, that consent did not extend to receiving a barrage of such messages."

This may seem obvious, but it wasn't to a lower court, which now has to reconsider the case and what penalty to assess.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20060511/wr_nm/crime_britain_spam_dc

Australia has an excellent anti-spam law, the Spam Act 2003. The Minister for Communications, Information Technology and the Arts, Senator Helen Coonan has called for public submissions as part of a review of the Spam Act 2003, to be completed by April 2006.

"The Australian Spam Act is internationally recognized as a leading legislative model to crack down on the scourge of spam that is overloading people's in-boxes and causing great frustration," Senator Coonan said. "Since the Act came into effect, many professional spammers that had been based in Australia have either shut up shop or left the country."

Australia's Spam Act applies to commercial electronic messages which include spam sent via email, SMS, Instant Messaging and Multimedia Messaging Service.

For more info, see http://www.dcita.gov.au/ie/spam_home/spam_act_review.

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.