Washington's "spam-killing" statute: Does it slaughter privacy in the process?

In 1998, the Washington Legislature passed an historic law prohibiting the sending of commercial e-mail messages containing false or misleading inform ation in the subject line or header. The law also permits companies that pr ovide Internet services, known as Internet Service Providers (ISPs), to blo ck the transmission or receipt of messages reasonably believed to violate t he statute. However, the law fails to specify the permissible activities th at an ISP may pursue to form such a reasonable belief. It thereby encourage s a variety of intrusive ISP activities, such as message screening. Existin g statutory and constitutional privacy law provides the only shield for an e-mail subscriber against invasive ISP activities. This Comment argues that these existing privacy laws fail to provide meaningful protection to e-mai l subscribers from the potential abuses of their ISPs. The Comment recommen ds legislative action to amend the anti-spam law by explicitly limiting the ways in which an ISP may develop its "reasonable belief" that a particular e-mail message violates the anti-spam statute.