HB 82-COMMERCIAL ELECTRONIC MAIL  CHAIR BUNDE announced HB 82 to be up for consideration. REPRESENTATIVE KEVIN MEYER, sponsor of HB 82, told members HB 82 prohibits individuals from sending unsolicited e-mail that contains sexually explicit material unless the subject heading contains the communication "add:adlt". Nine other states require this same heading for sexually explicit e-mail and other states have pending legislation. Some people call this a consumer protection bill, but he calls it a children's protection bill. He said society tries to protect children from getting this type of material by requiring them to be 18 to go to an R-rated movie or an adult bookstore. Yet children can open their e-mail and see everything we are trying to protect them from. In summary, this bill does two good things. By requiring certain letters in the subject line, adults can start deleting those e-mails or tell their kids not to open them. Parents can also set up a filtering system to pick up that subject heading and prevent delivery of that e-mail. CHAIR BUNDE asked how it could be enforced and how out-of-state violators would be prosecuted. REPRESENTATIVE MEYER replied the Department of Law has received a lot of complaints on this matter. The Department of Law could pursue it or individuals could take action themselves. MR. ED SNIFFEN, Assistant Attorney General, supported HB 82 in its current form. He said it has no legal problems, but enforcement is a trickier problem and could go only so far out- of-state. The Department of Law's normal procedure is to find out as much about the sender as possible, send them cease and desist letters and hope the sender takes them seriously. This bill would give the department another tool to use. He said the department really can't stop people who thumb their nose at the law in this instance, but he hopes this legislation would target the majority of legitimate e-mail operators. He pointed out the bill contains language about computers and e- mail within the state. However, a lot of companies would send e- mail messages without this header to folks in Alaska who have yahoo.com addresses because there's no way a sender can identify that those addresses are located in Alaska. CHAIR BUNDE said he hopes other states enact similar legislation and squeeze out the offenders. SENATOR SEEKINS moved to pass CSHB 82(L&C) from committee with individual recommendations. SENATORS DAVIS, SEEKINS, FRENCH, STEVENS AND BUNDE voted in favor and CSHB 82(L&C) moved from committee.