Two pending Congressional bills show that attacks can creep in from unexpected corners. Neither bill abridges privacy in itself, but both set precedents that can be unsettling if you've followed the history of privacy abuses. As its name indicates, it concerns itself mostly with unethical marketing practices in the telephone industry. If you have electronic mail, you probably are either sick of UCE or have taken extraordinary measures to rid yourself of it. Since UCE is defined fairly narrowly by the bill, I think the application of this clause to UCE does no harm.
Commercial speech deserves regulation.
But we must look carefully every time someone encroaches on the right to anonymity, as this bill does. Anonymous email is a traditional haven provided by the Internet. Many therapeutic newsgroups are visited by recovering drug users, alcohol abusers, and victims of rape or child abuse, often using anonymous remailers or other technical means to disguise the sources of their mail. Anonymity is also reputed to be valuable for whistle-blowers, although the only incidents I know of its use for this purpose were the posting of internal Church of Scientology documents by its critics. None of this is prevented by the Anti-slamming Act, but legislators need to remain sensitive to the value of anonymity.