The bill, sponsored by Sen. Gordon H. Smith, R-Ore., comes at the same time as a report from email filtering company Postini stating that spam now accounts for 92.6 percent of all email.
With its new spam-fighting jurisdiction under the U.S. Safe Web Act, the FTC can now investigate the origin of email scammers in multiple countries by tracking email servers and other nefarious methods of concealing point of origin, particularly in cases where spammers route their attacks through several different countries. The FTC also can seek assistance from foreign law enforcement.
In response to the passing of the bill, the FTC said it will focus on illegal spam and scam operations originating out of Africa, Southeast Asia and Eastern Europe.
The FTC was formerly able to pursue foreign spammers but not to the extent that it is now.
"Commerce has gone global and so fraud follows," said Lydia Parnes of the FTC's Bureau of Consumer Protection.
The FTC had been lobbying Congress for several years to obtain such unlimited power in the fight against foreign spam operations, and in 2005 it produced a 32-page report making a plea for the power to break through geographic and legal boundaries so far restricted by U.S. law.
Security firm McAfee recently stated that spam has risen at a rapid rate, indicating how much the digital underworld has developed this past year, and with it the higher degree of damage scams or virus-infected email can have on PC users.
"There's less focus on what is the top virus," Paul King, a senior security advisor for Cisco, told the BBC. “To be quite honest it does not really matter because the criminals just do what works."
