Tracy Shapiro, an attorney for the FTC's Advertising Practices Division, said the federal watchdog would like to see legislation that increases civil penalties against cyber-criminals, but it feels that the new bills could eventually get in its way in bringing accused spyware companies to trial. Section V of the Federal Trade Commission Act remains broad enough to provide for continued prosecution of the most significant offenders, including spyware providers, she said.

"In general there doesn't need to be a law specifically outlining spyware. There's a danger in saying 'no keystroke logging' because that's too specific and someone might look at the law and say another practice is OK," said Shapiro. "Sometimes it's hard to craft legislation to address specific types of technologies; it seems like a good argument against new laws if we can get judgments already."

In addition to the potential to create loopholes by limiting their scope to existing threats, the specific nature of the bills could make them hard to apply to similar threats carried out in the future on mobile devices, as opposed to today's PC-based spyware schemes, she said.

On the flip side, Schwartz said the CDT has been surprised and disappointed that the FTC hasn't brought any lawsuits based on the SafeWeb Act, passed by Congress in 2006 and aimed at helping the agency fight spam, spyware, and online fraud.

The expert said it was particularly puzzling that the FTC hasn't taken advantage of elements of the SafeWeb law aimed at aiding in the pursuit of cyber-criminals operating in other countries -- widely recognized as one of the biggest challenges in fighting malware and online fraud.

"We've seen very little action under the SafeWeb Act; there have been some joint spyware cases with Canada where US-based adware companies were working within Canada, which seemed like the perfect opportunities to use it," said Schwartz. "We thought [SafeWeb] was worth passing, and we want to see some action on it soon."

Shapiro admitted that she didn't know of any cases brought by the FTC that have sought to apply the SafeWeb laws. In the area of international cyber-law enforcement, she said it remains a challenge to share information with some foreign governments.

Other Anti-Spyware Coalition contributors remarked that they share the FTC's concerns over passing laws that may eventually serve to handcuff enforcers with outdated terms and conditions.

"We're pretty much against the laws," said Alex Eckelberry, president of US-based anti-spyware applications vendor Sunbelt Software. "We think they will do more harm than good."