On March 18, the U.S. Attorney in Brooklyn and New York City FBI office announced the unsealing of indictments against three individuals and five corporations for their participation in a "massive Internet fraud scheme" involving bogus "'free tours' of adult entertainment sites." One of the individuals was reported to be a member of the Gambino crime family.
Their wrong-doing was said consist of deceiving their victims into giving up their credit card numbers — just to be sure they were of age, mind you — for a "free peek" at naked women doing wicked things. But the guileless peekers were billed, of course, to the tune of $230 million, according to the federal charges. (Does lust make men stupid?)
The Times reported that Roslynn Mauskopf, the United States Attorney for Brooklyn, said, "The defendants created a web of lies and deception to trap unwary consumers on the Internet…This massive scheme undermined public trust in e-commerce." Consumers? Public trust in e-commerce? You'd think they were shopping for shirts.
There was no mention in the press release about possible violations of federal Internet obscenity laws, so we don't know whether the New York City feds concluded that the pornographic material was not obscene or whether they thought about obscenity at all.
The encouraging news in Washington on March 13 was that the House of Representatives Committee on Government Reform held a hearing on the "new and growing problem" of "peer-to-peer" Internet file-sharing programs that provide free, easy, and often inadvertent access to millions of hardcore pornographic computer files. These programs include Music City Morpheus, BearShare and Aimster.
In their opening remarks, however, Committee Chairman Tom Davis (R-VA) and Ranking Minority Member Henry Waxman (D-CA)(both links PDF documents) gave the impression that even they are laboring under the erroneous notion that the only kind of pornography that is illegal is child pornography.
Mr. Waxman saw the problem this way: "If your child has access to a broadband connection, the most hardcore, triple-x videos imaginable can be downloaded in just a matter of minutes... kids will be bombarded with pornography even if they aren't looking for it. GAO [The General Accounting Office] did searches for popular entertainment figures like Britney Spears and the Olson Twins and for cartoon characters like Pokemon. And what they found was that more than half of the files they retrieved were pornographic. In fact, they even retrieved files that contained illegal child pornography." Could it be that Mr. Waxman thinks the triple-x stuff is not illegal?
In his prepared statement, Mr. Davis said, "The alarming ease of inadvertent, unsolicited access to pornography on these networks threatens our children. Period. We're not talking about bad language or simple bad taste - we're talking about ugly, graphic images that have no place in our homes. And that doesn't even include the child pornography that's just plain illegal." He didn't say what kind of illegal the "ugly, graphic images that have no place in our homes" are, but it may be he thinks they're not illegal at all.
Mr. Waxman stepped right up to the truth of the matter, and seemed not to see it: "As legislators, we can try to pass laws. But I'm not sure there's a legislative solution available for this problem." It was as though Title 18, Chapter 71, Sections 1460-1470 (MS Word document) of the United States Code — the federal criminal laws on obscenity — simply do not exist, were not enacted by earlier Congresses, signed into law by earlier Presidents, upheld in court and enforced to good effect by police and prosecutors, though not lately.
Voluntary guidelines for Internet chat room providers have been developed by a "task force" of British government and industry leaders to help protect children in the United Kingdom from pedophiles. The BBC reports that Yahoo was part of the development team but the company "has admitted it has not yet implemented the guidelines and has set no timeframe to do so..."
The BBC adds, "One of the main factors seems to be that Yahoo UK has its decisions made by its parent company, Yahoo.com, which is based in the U.S. America has a very different attitude towards how the net should be regulated."
The BBC quotes a task force member as saying, "Historically America has a completely different attitude to these questions, due to its attitude towards free speech... The mindset is that it is wrong for government to lay down laws and the ethos is that the Internet is the Wild West — the last frontier."
The guidelines, called Models of Good Practice, are a "benchmark to assess service providers by," according to a British Home Office spokesperson.
UK chat room guidelines include the following:
In the uncanny-grasp-of-the-obvious department, university researchers are second to no one. A news release from Emory University on February 28 reveals that researchers from Emory's Rollins School of Public Health and the University of Alabama at Birmingham studied the matter for 12 months and concluded that "adolescents with high exposure to rap music (i.e., 14 hours or more per week) were 3 times more likely to hit a teacher and more than 2.5 times as likely to have been arrested, compared with their peers who had less exposure to rap music." The release added: "Adolescents who frequently watched rap videos were also twice as likely to have multiple sexual partners and more than 1.5 times as likely to acquire an STD, use drugs, and use alcohol during the 12-month study." The study was reported in the March issue of the American Journal of Public Health. The Atlanta Journal Constitution ran the story March 3 and noted that, "Emory researchers were quick to say that their study does not mean rap music videos are the cause of unhealthy behavior." All they found was a link, a correlation. In a sidebar, the Journal Constitution reported that most of their readers thought it was more than that: 80% responded "yes" to the paper's survey question, "Do you think rap music videos have a bad effect on teenage girls?" From the BBC we learn that more than 1,600 men in the United Kingdom have been arrested "so far" on child pornography charges in Operation Ore, the UK extension of the U.S. Justice Department's Operation Avalanche. British authorities are working their way through a list of 7,000 UK residents whose names showed up on the subscriber list of Landslide Productions, a child porn distribution business based in Dallas and marketed worldwide through the Internet. The BBC said UK police "have previously complained they lack the resources to investigate all the names passed to them by the United States Postal Inspection Service." But they keep plugging away. Attorney General John Ashcroft announced the "successful conclusion" of Operation Avalanche in August 2001, noting in a news release that the married couple who ran Landslide Productions had been convicted and sentenced, Thomas Reedy to life in prison and Janice Reedy to 14 years. The news release also noted that Operation Avalanche had led to "144 searches in 37 states with 100 arrests to date..." Landslide's subscriber list was reported to include some 35,000 names in the United States. The UK police, of course, don't have as much ground to cover as we do. AGI, an Italian online news service, reports police "have identified 2,700,000 online registered users dedicated to child pornography." The investigation is codenamed "Sickos Club," from an aptly named web site involved in the child porn traffic. The Deputy Chief Prosecutor in Venice, Michele Maturi, is directing the investigation in 17 regions across Italy — most of the country. The inquiry has led to several unsuspected persons, including students, public employees, and professionals, including doctors. Reuters reported March 14 that U.S. Senate Commerce Committee Chairman John McCain wrote to the chief executive officers of five TV cable companies — Comcast Corp., Time Warner Cable, Charter Communications, Cox Communications and Adelphia Communications Corp. — urging them to adopt "a la carte" pricing so their customers could pick and choose which channels they receive rather than being forced to take entire packages of channels. The idea was to cut costs for consumers, which could well result, but the unbundling, if it happens, could also reduce the number of homes exposed to the porn channels as people exercise their options prudently. So-called First Amendment absolutists — the ACLU, for example — are forever saying that we as a society must not limit speech that offends most of us because to do so would set precedents that might lead to limits on speech most of us approve. This is known as the slippery-slope argument. Has it ever actually happened that way? Good question. But we know from experience that the process works in the opposite direction. When we tolerate offensive speech we get more offensive speech. Examples abound. In one, a jury in Salt Lake City a couple of years ago acquitted a porn video shop owner of obscenity charges essentially because videos like his were available on pay-per-view television at a hotel near the courthouse. The defense attorney contended that the hotel videos reflected the standards of that community, so how could his client's videos be offensive and, therefore, how could they be in violation of the obscenity laws that depend on community standards for their enforcement? The prosecutor, the judge or the jury (or all three) apparently disregarded the Supreme Court holding that availability of pornography is not the same as community acceptance of it. Nor did anyone explain why a minority of guests from outside the community, who view porn movies while staying at a hotel owned by a national chain that shows porn nationwide and doesn't ask the local community whether it wants in-room porn, should be a reflection of local community standards-but that is another story. Recently, a woman named Leslie Gold had her picture taken with her blouse open wide and her breasts covered by a pair of hands, not hers. She wanted to put it up on a billboard, with the words "She's more than a handful" were printed under the picture. Ms. Gold makes a living as "RadioChick" on a morning show known for its sex talk. She thought the billboard would be good advertising for the show. Just business. Clear Channel, the broadcasting company that owns the New York station and many others, decided it was bad business and refused to go along, calling the billboard "pornographic." RadioChick objected strenuously, telling the New York Post (11/29/02) the billboard was no worse than a Calvin Klein or Victoria's Secret ad. Thus, here we have ads that were offensive to much of the public used to justify more of the same. Now, that's a slippery slope. "Create in me a clean heart, O God." So it is written in Psalm 51. Words to live by, given to mankind thousands of years ago. The Psalmist's prayer is for a heart that sees beauty in goodness, seeks fulfillment through the natural law, and reveres life. Just this year, in January, the Vatican called on Catholic politicians essentially to carry out their duties with a clean heart. It came down to this: "Those who are directly involved in lawmaking bodies have a grave and clear obligation to oppose any law that attacks human life." Among others, laws that sanction abortion, euthanasia, human cloning and same-sex "marriage" are on that list. The clean of heart will also uphold obscenity and indecency laws that help people maintain a decent society in which children and families can thrive. Some politicians maneuvered for more than wiggle room. The New York Times (1/17/03) quoted an Italian Member of Parliament this way: "It's good advice... but it would be a mistake to look at it as an obligation." Bishop Wilton Gregory, president of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, said something much different, according to the Times: "The values brought by Christians to the political process must not be muted or silenced by any intolerant secularism."
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