In May 2008, the Supreme Court in a 7-2 decision found that anyone who sends an email offering or seeking sexual images of children can be sent to prison, even if no such pornography exists, thus overturning a 2002 decision (Ashcroft vs. Free Speech Coalition) that shielded computer-generated porn. The justices had ruled then that since no real children were involved in producing such imagery, "virtual" porn deserved free-speech protection. As a result, Congress passed a law in 2003 making it a crime - punishable by between five and 20 years in prison - to exchange online messages about any material that would cause "another to believe" it depicted a minor engaged in sex, whether "actual or simulated." That law was appealed in 2006, but now the Supreme Court has upheld it.
In February 2008, Debbie Nathan, a courageous freelance journalist, covered the annual American Academy of Forensic Sciences conference in Washington, D.C., where law enforcement officials' presentations included assessing the state of Internet child porn. Attendees were told how to tell the difference between sexualized images of real children (illegal) and computer-generated images (which, it turns out, would remain legal for three more months). However, the technology increasingly has become sophisticated, in turn making such differentiation exponentially difficult. There were approximately 4,000 individuals at this event - including police detectives, anthropologists, the Department of Justice and the Department of Defense.
"You may be asking why the Department of Defense is investigating child porn," Nathan said. "I don't have the answer. But I suspect it's a political maneuver, related in some way to how, immediately after [Sept. 11], the Justice Department started cooking up new ways to suspend people's privacy rights in the name of fighting terrorism. After that played poorly with a lot of Americans, Attorney General Alberto Gonzales and other bigwigs started justifying mandatory Internet-data gathering, and the Patriot Act's use of warrantless searches, by saying they are necessary to combat child porn. Likewise, the Department of Homeland Security is running ‘Operation Predator,' a program to do things like inspect people's computers at the border for child porn - though what this has to do with homeland security is not clear - and the program has led to arrests of Homeland Security's own bureaucrats on child-sex charges."
Michael Salyards, representing the Department of Defense's Cyber Crime Center, displayed several images that looked like photos, pointing out that only one was genuine. He showed an Asian woman, and then another Asian woman, then asked the audience, "Which is real?" When he revealed which was which, Nathan and many others thought the virtual Asian woman looked realer than the actual one. The same reaction occurred when images of two females wearing bikinis were shown. Salyards said the U.S appeals court ruling against Attorney General John Ashcroft had created "legal chaos."
"After these presentations," Nathan concluded, "it seemed clear that the technology exists to make real child porn look fake. And - much more significantly - to make computer-generated porn, which looks genuine enough to fool ordinary people. I bet most defendants and their attorneys who raise the computer-generated defense are bullshitting. They've probably been caught with the real thing, and all the conference speakers expressed trepidations about the next big thing: child porn video. If the pedo-weirdies that most of us don't understand can [emotionally and physically invest in] visual, computer-generated, child porn - thus leaving the real kids alone - maybe computer-generated porn isn't such a horrible thing."
In August 2006, Nathan wrote for Salon.com an article titled "Why I Need to See Child Porn," in which she stated: "It infuriates me that the government prohibits reporters and other legitimate investigators from doing front-line research into child pornography. The reporting I'm talking about involves testing government claims about how prevalent child porn really is, and what makes an image pornographic in the first place.
"To get answers, investigators must look at illegal material - lots of it," she continued. "Those investigators must also be independent of the government. Otherwise, the government can use our fear and loathing of kiddie porn to make false political claims ... It took a while for the press to figure out that commercial child porn was virtually nonexistent by the 1980s. In fact, as researchers eventually discovered, the main manufacturer was the U.S. government, which produced and sold child-porn magazines for sting operations." Nathan's article rapidly was removed from the site, with an explanation that it was inaccurate to argue that under child-pornography laws, "journalists and researchers had no protection if they viewed visual depictions of child pornography, even inadvertently, in the course of their work."
In 2004, Ashcroft testified before Congress that the Patriot Act had helped catch two Internet child pornographers, thereby enabling investigators to ask an ISP for the names of the criminals, then get a warrant to search their houses. News sources later learned that investigators knew who the pornographers were and where they lived before they used the Patriot Act.
Just as Sept. 11 served as an excuse to invade Iraq, kiddie porn served as an excuse to pass the Patriot Act.
- Paul Krassner's latest book, Porn Soup, a self-published collection of his columns for AVN Online, is available at PaulKrassner.com.
This article originally appeared in the November 2008 issue of AVN Online. To subscribe, visit AVNMediaNetwork.com/subscribe.
