Attorney General Alberto Gonzales’s department is expected to announce soon the creation of a special unit within its criminal division to focus on adult obscenity cases, according to an Associated Press report.
“Enforcement is absolutely necessary if we are going to protect citizens from unwanted exposure to obscene materials,” Gonzales recently told federal prosecutors. He directed U.S. attorneys to report back by late July on effective ways to crack down on obscenity and what tools the prosecutors might need.
Those kind of words please religious conservatives, who claim the Clinton administration virtually ignored the proliferation of pornography, particularly on the Internet, during the 1990s.
Since 2001, 40 people and businesses have been convicted and 20 additional indictments are pending, said Andrew Oosterbaan, chief of the Justice Department's child exploitation and obscenity section. By comparison, there were four such prosecutions during the eight years of the Clinton administration, he said.
Critics say a few dozen criminal cases will not dent an industry with an estimated $10 billion a year in sales. Moreover, they say, the effort is an assault on the First Amendment protection of speech and expression, however distasteful.
''They'll find some sacrificial victims, but the porn industry will go on,'' said Marjorie Heins, founder of the Free Expression Policy Project at New York University's Brennan Center for Justice.
A proponent of strict enforcement of obscenity laws agreed with Heins that so far, the administration has aimed mostly at minor figures in the industry.
''At some point, they're going to have to ratchet it up if they want to do something meaningful,'' said Robert Peters, president of Morality in Media.
