WILL NAUGHTON'S CHILD PORN CONVICTION GO?

Fallen Internet wunderkind Patrick Naughton has a court date today in his hope to have a child pornography conviction thrown out, based on the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals declaring part of the Child Online Protection Act unconstitutional the day after his conviction.

Naughton has been free on bail but his freedom is tightly restricted. Reportedly living now in a "seedy Hollywood apartment," according to the New York Post, Naughton is barred from being with a child unsupervised, has restricted travel rights, and cannot use a computer except for work purposes.

And even if his conviction for possessing child porn is thrown out, Naughton is far from off the hook - he still faces re-trial on the charges which made him a pariah in the first place: that he sought sex with whom he believed was a 13-year-old girl he met in an online chat room and traveled to Santa Monica from his Seattle home for precisely that reason.

The irony: Naughton had, among other achievements making him a cyberspace legend, developed software designed to keep porn off computers and sex talk out of chat rooms.

Naughton was arrested in September at Santa Monica Pier, after he met what turned out to be an undercover sheriff's deputy dressed to appear like a teenage girl such as the one he knew as KrisLA online. Online, KrisLA turned out to be an undercover FBI agent. His jury deadlocked on two charges related to that encounter, but when his laptop computer was seized with hundreds of child porn images on the hard drive, that ensured a conviction on that charge.

But the next day, the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals, in a case brought by the Free Speech Coalition, overturned the portion of the Child Online Protection Act under which Naughton was convicted. Naughton shortly won his freedom on bail.

Naughton is likely to repeat the defense he'd used at his first trial - that he became caught up in the Internet's fantasy worlds as a way to relieve the stress of his overworked lifestyle. He testified at his first trial that he found online chat rooms as a late night distraction while he worked as much as 90 hours a week during the height of his career.

"In my life, I kept getting promoted and getting promoted," he testified, according to the Post. "Frankly, I'm just a software engineer, and they put a suit on me and put me in front of cameras, so the stress kept building. I traveled more and more. So I used [chat rooms] as an escape from a lot of work stress, and as something to do while I couldn't sleep in hotel rooms across the country."

It was on March 8, 1999, the paper says, that he made the chat room visit which ended up destroying his career - into a room called "dads&daughtersex," where he used the handle "hotseattle" and met KrisLA. Their talk in the room was sexually blunt; the defense argued Naughton was simply role-playing, believing his correspondent was actually an adult doing likewise.

But last Sept. 14, he apparently moved from role-playing to role-claiming, traveling to Santa Monica Pier to meet his anonymous cyber-girl friend. He was greeted by the undercover sheriff's officer dressed to resemble a young girl, and as they started walking down the beach at Naughton's suggestion, agents moved in to arrest the man who had helped create the Java script system.

The Post says one juror in the trial voted to acquit Naughton on the interstate underage sex charges because he wasn't convinced the kinky online talk between Naughton and KrisLA was real. This juror also said he thought the investigators should have waited until Naughton actually made a move on her before arresting him.

Giga Information Group analyst Rob Enderlee, who tracks cyberspace social trends for the California firm, tells the Post Naughton was caught in part by the "false belief" that online communication is anonymous. "(I)n fact, it's the most public of streets," Enderlee tells the paper. "You and I talking right now doesn't mean much because there are no witnesses. But everything online is documented and recorded somewhere."

Enderlee also says Naughton should have known better. "(He) might have been bored, but he was also an idiot," Enderlee tells the paper. "He, more than anyone, should have known that if you can't do or say something in public, you shouldn't do it on the Internet."

"You have millions of people using the Internet, and using it in ways which are First Amendment protected," Naughton's defense lawyer Donald Marks tells the Post. "And to know now, as we do, that the FBI is on the [Net] in sting operations and role playing is a little bit scary for a lot of people in America."

Naughton, however, might have known of several precedents which could have deterred him. In the same year his online dalliance with KrisLA ended up destroying his career, the chief executive officer of the Florsheim Group was forced to quit after he was accused of storing and viewing porn on his Chicago office computer.

The same month, June, aides to Oklahoma's conservative U.S. Senator James Imhofe were disciplined for keeping enough porn on their computers to crash the office's computer network, the Post says. And the dean of Harvard Divinity School, Rev. Donald Theimann, resigned after thousands of porn images were found on his hard drive by a co-worker.