While addressing the general assembly of the United Nations this morning President George W. Bush offered the PROTECT Act, a controversial law better known as the Amber Alert bill, that included a section designed to circumvent last year’s declaration by the Supreme Court that a federal law was unconstitutional, as a model for the world adapt to combat the existence of sex slavery.
A section of the Amber Alert allows the United States government to prosecute for sex crimes with children that did not take place in their jurisdiction. Places such as Thailand have a reputation as being a safe haven for practicing pedophiles.
“The Department of Justice is actively investigating sex tour operators and patrons, who can face up to 30 years in prison,” Bush announced to the assembly, referencing the practice of “sex tours,” tours packaged with the intent of introducing the patron to places where they can have sex with children.
PROTECT is an acronym for the full name of the bill Prosecutorial Remedies and Other Tools to end the Exploitation of Children Today Act of 2003.
While most of the Amber Alert bill, including the section mentioned above, presents no threat to the legitimate adult industry, Title V of the law, which was not mentioned by Bush in today’s address, provides some constitutionally questionable powers to law enforcement agencies.
Title V of the law was designed to circumvent the Free Speech Coalition's (FSC) victory in its suit against the Child Pornography Prevention Act (CPPA) by tracking the Supreme Court dissents in that case and fashioning a new law that Congress intended to address legally address those dissents so that they could declare “virtual” child porn illegal in a constitutional manner.
“Virtual” child porn refers to materials whose production may not have involved the use of real children but depict children having sex. Some legal experts have suggested that the vagueness of the law would allow works such as Franco Zifferelli’s Romeo and Juliet (1968), which includes a scene depicting the teen age Romeo and Juliet (14 years old) having sex, to be prosecuted.
Title V of the Amber Alert bill has not yet been contested on constitutional grounds.
As AVN Senior Editor Mark Kernes reported earlier this year the Amber Alert sets the stage for a new use of the Child Protection Restoration and Penalties Enforcement Act of 1990 (better known to the adult entertainment industry as the labeling and record keeping law), Sec. 2257 of Title 18 of the U.S. Code.
Sec. 511(b) of PROTECT Act reads "Not later than 1 year after enactment of this Act, the Attorney General shall submit to Congress a report detailing the number of times since January 1993 that the Department of Justice has inspected the records of any producer of materials regulated pursuant to section 2257 of title 18, United States Code, and section 75 of title 28 of the Code of Federal Regulations. The Attorney General shall indicate the number of violations prosecuted as a result of those inspections."
At present, the number of times the Department of Justice "has inspected the records of any producer of [adult] materials" is zero.
Legal experts within the industry have conjectured that this clause could be intended to be used as a loophole by the government in prosecution of virtually any one involved with adult Websites.
