First Amendment attorney Paul Cambria on Thursday made a promise to the Senate Commerce Committee and now he’s going to have to keep it.
At the Senate hearing titled “Protecting Children on the Internet,” Senator Ted Stevens (R-Alaska), the committee chairman, asked Cambria pointedly, “Why doesn’t the adult industry rate itself?” He was referring to a rating system similar to that used for mainstream movies and TV shows.
Cambria, general counsel for the Adult Freedom Foundation (AFF), responded by saying that the industry needs to enter into a dialogue with Congress to find out just what Congress wants to see in such a system.
But Stevens was having none of that.
“My advice to you is, you better tell your clients to do it soon, or we’ll do it for them,” Stevens said angrily.
This thought was repeated later by Senator Mark Pryor (D-Ark.), who voiced support for a dot-xxx top-level domain and wanted to know from Cambria why dot-kids would be better? Cambria responded that the U.S. Congress cannot impose dot-xxx on the rest of the world. Then in responding to points made by a previous witness, Cambria noted that there are ways to prevent any adult content from appearing on a dot-kids website.
The senators who were present at the hearing in Room 562 of the Dirksen Senate Office Building included Daniel Inouye (D-Hawaii), Frank Lautenberg (D-N.J.), Conrad Burns (R-Mont.), Bill Nelson (D-Fla.), Pryor and Stevens.
The witnesses present were: James H. Burrus, Jr., deputy assistant director of the Criminal Investigative Division of the FBI; Laura Parsky, deputy assistant attorney general with the Justice Department; Dr. James B. Weaver III, professor of communication and psychology at Virginia Tech; Tim Lordan, executive director of the Internet Education Foundation; Tatiana Platt, chief trust officer and senior vice president of America Online; and Cambria.
In Cambria’s presentation, he first thanked the commerce committee, noting that this was the first time that a representative of the adult industry had been called to testify. Cambria said that besides representing the AFF that he also represented several of the biggest producers of adult material in the United States and stated, “I have come to know the commitment of the industry is to provide material to adults, not to children.”
One of Cambria’s primary points was that the adult industry supported filtering of home computers rather than Internet Service Providers (ISPs).
With 34 million Americans having visited adult sites in just the month of August of 2003, and with nearly half of the adult video outlets in the country offering adult products, “lawful adult expression is fully accepted in America,” Cambria concluded.
Cambria further noted that the adult industry does not use children in its productions, does not make its productions for viewing by children, and even pays rewards for information leading to the conviction of child pornographers. He went to say that U.S.-based adult websites are governed by both the obscenity and child pornography laws. Therefore, “Congress doesn’t need to burden Internet speech with laws that are unconstitutional,” Cambria advised the committee.
Cambria, however, was the final witness at the hearing, which began with a presentation from Senator Blanche Lincoln (D-Ark.), who appeared to support the regulation of adult content on the Internet.
“I know in my heart…that parents are the first line of defense…but I have to emphasize, they cannot do it alone,” Lincoln said.
Lincoln drew a distinction between the Main Street then and the Main Street of today, which she described as “very different.” She noted that when she was a child if her father took her into the local drugstore and left her alone, if she wandered into a section of material that would have been inappropriate for her that more than a dozen people would have steered her away from it and told her father that she had seen the material.
But all that has now changed to the point that “technology can now bring inappropriate material even onto a school bus” through for various mobile devices such as cell phones and iPods. Lincoln noted that her bill 1540 would require age verification to access adult material on the Internet, which she described as a 12 billion-dollar profit industry, and her bill would also levy a 25-percent excise tax on the material.
The next two witnesses were Burrus and Parsky. Burrus informed the committee that the Justice Department was taking “aggressive action” on Internet obscenity, and that the Justice Department’s obscenity squad had brought 52 Internet obscenity cases since 2004.
Parksy told the committee that within the Child Exploitation and Obscenity Section (CEOS) of the Justice Department, there is now a high-tech investigative unit which tracks all forms of adult Internet communication. She claims that there had been a 445 percent increase in CEOS cases in the last four years and that child pornography cases had increased 448 percent.
At that point, Stevens asked the witnesses whether they could think of anything Congress could do to provide them with better tools to control Internet obscenity and child pornography. Both witnesses responded that they felt the current laws were adequate, but that they could use more resources to implement those laws. Stevens then pressed them as to whether the laws currently on the books would allow them to target child pornography effectively. Burrus responded that he could work with the laws as they are, but Parsky said that the Justice Department supported the Child Safety Act. (H.R. 3132), which contains several ideas that the Justice Department felt could improve the current laws, including a definition for secondary producer under the record-keeping and labeling act 18 USC 2257, and also forfeiture provisions for violators of the obscenity laws.
The committee then brought up a panel of witnesses consisting of Weaver, Platt, Lordan and Cambria. Weaver told the committee that the government “had failed to prepare most American families for the proliferation of pornography,” and that profiteering by mainstream companies has aided in that proliferation. He advised three courses of action: 1) that pornography should not be the primary sex educator of America’s youth; 2) that sexual images in free adult content, particularly ad ware, should be looked upon as commercial speech, and 3) that mechanisms should be developed to save children from the increasing high-tech delivery of pornography.
Platt noted that her company, AOL, was taking a proactive approach toward helping parents prevent their children’s access to online pornography, which she said can be “devastating for younger users.”
Lordan was particularly upbeat in his testimony, saying that “parents are getting the message” that filters are a workable means to prevent their children’s access to the material.
“My parental control choice is my TiVo,” Lordan said, describing how he always prerecords what his children will watch and screens it for adult content before they see it.
“We must find ways to keep our kids online and away from pornographic material,” he said, and noted that adult material is “certainly a challenge.”
