The final piece of funding for an anticipated crackdown on the Adult industry by the Department of Justice (DOJ) was included in the last minute, $388 billion omnibus appropriations bill passed by Congress a few weeks ago. Congress approved the FBI’s request for ten new agents and almost $2 million earmarked for investigations in support of the DOJ’s Criminal Division's Child Exploitation and Obscenity Section (CEOS).
The Department of Justice was also allowed to add 25 new positions, including 17 attorneys, for the purpose of prosecuting Adult obscenity crimes as well as child pornography, and $2,605,000 to provide the CEOS with the tools they need to do the job.
The Bush Administration claims that, overall, they included $42 million for Justice Department programs that investigate and prosecute child exploitation and fight obscenity—double the amount allocated for those activities in 2001.
While the bulk of the $42 million goes to programs geared toward child pornography, the extra manpower allocated for CEOS prosecutions indicates that 2005 could prove to be a troublesome year for the Adult industry, according to First Amendment attorney Paul Cambria.
“Compare this to what has been done in the past, and we’re looking at the possibility of a significant crackdown,” Cambria told AVN.com. “During Operation Woodworm, I don’t think they worked with more than a dozen attorneys—so 17 lawyers should be considered a significant force.”
Operation Woodworm was a task force that led to the prosecution of more than 20 Adult video companies in the late 1980s.
The $1,785,000 allocated to the FBI to support CEOS operations was described by the DOJ in its Budget and Performance Summary for fiscal 2005 as dedicated to providing the “specialized investigative resources necessary for the investigation and prosecution of producers and distributors of obscenity and child exploitative material.”
By way of comparison, while the FBI was granted $1,785,000 to support DOJ efforts against adult obscenity and child pornography, they only asked for and were allocated $1,213,000 and eight positions to investigate corporate fraud.
The DOJ claims justified that increase of funds by suggesting that CEOS’ ability to prosecute child pornography and adult entertainment was limited “primarily by the resources of the Section.”
Continuing the trend to obfuscate legal issues pertaining to adult entertainment by associating it with child pornography, the government reports that the “number of child exploitation and adult obscenity investigations and prosecutions increased by more than 300% since 2001.”
Cambria notes that the DOJ is exaggerating their ability to prosecute adult material by lumping it together with child pornography. “When you track down their convictions, most of them are to pleas to child porn. Some of them have to do with extreme types of adult entertainment: bestiality, or really hardcore depictions of rape or situations like that,” Cambria said. “That is not mainstream product, I have not seen any mainstream adult products prosecuted.
“That’s very significant because 98 percent of the material on the market is in an area that is not being prosecuted,” he adds.
Congress also approved $150,000 for the Obscenity Crimes Project (OCP), described as a tool to report Internet obscenity crimes. The OCP is basically the Morality in Media Web site, obscenitycrimes.org,
