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Britain Seeks to Ban Violent internet Porn They Take It Off, but They Also Put on Suits, Uniforms and Blue Collars 'Porn is to blame' for abuse rise Porn a leap backward for Olympic women BT puts block on child porn sites New York man loses shirt in topless bar Administration wages war on pornography 17-Year-Old Girl Escapes Forced Prostitution RingLas Vegas, stripped: City uncovers profitable trend The French Spar Over Sex: There's A Limit, No? Coalition Wants To Change Hotel Porn Channels Lavish Lifestyle Ends With Prison For Fraud Hustler Magazine's Girls of Afghanistan O.D. May Have Killed 'Wild' Sassoon Heir Ex-Yale Scholar Guilty In Assault, Had Sex With Boy He Was To Mentor Porn-blackmail teacher cops plea Floating Florida sex boat gets 'put out' to sea Skin and sin are in again on the Las Vegas strip Teen placed in jail cell with sex offender Girl Model Sites Crossing Line? Sex trade may lure 325,000 U.S. kids TAXES PAID FOR SEX JAUNT: REPORT GOLD CLUB TRIAL PUTS STARS AT CENTER STAGE Seattle bans 'upskirt' photography Man Accused of Placing Lewd Photos on Cars City Council approves tougher strip-club rules |
Enfield couple convicted of torturing 11-year-old girl 'Horror-porn' indictment thrown out Police: Prostitute reports client in child porn case Holly Jones family to fight child porn Adolescents in Adult City: Often From Elsewhere, and Often Going Nowhere Norway hotel staff want porn ban HIV Cases Shut Down Pornography Film Industry High court bars Internet porn law enforcement US arrests dozens over Internet child porn distribution Hip Hop's Crossover to the Adult Aisle Man Arrested For Allegedly Having Sex With 2-Month-Old Justices Hear Arguments on Internet Pornography Law Hiding in Plain Sight: Parlors lack permits, mar town images Clinton Man Arrested on Child Pornography Charges in NH Dorm Party With Strippers is Focus of Investigation Rewritten Child-Porn Law Approved Feds Bust Russian Strip Ring -Preyed on imported girls Suspect allegedly drugged, raped daughter's pals Officer fired from teaching job for bringing stripper to class Yale fires prof in child porn case Lumley's Arrest Called "Shocker" Shady Past Haunts Strip Club Backers Salem Cops: Lawyer Used Internet to Lure Young Teens for Sex State says worker stole for lovers Cyberporn bids for the mainstream Doctor held in killing of wife; secret life alleged Men Charged With Child Pornography, Underage Sex N.Y. Officers Face Child Porn Charges Internet Sex Performer Tells Her Story Kentucky sex shop owner undergoes conversion |
Britain Seeks to Ban Violent internet Porn Aug 30, 2005 LONDON (AP) - Ever since Jane Longhurst was killed two years ago by a man obsessed with violent Internet pornography, her family has campaigned for the British government to outlaw the viewing of extreme sexual material on the Web. On Tuesday the government agreed, announcing plans - the first, it said, by any Western country - to ban the downloading and possession of violent sexual images. Police and anti-porn campaigners welcomed the proposal but free-speech groups called it censorship, saying there was no proven link between violent imagery and violent behavior. Home Office Minister Paul Goggins said the government felt a duty to prevent cases such as the murder of Longhurst, a 31-year-old teacher strangled by a friend who was obsessed with violent pornography he found on the Internet. "This is material which is extremely offensive to the vast majority of people, and it should have no place in our society," Goggins said. The government's proposals would make it an offense to possess "extreme pornographic material which is graphic and sexually explicit and which contains actual scenes or realistic depictions of serious violence, bestiality or necrophilia." Viewing such material would constitute possession, although the government said it did not plan to prosecute people who accidentally stumbled across the images. Such legislation would be a first for any Western nation, the Home Office said. Those convicted would face up to three years in prison. The Obscene Publications Act already bans publication of images of sexual brutality on the Internet but is all but impossible to enforce unless the material is hosted in Britain . The Internet Watch Foundation, an industry-funded watchdog that encourages Internet users to report illegal content, says almost none of the obscene material it found on the Net was hosted in Britain ; the majority came from the United States . That makes such matters very difficult to investigate, said Metropolitan Police Commander Dave Johnston, who welcomed the government's proposal. Chris Evans of the pressure group Internet Freedom said Internet users "should be able to make up their own minds about what they view." "The idea that you can prevent violent action by banning such images is nonsense," he said. The government's proposal is a long way from becoming law. Interested parties have until Dec. 2 to comment on the plans, which would then have to be drafted into a bill and passed by Parliament before taking effect. |
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'Horror-porn' indictment thrown out By ANDREA CAVANAUGH LOS ANGELES - In a case closely watched by the adult entertainment industry, a federal judge threw out an obscenity indictment against the owners of a Chatsworth company that produced a ''horror-porn'' film. Federal obscenity laws are unconstitutional in the context of the case against Extreme Associates, U.S. District Court Judge Gary L. Lancaster ruled Thursday. Extreme Associates owner Rob Zicari hailed the dismissal as a victory for civil liberties. ''In no way does the court condone pornography -- what they're saying is that adults have the right to view what they want in the privacy of their own home,'' Zicari said. ''It kind of restores my faith in the system. There are still judges that care about our rights and our freedoms and aren't afraid to make controversial decisions.'' Mary Beth Buchanan, the U.S. attorney for the Western District of Pennsylvania, said Friday that she may appeal the decision. ''We continue to believe that the federal obscenity statutes are valid and constitutional,'' Buchanan said. The case centered around the film ''Forced Entry,'' a film starring and directed by Zicari's wife, Janet Romano, under the name Lizzie Borden. The company's Web site bills the film as a ''stunningly disturbing look at a serial killer, Satanic rituals, and the depths of human depravity.'' ''It's horror-porn,'' Zicari said. ''At least it has a plot.'' Zicari and Romano were indicted in Pittsburgh in 2003 in what was considered a major test case of federal obscenity laws. They argued that federal obscenity statutes violated their constitutional right to liberty and privacy. Members of the
adult entertainment industry have followed the case closely, viewing
the outcome as a barometer of the anti-obscenity effort pursued by
Attorney General John Ashcroft. The $7 billion adult-film industry
is centered in the San Fernando ''Hopefully, this will encourage the government to leave the adult industry alone,'' said attorney Roger Jon Diamond, who has successfully represented a number of clients in the adult entertainment industry. ''What we want here for American adults is freedom, the same freedom President Bush says he is fighting for in Iraq. It makes no sense to fight for freedom abroad and restrict it here.'' But Bill Margold, who acted in and directed adult films for more than three decades and serves as an activist for the industry, said producers of explicit adult films should use common sense and keep a low profile. ''We've dodged a huge bullet, but this is not a license to go nuts,'' he said. ''Society does not have to have their noses rubbed in our business." |
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A Dirty business The omens are not encouraging. Lukas Moodysson dislikes interviews and hates having his photo taken. And while he is prepared to discuss his new film, he doesn't want to get into that whole rigmarole of defending it and justifying it and, God forbid, explaining it. Stubble-headed in a scarlet hooded top, he slopes into the room like Santa's gloomiest little helper - the one charged with fielding the complaints of the most recalcitrant children. But if Moodysson is difficult, he's got nothing on his latest film. A Hole in My Heart is a slap in the face for the mainstream punters who cherished his 2000 hippie fable Together, and a test of nerve for those who stuck with him through the more bleak and melancholic Lilya 4-Ever. In essence, it documents the shooting of an amateur porn movie, with its director, stud and starlet holed up in an infernal Stockholm apartment while the director's teenage son tends pet earthworms in the room next-door. The drama unfolds in a storm of drunken antics and a crush of gynecological close-ups. It's an audacious tactic. Most portraits of the porn industry try to de-sex their subject matter by affecting a genteel distance. A Hole in My Heart goes the other way, ramming the viewer right up against it. "I decided not to care if it became exploitative," Moodysson says. "I wanted to talk about the sexualization of public spaces, like commercials, and the way porn seeps into everybody's living room, but I didn't want to be a part of it. Then after a while I realized I couldn't draw that line. So the film becomes part of what it's talking about. It is a symptom, not a diagnosis." To illustrate his point, he tells the story of a Swedish couple caught having sex during a screening. Someone in the audience spotted them and complained to the manager. Moodysson gives a smile as bright as December sunshine. "People react very differently to the film. And those reactions are enormously interesting." Lilya 4-Ever had a sacrificial lamb in the form of a Russian teen press-ganged into prostitution. In A Hole in My Heart, the lamb role is taken by Sanna Brading's porn starlet, who dreams of appearing on Big Brother, but winds up menaced by a camera, force-fed on junk food and sodomized by her co-star. The implication is that there's not much difference - both are just part of what the director calls the "pornofication" of western culture. Moodysson agrees, but says: "I realize that the reason I'm a film-maker is that I'm deeply conflicted in my feelings about things. I was obsessed with Big Brother, me and my wife watched it almost every day. I loved and hated it at the same time." And what of porn? Has he watched many skin-flicks in his time? "Well, that depends on who you compare me with. When we were making this film I watched quite a lot of things, but it became too much. I became so ill, and now I feel less interested in porno than I have ever been in my life. It was like an exorcism." The problem, he says, is that he didn't want to make a film that simply stated that pornography was bad, because it would be too easy and he wouldn't believe in it. Moreover, he felt the need to empathize with those who work in the industry, "because nobody cares about them. They are stigmatized by both sides - the feminists and the moral majority. But they have a good reason to be in porno. I think that there are strong links between people who have been abused in the past, and a kindness between hurt, broken people. They take care of each other." He makes it sound like an orphanage. "Yes, that's right," says Moodysson. For a moment he looks positively happy. "I see this film as an orphanage. That's what it is - an orphanage." |
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Police:
Prostitute reports client in child porn case HOLLYWOOD, Florida -- A prostitute turned in a customer after seeing child pornography, including a video of an apparent toddler rape, on the man's home computer, police said. Detective Carlos Negron said police were contacted by the woman on Tuesday, saying that while working at the man's apartment as a prostitute she saw numerous pictures of children who appeared to be between ages 3 and 16 performing sex. The woman told police that it was a disturbing video that showed the rape of a younger child, perhaps no older than 2, that caused her to make the call after she left the apartment, the South Florida Sun-Sentinel reported. Negron said Federico Eduardo Amezaga, 29, let investigators search his apartment, where they found numerous photos and videos of children performing sex acts. Officers arrested Amezaga on 15 charges of possessing child pornography and took him to the Broward County Jail, where he was being held Friday in lieu of $150,000 bond. He is being represented
by the Broward County public defender's office, which did not immediately
return messages seeking comment.
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Holly
Jones family to fight child porn
TORONTO - Canada should take the lead in fighting child pornography, the family of Holly Jones said on Thursday. The family of the murdered 10-year-old Toronto girl made the appeal after the man who pleaded guilty to murdering their daughter admitted to habitually consuming child porn on the internet. Michael Briere, 36, admitted the crime on Thursday. He faces an automatic sentence of life in jail with no chance of parole for 25 years. Paul Culver, senior Crown attorney for Toronto, said the Jones case was precedent-setting because it was "one of the few cases where we can say, 'This guy was triggered by images of child pornography.'" Tim Danson, lawyer for the Jones family, announced outside the courthouse that the family members are committing themselves to the fight to eradicate child pornography. "Canada must take the lead for the international community to wipe out [child pornography] on the internet and in Canada," he said in a prepared statement from the family. To that end, the Jones family would present a raft of legal initiatives in the fall called "Holly's Law." Maria Jones, Holly's mother, was too emotional to read the prepared statement and take questions. But she spoke briefly. "I know Holly will make a difference," she said. Holly's father George Stonehouse did not attend because he "feared he would not be able to control himself" when faced with his daughter's murderer, said Danson. Holly disappeared near her west-end Toronto home on May 12, 2003. Parts of her dismembered body were found a day later in Lake Ontario. A statement of facts filed with the court on Thursday gave previously unreleased details about Holly's killing. On the night of May 12, Briere was looking at internet child porn. He left his house, saw Holly walking on the street, grabbed her by the neck and took her back to his apartment. Within about an hour, he had sexually assaulted, strangled and dismembered Holly. Police became suspicious of Briere after he refused a voluntary DNA test. The police managed to obtain his DNA surreptitiously and matched it with samples taken from blood found under Holly's fingernails. "I fully recognize and acknowledge that the crime which I am guilty of is simply the worst kind of crime a person can commit," Briere said in court. click here for: |
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| They
Take It Off, but They Also Put on Suits,
Uniforms and Blue Collars By SARAH KERSHAW Published: June 2, 2004
"A reporter asked me recently, how did I make the transition from dancer to mayor?" said Ms. Jones, now senior vice president for communications and government relations at Harrah's Entertainment Inc. She says she usually forgives such mistaken assumptions. In Las Vegas, after all, asking the former mayor if she has any pole tricks in her repertoire is not quite as crazy as asking Rudolph W. Giuliani if he was a Chippendale dancer before becoming mayor of New York. Reputation and reality are sometimes indistinguishable here. The female body may be second only to the slot machine as the most visible local icon, selling everything and defining the city's lusty aesthetic and anything-goes credo. A local truism - exaggerated, of course - says that women who work here are either making the beds or lying in them. "This is a world of women, and the lines and categories between sex and suburbs, bad girls and good girls, are endlessly blurred," wrote Kathryn Hausbeck, associate professor of sociology at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, in a recent essay, "Who Puts the 'Sin' in 'Sin City' Stories?" Dr. Hausbeck, who is writing a book about life and sex work in Nevada's many legal brothels, says that the Las Vegas of 2004 is more eroticized than ever. With blunt sexuality pervading mainstream culture - a trend she calls the pornographication of America - Las Vegas is forced to stay one step ahead, to nurture its notoriety. "There's a really strong argument to be made that the pornographication of everyday life that we see across the country just forces Vegas - Sin City - to keep its reputation going," Dr. Hausbeck said. "To sort of take that extra step, by being a little racier, more extreme." Las Vegas, which experimented in the 1990's with a more "family friendly" identity - with Ms. Jones's enthusiastic support - has come full circle, pushing its adult-playground image to new limits. One need only take stock of the exploding number of strip clubs here, the casinos with topless revues, the racy billboards or the suggestive television spots for Las Vegas's wildly successful marketing campaign that end with the line: "What happens here, stays here." Many women, Ms. Jones included, are not happy with the image: "When you're constantly characterizing women as fluff that that begins, even subconsciously, to be a part of a culture, it impacts how you see women in general." The billboards are at the center of a collision between two Las Vegases: the hedonistic zone where tourists play and the sprawling suburbs beyond it, where families live. A community lobbying campaign to restrict them was fueled late last year by outrage over a Hard Rock Hotel and Casino billboard for a rodeo that showed a woman's legs with underwear near her ankles and the phrase "Get Ready to Buck All Night." The Clark County commissioners unanimously passed a law recently banning new billboards in the ever-expanding unincorporated areas. The Nevada Gaming Commission will hold a hearing on whether the Hard Rock's ads, including one of a woman on a card table with a card in her mouth that reads "there's always a temptation to cheat," discredit the gambling industry. The issue of sexually suggestive ads has heated up in the last months, with the American Civil Liberties Union weighing in in favor of the First Amendment and anti-Sin-City activists promoting "decency in advertising'' with more child-friendly billboards. "We want to take the kids to school or go to the mall without having these images forced on us," said Michael Wixom, a lawyer and a founder of the Main Street Billboard Committee, which has won the support of the Nevada P.T.A., American Mothers Inc. and other groups. "I can turn off the TV. I can turn off the radio. But I can't turn off a 40-foot billboard the size of a semi-truck." There are an estimated 15,000 working exotic dancers, and an additional 35,000 registered with the Clark County sheriff's office (as is required of all dancers), says Andrea Hackett, a dancer and political activist who tried unsuccessfully two years ago to unionize the strippers here. But far more women are working as cocktail waitresses, maids, casino workers, administrative assistants, cabdrivers, construction workers, social workers, small-business owners and veterinarians. A woman, Carol C. Harter, is president of U.N.L.V. , and the president and vice president of the Culinary Workers Union, Local 226, one of the most powerful labor unions in the country, are women. There are developers and real estate moguls, government officials, politicians and policewomen. Almost since Las Vegas sprung up in the desert 100 years ago, women have played a crucial role in the labor market here, with much higher percentages of women working in Las Vegas than in the rest of the country, said Joanne L. Goodwin, an associate professor of history at the university. The employment rate is still high for women, according to a recent study by the Institute for Women's Policy Research, a group based in Washington that analyzed 2000 census data to compare the status of women in the work force in the 50 states and the District of Columbia. And in 2000, Nevada's average annual earnings for women, $32,000, put it in the top third of states. But the study showed that Nevada ranks near the very bottom in percentage of women employed in managerial or professional occupations. It found that 28.2 percent of Nevada women - the figures are similar for Las Vegas - are employed in managerial or professional occupations, compared with 36.2 percent nationwide. That puts Nevada above only Idaho. Patricia Leigh Brown contributed reporting for this article. |
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| Adolescents
in Adult City: Often From Elsewhere, and Often Going Nowhere
By CHARLIE LeDUFF Published: June 1, 2004
Now the hotel rooms are full, and people keep moving here to take jobs building and cleaning them. Las Vegas grows at a supersonic rate. But within this growth lie seeds of conflict. Away from the adult fantasy of the Strip, Sin City and its suburbs crawl with children and parents trying to raise them. One in four Las Vegans is a minor. The witch's brew of adolescence in a 24-hour town takes a toll on teenagers here. Consider that Nevada, led by Las Vegas and the suburbs of Clark County, ranks near the bottom for a host of teenage afflictions: violence, drug use, pregnancy, suicide and drop-out rates. The schools are crowded and underfinanced, leading to a churning system that tends to lose track of children. According to the Nevada Department of Education, more than 12 percent of high school students drop out in senior year. Moreover, 36 percent of Clark County students were not enrolled for the entire school year. Who needs high school anyway? teenagers ask. Not when valet parking attendants tell stories about making $100,000 a year. Here, stripping and blackjack dealing are viable career choices. To a teenager, adult life in Las Vegas can look easy. Part of the easy life is acting hard. While the juvenile population increased 20 percent over the last four years, juvenile delinquency increased more than 30 percent, according to a state report. There are more than 150 gangs now, including a growing white supremacist element. All big cities have their problems, city leaders are quick to point out. Children struggle everywhere. But Nevada consistently ranks poorly among states on issues affecting children's well-being, according to "Nevada Kids Count,'' a report by the Center for Business and Economic Research at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. "Just half of Nevada's residents have lived here more than 11 years," said Dr. R. Keith Schwer, the center's director. "Lots of people coming and going. It has a toll on kids, particularly children." The chaos of growth is one problem. Another is the type of people that growth and opportunity attract. Broken and blended families come for a new life. Second chancers, they are called. "People come here with problems from somewhere else," said Jonathan Vansboskerck, an assistant district attorney who prosecutes juveniles. "Parents work split shifts and kids take their cues from each other. Unsupervised homes, basically." Broken families or traditional ones, it does not seem to matter. Parents often work the swing or graveyard shifts and do not arrive home until well after dark. With so many families from out of state, there are few aunties or grandmothers or cousins to speak of, leaving a tribe of unsupervised teenagers. High school lets out at 1:10 p.m., hours before parents make their long commutes home from the Strip. Teenagers are most likely to have sex when parents are not at home, according to the "Kids First" study, in those afternoon and evening hours when Mom and Dad are working. While there are after-school activities like study hall and sports leagues and 4-H Clubs, there are not enough of them, said Donna Coleman, a former state school board member and executive director of the Children's Advocacy Alliance, a nonprofit group that studies children's issues. "Whatever we're doing, it's not working and we need to do more," Ms. Coleman said. "A lot of the problem is parental responsibility. The influence of the profligate adult life, the lack of a coherent community, no extended family. Who's looking after the children and who's going to pay for it?" For example, Ms. Coleman points out, while schools require a suicide prevention course, there are no suicide prevention programs. The suicide hotline is a toll-free number that routes callers out of state. Then there is the issue of sex for sale. The billboards featuring tacit lesbian sex are everywhere. Sin City is full of men plying convenience stores and bus stations and street corners for lonely, unsupervised girls. The neon draw of the Strip can be hard to resist. "Kids are getting bombarded by the stimulation of today's society, particularly in Las Vegas," said Tom Waite, site director of Girls and Boys Town of Nevada, which counsels and shelters runaways and others. "We're tying to calm the kids down." Parents go to extreme lengths to keep children on the right road. Jannie Poulos, 39, is a daytime bartender at a local tavern on the affluent northwest side of town. On those days that she cannot find a baby sitter, or there are no after-school events, her son comes to the bar and has a soda in the back. "I grew up here and so I know better," she said. "It's the kids from Iowa getting caught up in the moment. If you're going to raise a kid here with these kinds of influences, you have to know what your kid is up to. You have to care about them, basically." |
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| 26 Nov 2004 'Porn is to blame' for abuse rise from scotsman.com PORNOGRAPHIC images in the media, on public transport and on the internet have been blamed for violence against women in Scotland. On the UN international day of action to eliminate violence against
women, the Shadow social justice minister Christine Grahame yesterday cited a report that one in five young men and one in ten women thought that violence against women was acceptable and pointed the finger of blame at the media and entertainment industries. She said: "The violence of pornography is there for all to access whether on the bus, the video, the magazine, the web. "It is here young men and women are subjected to the influences that make them devalue each other's sexuality, contaminating respect for each other as people and cannot be detached from violence in all its forms against women." Ms Grahame welcomed Executive plans to set up an expert committee on tackling violence against women and urged them to include the issue of pornography. With recorded levels of rape and attempted rape at its highest ever
level at 988 in |
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| Tuesday, 27 July, 2004 Norway hotel staff want porn ban Pay-TV porn is causing bad behaviour, say hotel staff The main hotel and restaurant employee union says a growing number of its staff are facing such harassment. It says some guests, often businessmen, call the reception for extras - such as fresh towels - to lure female staff. "It can be very unpleasant to get called to a room to be met by a naked man," said a union official. "Some have found themselves in the presence of men watching X-rated movies and several have been accosted," Eli Ljunggren said. "We have received complaints from a number of our members who have found themselves in very uncomfortable situations while in the rooms," Ms Ljunggren added during an interview on Norway's public radio station, NRK. The Scandinavian country has some of the strictest pornography laws in the world. However, most Norwegian hotels broadcast erotic films for a special fee.
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| Porn
a leap backward for Olympic women
By Stanley Crouch, NY Daily News The whorishness that now passes itself off as female liberation is one of the most unexpected aspects of culture in our time. Were it not true that so much of rap is promoted and accepted as "keeping it real" - with its ongoing illiteracy, gold teeth, misogyny and cultivation of thug and slut images - we might be even more shocked by those female Olympic athletes currently showing off their buff for a buck in Playboy magazine. The point here is that we had to sit and listen - as we should have listened! - to the women of the '70s come out against being reduced to what is rudely called "a rack" or a pair of "gams" or a backside. Women wanted everyone to know that they were more than sex objects made up of idealized measurements and proportions. They had brains. They had souls. All of this, and every other human quality, disappeared in the male obsession with boobs, legs and bums. Yet something very strange has happened along the way. Somehow or other, the male fantasy standards have been usurped by females who claim that dressing and acting like sluts - one up, Madonna, one down, Lil' Kim - is an expression of their power and their freedom from the dictates of men. That has to be one of the dumbest ideas ever floated. Women cannot usurp pornography. It devours all who walk through its doors, chews them up and spits them out in a series of images that help define all women as predictably sexual in certain ways. Souls and brains and independence do not survive in pornography. Hugh Hefner's genius was that he was able to take the position that the girl next door would take her clothes off in front of the camera if you could charm her into it. If charm didn't work, money did. Greenbacks could pull anyone's clothes off. Now the Olympians have proven him right again. It is full proof that we are in a post-shame culture. Embarrassment is now impossible, it seems. I was looking recently at photographs of Alice Coachman, who was the only American female to take home the gold from the 1948 Olympics in London. Coachman was also the first black woman so awarded and had fought her way through racism in her home state of Georgia to stand above her competitors when she received her medal. There is a look of immense dignity in her face, which is not of the past but the future. She will be there when our nation outgrows this moment of self-denigration posing as liberation. Yes, Alice Coachman is waiting. |
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| HIV
Cases Shut Down Pornography Film Industry By Nick Madigan New York Times, April 16, 2004 The nation's
multibillion-dollar pornographic film industry virtually shut itself
down this week after producers learned that at least two X-rated actors
had been infected with the virus that causes AIDS. |
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| BT
puts block on child porn sites
Martin Bright, home affairs editor Sunday June 6, 2004 The Observer British Telecom has taken the unprecedented step of blocking all illegal child pornography websites in a crackdown on abuse online. The decision by Britain's largest high-speed internet provider will lead to the first mass censorship of the web attempted in a Western democracy. The move, previously thought to be at the limits of technical possibilities of the internet and prohibitively expensive, was given the personal backing of BT chairman Sir Christopher Bland at a board meeting last month after intense pressure from children's charities. Known as Cleanfeed, the project has been developed in consultation with the Home Office and will go live by the end of the month, The Observer can reveal. Other major players in the internet market, such as Energis and Thus, which owns rival Demon Internet, are said to be preparing to block banned sites. Subscribers to British Telecom's internet services such as BTYahoo and BTInternet who attempt to access illegal sites will receive an error message as if the page was unavailable. BT will register the number of attempts but will not be able to record details of those accessing the sites. A list of illegal sites compiled by the Internet Watch Foundation, the industry's watchdog, has been available for some time, but until now there has been no way to prevent people accessing them because most are based outside the UK. The initiative would not have been possible a year ago, but improvements in computer processing speeds means that the company is now able to block websites, offensive pages and even individual images of abuse. The move is the brainchild of John Carr, internet adviser to children's charity NCH, who wrote to Home Office Minister Paul Goggins last July urging action on pedophile websites after a successful campaign to block internet newsgroups (electronic message boards which pedophiles used to share images of children). Goggins approached internet providers last September to ask them to investigate if it would be possible. At first they were resistant, but BT came back to the Home Office last month to announce early tests of Cleanfeed had been successful. Blocking websites is highly controversial and until now has been associated only with oppressive regimes such as Saudi Arabia and China, which have censored sites associated with dissidents. But many in the field of child protection believe that the explosion of pedophile sites justifies the crackdown. 'British Telecom deserve to be congratulated on this bold move,' Carr said. 'I expect every other service provider will now look at what they are doing to see if they can achieve a similar result.' Pierre Danon, chief executive of BT Retail, added: 'You are always caught between the desire to tackle child pornography and freedom of information. But I was fed up with not acting on this and always being told that it was technically impossible.'
BT says it is blocking up to 20,000 attempts each day to access child porn. Its figures provide the first firm evidence of the extent of web paedophilia and BT is targeting the porn with its Clean Feed system. The Internet Watch Foundation called the figures "staggering" and said children were being abused in order to supply the hardcore images. Police officials said the extent of the online porn problem was "extremely disturbing". Illegal images BT said in its first three weeks its new system, which bars access to particular sites, registered nearly 250,000 attempts to view web pages containing images of child pornography. That represents an average of about 10,000 requests each day. Anyone trying to access such a site would be presented with a message reading "Website not found". Pierre Danon, chief executive of BT retail, said the company was blocking access to hundreds of sites which had been identified by the Internet Watch Foundation. But he said BT did not track those trying to log onto the sites or pass their details on to police. And he said the company had no way of telling how many users were navigating to such sites by accident. "We don't know their motives or who does it and honestly we don't want to know," he told BBC Radio 4's Today programme. A BT spokesman added: "It could be that one dedicated pervert is making hundreds of attempts to get on websites each day." Currently the technology is only blocking BT Retail's 2.5 million internet customers from viewing child porn sites but Mr Danon said the company would make it available to other internet service providers on a non-commercial basis. Home Office minister Paul Goggins said the figures revealed by BT were "deeply shocking" and he said he hoped other service providers would take up the offer of using BT's blocking technology. He told the Today programme: "Every image of a child that appears on the internet is an image of a child that's abused." The BBC's Neil Bennett said even allowing for some people making repeated attempts, it is clear thousands of people are trying to see such material daily. BT is only one of the main service providers in the UK and police leaders are calling on others to block paedophile websites. Websites assessed by the IWF as "illegal to view" under the 1978 Child Protection Act were targeted by BT. The IWF keeps a real-time live database which is updated every time an illegal site is found. At any one time there are thousands of sites on the database.
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| High
court bars Internet porn law enforcement
Ruling sends law down to lower court for trial From Bill Mears
By a 5-4 vote, the high court said 1998 legislation "likely violates the First Amendment." The court ordered parties from both sides to reconsider the issue in a lower-court trial. The ruling gives the Bush administration a chance to prove the law does not violate free-speech rights. The case tested the free-speech rights of adults against the power of Congress to control Internet commerce. The 1998 law, known as the Child Online Protection Act (COPA), never took effect. It would have authorized fines up to $50,000 for the crime of placing material that is "harmful to minors" within the easy reach of children on the Internet, according to The Associated Press. The law also would have required adults to use access codes and or other ways of registering before they could see objectionable material online, according to the AP. Writing for the majority, Justice Anthony Kennedy said, "the government has not shown that the less-restrictive alternatives proposed ... should be disregarded. Those alternatives, indeed, may be more effective" than the law passed by Congress. Kennedy said rapid changes in technology would make filtering software a more effective tool to block access than the more restrictive means laid out in COPA, such as age verification and use of a credit card. He said a new trial would allow fresh discussion of the kinds of technology that could satisfy constitutional concerns. Justices John Paul Stevens, David H. Souter, Clarence Thomas and Ruth Bader Ginsburg agreed with Kennedy. In his dissent, Justice Stephen Breyer wrote that, while the law places some burdens on adults wishing to view adult material, "it significantly helps to achieve a compelling congressional goal, protecting children from exposure to commercial pornography." He was joined by justices Rehnquist, O'Connor, and Scalia. The case marked the third time the high court has considered the issue. A 1996 law was struck down by the justices, and the court balked at allowing a second law from going into effect. The American Civil Liberties Union and other groups sued, saying the law criminalizes free speech. The ACLU applauded the ruling. "There are many less restrictive ways to protect children without sacrificing communication intended for adults," said Ann Beeson, the ACLU attorney who argued before the Court. "By upholding the order stopping Attorney General Ashcroft from enforcing this questionable federal law, the Court has made it safe for artists, sex educators, and web publishers to communicate with adults about sexuality without risking jail time." The case is Ashcroft v. ACLU , case no. 03-0218. The case was the last of nearly 80 cases decided in a busy court term that ended Tuesday with no announcements that any of the nine justices would retire, according to the AP.
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Hear Arguments on Internet Pornography Law By John Schwartz The New York Times/March 3, 2004 WASHINGTON - The Supreme Court heard oral arguments on Tuesday about Internet pornography, one of the most vexing issues at the intersection of technology and First Amendment rights. Neither side got a free ride from the justices in the discussion of the Child Online Protection Act, a 1998 law that makes it illegal for commercial Web sites to make available to children 16 and under material that is not necessarily obscene but could be considered "harmful to minors" under a complex, three-part formula in the law. Just minutes into his argument, Solicitor General Theodore B. Olson was interrupted by Justice Sandra Day O'Connor, who asked why the government was fighting for new laws when it was not enforcing the old ones. "There are very few prosecutions, and there's all kinds of stuff out there," Justice O'Connor said. Mr. Olson said the Bush administration was stepping up its prosecution of pornography cases in the online and offline world and had issued 21 indictments in the last two years. Regulation of Internet pornography is urgently needed, Mr. Olson said, because "it's causing irreparable injury to our most important resource - our children." The materials are "as available to children as a television remote," he said, and turn up when youngsters make the most innocuous searches. He argued that the world of online pornography was exploding, and said that typing the words "free porn" on a search engine produced 6,230,000 sites. "I did this this weekend," he said. When asked whether all of the sites could be considered obscene, he said, "I didn't have enough time to go through all of those sites," drawing laughs from justices and spectators. At another point, Justice Stephen G. Breyer asked for specific examples of Web sites that were not pornographic but could run afoul of the law's prohibitions. Justice Breyer said that he looked at examples provided by the American Civil Liberties Union in its legal brief and could not find one that fell that into that middle ground. Ann Beeson, a lawyer for the civil liberties union, cited examples that included "lesbian and gay pleasure" and "the pleasure of sex outdoors," and the works of a sex columnist, Susie Bright. But the discussion moved on without growing more explicit, and decorum was preserved. Congress passed the Child Online Protection Act in 1998 after the court struck down its first major effort to restrict pornography in cyberspace, the Communications Decency Act, which Congress passed in 1996. That law, which would have made it a crime to provide "indecent" material to minors online, was declared unconstitutional by the Supreme Court in 1997. In passing the Child Online Protection Act, Congress was trying to produce a law narrower in scope than its first try, Mr. Olson said. The new law prohibits commercial Web sites from publishing material "harmful to minors" unless the site can show that it has made good faith efforts - requiring a credit card, for example - to keep out all Web surfers younger than 17. Violators could be fined as much as $50,000 and spend six months in jail, with higher penalties for repeat offenders. The civil liberties union challenged the law in federal court and was joined by a broad coalition of Web sites, booksellers and civil liberties organizations, as well as online stores like Condomania and online publications like Salon, which discuss sex frankly. The oral arguments on Tuesday were the second time the justices have taken up this law. In a ruling last term, they reversed a decision by the United States Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit, which had declared the law unconstitutional. The appeals court said that the law's reliance on "community standards" would mean, in practice, that the most tolerant communities would still be held to "the decency standards of the most puritanical communities." The Supreme Court said that the lower court should not have declared the law unconstitutional based on a finding of only that single major flaw. The Third Circuit reviewed the case again and, last March, found multiple grounds for declaring the act unconstitutional. In the arguments on Tuesday, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg asked whether people who were entitled to view the Web sites would be reluctant to do so because of the government's requirement that the sites verify age by getting credit cards or other identification. "The whole world can know about it if I put in my credit card number," Justice Ginsburg said. Mr. Olson replied that the law included provisions that make abuse of the data illegal. Ms. Beeson argued that there were less restrictive alternatives to the pornography law: parents could now take matters into their own hands by using Internet filtering software and configuring it to reflect their own values. Congress already requires that schools and libraries use filters. Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist and Justice Antonin Scalia seemed skeptical of that argument, however, and both noted that the civil liberties union had opposed the library filtering bill. Mr. Olson also noted that a number of Web sites gave step-by-step instructions on defeating the technology. Still, Ms. Beeson said in closing, Congress has gone too far in restricting online speech. "The government can't burn down the house to roast the pig," she said.
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Man Arrested
For Allegedly Having Sex With 2-Month-Old; SACRAMENTO -- An El Dorado Hills man is being held without bond on federal child pornography charges after agents on Monday said they seized images from his home showing him performing sexual acts with his 2-month-old daughter. U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents said the girl is one of the youngest sexual assault victims they have ever encountered. Larry Michael Jeffs, 41, was arrested at his home Thursday after the agents said they found explicit video images showing him engaging in sexual acts with the infant, who is now 8 months old. Jeffs is alleged to have distributed the images over the Internet, where they were recovered during a child pornography investigation in Detroit. The agents said they traced the images to Jeffs' e-mail. Federal agents and the agents with the California Department of Justice Sexual Predator Apprehension Team raided Jeffs' home and seized computer equipment, a digital camera, and infant's clothing and bedding. A 41-year-old El Dorado Hills man was arrested on distribution of child pornography charges after policemen seized video from his home showing he engaged in sexual acts with his daughter who was only 2-months-old. Officers believe the infant is one of the youngest sexual assault victims they have ever encountered. Larry Michael Jeffs was charged of engaging in sexual acts with his infant child, now 8-months old. Jeffs also placed computer images of himself molesting the child in the Internet, where they were detected during Operation Predator. Agents traced images recovered during an ongoing investigation in Detroit to Jeffs' e-mail. Jeffs is currently being held at the Sacramento County Jail. If convicted, pedophile faces a maximum sentence for distributing child pornography and production of child pornography involving a parent of 50 years in prison. Police seized computer equipment, a digital camera, and infant's clothing and bedding during search in Jeff's home. Jeffs' attorney did not contest the prosecutor's request that he be held without bail, as a danger to the community and a flight risk.
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Hop's Crossover to the Adult Aisle The New York Times/ March 7, 2004 By Martin Edlund For the boisterous Atlanta-based rappers Lil John and the East Side Boyz, Dec. 10 was the crowning night of what had already been a triumphant year. Their album "Kings of Crunk" had been certified platinum; their song "Get Low" was in heavy rotation on MTV and commercial radio. That evening, at the MGM Grand hotel in Las Vegas, they collected three Billboard Music Awards, including one for R&B/hip-hop group of the year. But the rappers didn't linger over their victory. Instead, they skipped the after-parties and rushed upstairs to their suite to film a graphic girl-on-girl sex scene for their new porn video, "Lil Jon and the East Side Boyz American Sex Series," which was released last month through adult video stores and the Internet. "It's not softcore porn," Lil Jon said by telephone from Atlanta. "It's some real XXX." Hip-hop has lately taken a turn toward the bourgeois, with prominent rappers renouncing violence, embracing philanthropy and donning pinstripe suits. But in deliberate defiance of this newfound respectability, some top acts have begun to pursue a less-than-wholesome sideline: commercial pornography. Pop music has always pushed sexual boundaries, of course, and rap has never shied away from gleefully smutty lyrics. But now, some stars are moving beyond raunchy rhetoric into actual pornographic matter, with graphic videos, explicit cable TV shows and hip-hop-themed girlie magazines. 50 Cent, whose "Get Rich or Die Tryin' " was the best-selling album of 2003, was at the Adult Entertainment Expo in Las Vegas in January to promote a deal with a company called Digital Sin. The result, to be released later this year, will be an "interactive sex DVD," titled "Groupie Luv," featuring 50 Cent and the rap group G-Unit that will allow the viewer to select partners, sexual positions, camera angles, even the dispositions of the women ("naughty" or "nice"). The newly launched music-meets-porn magazine Fish 'n' Grits gives rappers and and porn stars equal play in its pages. (The rapper Method Man shares the inaugural cover with the adult film star Solveig.) And in January, Playboy TV introduced a new hip-hop-themed series - the first of several planned for this year - called "Buckwild." The show features mainstream stars like OutKast, Snoop Dogg, Nelly and Busta Rhymes cavorting with a frisky troupe of women called the Buckwild Girls, who seem to fall out of their clothes whenever a camera approaches. "It was inevitable," said Ken (Buckwild) Francis, the creator, producer and host of the series. "Hip-hop is a billion-dollar-a-year industry. If you don't do it, you're going to miss the boat." The first mainstream rapper to do a feature-length commercial porn video was Snoop Dogg, whose "Snoop Dogg's Doggystyle" was distributed through Hustler Video in 2001. Set in his Los Angeles home, it featured sex scenes interspersed with lip-synched performances of 11 previously unreleased songs. (Like other rappers who dabble in porn, Snoop Dogg does not actually have sex on camera; instead, he plays master of ceremonies, presiding over the festivities.) In an industry where a video that sells 4,000 copies is considered a runaway hit, "Snoop Dogg's Doggystyle" sold somewhere "in the hundreds of thousands," according to Larry Flynt, president of Larry Flynt Publications, which owns Hustler Video. It was named the top-selling tape of 2001 by the porn trade publication Adult Video News and was the first hardcore video ever listed on the Billboard music video sales chart. "It's been very lucrative for Snoop and us," said Mr. Flynt. The sequel, "Snoop Dogg's Hustlaz: Diary of a Pimp," was named top-selling tape of 2003. For the porn industry, hip-hop fans are an attractive new market. "The fresh music brings people who are primarily fans of hip-hop to the adult genre," said Christian Mann, president of Video Team, the company which co-produced and distributed the Lil Jon video. "We get a lot of customers that we might not otherwise get." Camille Evans, a publisher and editor of Fish 'n' Grits, said: "We've been using sex to sell music for years. Now we're just flipping it to have music sell sex." The economics of porn make it a lucrative prospect for rappers. A video like Lil Jon's can be done "on a very meager production budget of maybe $50,000," Mr. Mann said. Marquee rappers tend to undertake these projects as partners, rather than hired help, so if the video does well they get paid twice: once as talent (about $1 for every copy sold in the case of Lil Jon and the East Side Boyz), and then again as investors. (Lil Jon is a major stakeholder in Legacy DVD Works, which was co-producer of the video and will receive 50 percent of the profits from it.) The video retails for just over $20; if it sells 100,000 copies, that's a million-dollar profit, according to Mr. Mann. Sales of cable, Internet and foreign distribution rights can contribute 20 percent more, he said. Even if a video doesn't set sales records, it can add a helpful dash of danger and erotic adventurism to a rapper's image. One common scenario is to depict the rapper as a pimp presiding over a stable of beautiful women. The pimp is a stock figure in hip-hop iconography, an attractive rebel, full of street savvy and sexual charm. When it comes to hip-hop porn, he also solves a vexing casting issue: how to give rappers the appearance of sexual prowess without actually showing them having sex. In "Snoop Dogg's Hustlaz: Diary of a Pimp," Snoop peacocks in outrageous outfits and seduces a prudish journalist into his employ. But when it comes time for sex, Snoop passes the honors off to someone else - or, more often, to several other people. Ice-T's 2003 porn video, "Pimpin' 101," takes a similar tack. As the host, Ice-T leads the viewer through a step-by-step mock lesson in how to be a pimp, including primers on various kinds of women. (Oddly, Ice-T is a regular on the highly rated NBC television series "Law and Order: S.V.U.," on which he plays a detective who investigates sex crimes.) Another common conceit for these videos is a behind-the-scenes look at the "real" life of a rap superstar. Lil Jon's "American Sex Series" lets fans follow him to the strip club and into the hotel suite. "Your fans want to hang out with you," said Lil Jon. "When you watch this movie, if you're a guy, you feel like you're hanging out with us and wilding out with some girls." According to Brian Leach, vice president in the urban music division of Lil Jon's label, TVT Records, the porn video appeals particularly to Lil Jon's core audience of "hard, aggressive, crunk, edgy youth," as Mr. Leach puts it. These are fans who might feel alienated by Lil Jon's recent Top 40 success. (He produced and appears in four songs in the top 50 on last week's Billboard Hot 100 Singles Chart, including Usher's "Yeah!," which has been No. 1 for two weeks running.) "You have this audience that's wondering if he's still theirs," Mr. Leach said. "These videos say, `I still belong to you.' " However, they may distance him from everyone else. In mainstream pop music, it's hard to know where titillation ends and smut begins (often, it's just a few inches of cloth that separate a Rolling Stone magazine photo from a Playboy-type one). As Janet Jackson's recent Super Bowl misstep proved, even mock sexuality can be difficult to reconcile with commercial standards and tastes. In the past, rappers like Luther Campbell of 2 Live Crew and Too Short have dabbled in porn. But these acts never appealed to a particularly broad audience. Today, some of the biggest names in the business are involved. Artists like Snoop Dogg, 50 Cent and Lil Jon are fixtures on MTV; in fact, the network is even developing a Lil Jon cartoon. Of course, many of these acts' fans are teenagers. Mr. Mann, of Video Team, recalls hearing Lil Jon's "Get Low" played over the loudspeakers during halftime at his 10-year-old son's football game. "The little cheerleaders had actually made up cheers to the tune," he said. Mr. Mann and Lil Jon both insist that their video won't be marketed to underage consumers. But that attitude may be willfully naïve. In an age when teenagers scour search engines and file-sharing networks, snapping up anything they can find by their favorite rap stars, the wall between adult and youth entertainment is irreparably porous. Mr. Leach of TVT Records, Lil Jon's label, recognizes that the majority of Lil Jon fans are "kids who come from homes that are a little more conservative." But far from discouraging Lil Jon's porn venture, TVT is planning to put out its own racy Lil Jon DVD, titled "Too Crunk for TV," which will feature nude girls in the style of the enormously successful "Girls Gone Wild" video series. Another issue for these rappers is whether their porn projects will jeopardize their even-more-lucrative corporate endorsement deals. Snoop Dogg has recently appeared in television commercials for Nokia and AOL, and in November, Reebok released an enormously successful 50 Cent sneaker called the G6. In 2002, Pepsi pulled ads featuring the rapper Ludacris after Fox News's Bill O'Reilly chastised the company for promoting a "thug rapper" whose songs contain sexually explicit lyrics. Now Mr. O'Reilly has criticized Reebok for partnering with 50 Cent: "They don't care what he says on his records, and they don't care that he's marketing porn and drugs and all that other stuff," Mr. O'Reilly said on a recent episode of his show "The O'Reilly Factor." "They're liking his selling shoes." Since then, 50 Cent has quietly distanced himself from the porn project. The original press release announcing the deal characterized it as a partnership between Digital Sin and 50 Cent. A revised release, put out by 50 Cent's management after the "O'Reilly Factor" broadcast, billed it instead as a collaboration between Digital Sin and Lloyd Banks, one of 50 Cent's partners in the rap group G-Unit. 50 Cent's name appears only in the final sentence of the release, which states that he and G-Unit "won't be engaged in any sexual behavior but may make general appearances." For rappers who want to be involved in pornography, the decision may come down, in the end, to a simple matter of opportunity cost. "Our core consumers are minors, so we're not driving it that way," said 50 Cent's manager, Chris Lighty. "We're in the business of selling clothing and sneakers. We're going to have a $100 million business by the end of this year. This isn't something we're jeopardizing."
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U.S. arrests dozens over Internet child porn distribution Friday, May 14, 2004 WASHINGTON (CNN) -- Dozens of people have been arrested in connection with an ongoing federal crackdown on the distribution of child pornography sent over the Internet using peer-to-peer file sharing applications, federal law enforcement sources said Friday. Attorney General John Ashcroft and officials from the FBI and Immigration and Customs Enforcement on Friday announced the results of the latest enforcement actions which have taken place throughout the United States in recent days. Officials said cybercrime task forces have been targeting distributors of pornographic images on the file sharing networks which have been used by young, potentially vulnerable audiences, who primarily have used the peer to peer applications to share music. In some cases predators have used the technology to try to lure victims for sex, an official said. Federal law enforcement officials said the attorney general will highlight the ongoing problem in part to help alert parents of the continuing danger of pornography targeted at minors on the Internet. "The problem is not new, but it's growing. It's huge," said one federal official. Undercover FBI and ICE cybercrime investigators have been actively combating the many thousands of perpetrators engaged in pushing the pornography, officials said. One 19-year-old youth recently arrested and convicted told authorities he started using peer-to-peer applications to share music, but later moved on to sending and receiving images and movies of child pornography. Interagency task forces of federal, state and local law enforcement officials have been formed to fight what they say is a growing threat to children.
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Administration
wages war on pornography WASHINGTON - Lam Nguyen's job is to sit for hours in a chilly, quiet room devoid of any color but gray and look at pornography. This job, which Nguyen does earnestly from 9 to 5, surrounded by a half-dozen other "computer forensic specialists" like him, has become the focal point of the Justice Department's operation to rid the world of porn. In this field office in Washington, 32 prosecutors, investigators and a handful of FBI agents are spending millions of dollars to bring anti-obscenity cases to courthouses across the country for the first time in 10 years. Nothing is off limits, they warn, even soft-core cable programs such as HBO's long-running Real Sex or the adult movies widely offered in guestrooms of major hotel chains. Department officials say they will send "ripples" through an industry that has proliferated on the Internet and grown into an estimated $10 billion-a-year colossus profiting Fortune 500 corporations such as Comcast, which offers hard-core movies on a pay-per-view channel. The Justice Department recently hired Bruce Taylor, who was instrumental in a handful of convictions obtained over the past year and unsuccessfully represented the state in a 1981 case, Larry Flynt vs. Ohio. Flynt, who recently opened a Hustler nightclub in Baltimore, says everyone in the business is wary, making sure their taxes are paid and the "talent" is over 18. He says he's ready for a rematch, especially with Taylor. "Everyone's concerned," Flynt said in an interview. "We deal in plain old vanilla sex. Nothing really outrageous. But who knows, they may want a big target like myself." A recent episode of Showtime's Family Business, a reality show about Adam Glasser, an adult film director and entrepreneur in California, had him worrying about shipping his material to states more apt to prosecute. It also featured him organizing a pornographic Internet telethon to raise money for targets of prosecution. Drew Oosterbaan, chief of the division in charge of obscenity prosecutions at the Justice Department, says officials are trying to send a message and halt an industry they see as growing increasingly "lawless." "We want to do everything we can to deter this conduct" by producers and consumers, Oosterbaan said. "Nothing is off the table as far as content." Money and friends It is unclear, though, just how the American public and major corporations that make money from pornography will accept the perspective of the Justice Department and Attorney General John Ashcroft. Any move against mainstream pornography could affect large telephone companies offering broadband Internet service or the dozens of national credit card companies providing payment services to pornographic Web sites. Cable television, meanwhile, which has found late-night lineups with "adult programming" highly profitable, is unlikely to budge, and such companies have powerful friends. Brian Roberts , the CEO of Comcast, which offers "hard-core" porn on the Hot Network channel (at $11.99 per film in Baltimore), was co-chair of Philadelphia 2000, the host committee that brought the Republican National Convention to Philadelphia. In February, the Bush campaign honored Comcast President Stephen Burke with "Ranger" status, for agreeing to raise at least $200,000 for the president's re-election effort. Comcast's executive vice president, David Cohen, has close ties to Gov. Edward G. Rendell of Pennsylvania, a former chairman of the Democratic National Committee. Tim Fitzpatrick, the spokesman for Comcast at its corporate headquarters in Philadelphia, declined to comment on the cable network's adult programming. But officials at the National Cable and Telecommunications Association, which Roberts used to chair, said adult programming is legal, relies on subscription services for access and has been upheld by the courts for years. "Good luck turning back that clock," said Paul Rodriguez, a spokesman for the association. Ashcroft vs. consent In a speech in 2002, Ashcroft made it clear that the Justice Department intends to try. He said pornography "invades our homes persistently though the mail, phone, VCR, cable TV and the Internet," and has "strewn its victims from coast to coast." Given the millions of dollars Americans are spending each month on adult cable television, Internet sites and magazines and videos, many may see themselves not as victims but as consumers, with an expectation of rights, choices and privacy. Ashcroft, a religious man who does not drink alcohol or caffeine, smoke, gamble or dance, and has fought unrelenting criticism that he has trod roughshod on civil liberties in the wake of the Sept. 11 attacks, is taking on the porn industry at a time when many experts say Americans are wary about government intrusion into their lives. The Bush administration is eager to shore up its conservative base with this issue. Ashcroft held private meetings with conservative groups a year and a half ago to assure them that anti-porn efforts are a priority. But administration critics and First Amendment rights attorneys warn that the initiative could smack of Big Brother, and that targeting such a broad range of readily available materials could backfire. "They are miscalculating the pulse of the community," said attorney Paul Cambria, who has gone head to head with Taylor in cases dating to the 1970s. "I think a lot of adults would say this is not what they had in mind, spending millions of dollars and the time of the courts and FBI agents and postal inspectors and prosecutors investigating what consenting adults are doing and watching." The law itself rests on the landmark 1973 Supreme Court decision in Miller vs. California, which held that something is "obscene" only if an average person applying contemporary community standards finds it patently offensive. But until now, it hasn't been prosecuted at the federal level for more than 10 years. Since the last time he faced Taylor, Flynt's empire has grown into a multimillion-dollar corporation with a large, almost conservative-looking headquarters in California, where he and executives in dark suits oversee the company's dozens of men's clubs, sex stores and more than 30 magazines. "He's basically crusaded against everything I've fought for for the past 30 years," Flynt said. "This is for consenting adults. They have the right to view what they want to in the privacy of their own home. And even if they don't enjoy these materials, they still don't want to be looking over their neighbors' shoulders." Cases and results Taylor, who has been involved in the prosecution of more than 700 pornography cases since the 1970s, including at the Justice Department in the late 1980s and early '90s, declined to be interviewed. But he did talk to reporters for the PBS program Frontline in 2001, when he was president of the National Law Center for Children and Families, an anti-porn group. "Just about everything on the Internet and almost everything in the video stores and everything in the adult bookstores is still prosecutable illegal obscenity," he said. "Some of the cable versions of porno movies are prosecutable. Once it becomes obvious that this really is a federal felony instead of just a form of entertainment or investment, then legitimate companies, to stay legitimate, are going to have to distance themselves from it." The Justice Department pursued obscenity cases vigorously in the 1970s and '80s, prosecuting not necessarily the worst offenders in terms of extreme material, but those it viewed as most responsible for pornography's proliferation. Oosterbaan said the department is employing much the same strategy this time, targeting not only some of the most egregious hard-core porn but also more conventional material, in an effort "to be as effective as possible." "I can't possibly put it all away," he said. "Results are what we want." The strategy in the 1980s resulted in a lot of extreme pornography - dealing in urination, violence or bestiality - going underground. Today, with the Internet, international producers and a substantial market, industry officials say there is no underground. Obscenity cases came to a standstill under Janet Reno, President Bill Clinton's attorney general, who focused on child pornography, which is considered child abuse and comes under different criminal statutes. The ensuing years saw an explosion of porn, so much so that critics say that Americans' tolerance for sexually explicit material rivals that of Europeans. That tolerance could prove to be the obscenity division's biggest obstacle. Americans are used to seeing sex, experts say, in the movies, in their e-mail inboxes and on popular cable shows such as HBO's Sex and the City. There is no real gauge of just how obscene a jury will find pornographic material. The majority of defendants indicted in federal courts over the past year have taken plea agreements when faced with the weight and resources of the Justice Department. More than 50 other federal investigations are under way. In 2001, though, one interesting case emerged from St. Charles County, Mo., the heart of Ashcroft's conservative Missouri base. First Amendment lawyer Cambria defended a video store there against state charges that it was renting two obscene videotapes that depicted group sex, anal sex and sex with objects. Cambria won, convincing a jury of 12 women, all between the ages of 40 and 60, that the tapes had educational value and helped reduce inhibitions. They reached the verdict in less than three hours. The department's most closely watched case involves "extreme" porn producer Rob Zicari and his North Hollywood company Extreme Associates. The prolific Zicari is charged with selling five allegedly obscene videotapes, which he now markets as the "Federal Five," that depict simulated rapes and murder. Almost reveling in the charges, Zicari's Web site says, "The most controversial company in porn today! Guess what? Controversy ... sells!" The case hangs on a strategic move by the Justice Department that could make or break hundreds of future cases. Instead of bringing charges in Hollywood, where Zicari easily defeated a local obscenity ordinance recently in a jury trial, department officials ordered his tapes from Pittsburgh, Pa., and charged him there, hoping for a jury pool less porn-friendly. Industry lawyers and top executives contend that the courts should rule that because the tapes were ordered on the Internet, the "community standard" demanded by the law should be the standard of the whole community of the World Wide Web. The Internet is filled with ample evidence of even more hard-core or offensive material from abroad, they say, and someone in Pittsburgh should not be able to determine what someone in Hollywood can order. Either way, Nguyen, father of a 2-year-old girl, and his co-workers spend their days scouring the Internet for the most obscene material, following leads sent in by citizens and tracking pornographers operating under different names. The job wears on them all, day after day, so much so that the obscenity division has recently set up in-house counseling for them to talk about what they're seeing and how it is affecting them. "This stuff isn't the easiest to deal with," Nguyen said recently while at his computer. "But I think we're going after the bad guys and we're making a difference, and that's what makes it worthwhile."
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New
York man loses shirt in topless bar
In a lawsuit filed Wednesday, Mitchell Blaser, 53, said the management at the Scores club had added bogus charges to his American Express bill, which he claimed should have been in the region of 2,000 dollars. Blaser's lawyer, Leonard Zack, said the club had mistakenly banked on the idea that his client -- the chief financial officer of Swiss Re's American unit -- would be too embarrassed to pursue the matter in court. "It's a swindle, and they probably do it to a lot of people who don't want to do anything," Zack told the Daily News. Scores spokesman Lonnie Hanover insisted Blaser had "partied like a rock star" with two of his friends. The final credit card bill included 16,000 dollars for five bottles of Clos de Mesnil champagne, 7,000 dollars for table dances and stripper tips, 1,000 dollars for food and other drinks, and a 4,000-dollar staff tip. "If you want to live like Colin Farrell, you have to pay for it," Hanover told the New York Post. "The 28,000-dollar bill is totally legitimate." In his lawsuit, Blaser
claimed Scores security personnel had intimidated him into signing
a bill for 8,615 dollars. Days later, he said, he discovered that
his credit card had been charged three more times.
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Hiding in Plain Sight: Parlors lack permits, mar town images Tara York, New Haven Register. June 2, 2003 Shrouded behind curtains and tinted windows, secretive and often illegal "spas" are creeping from the backstreets to Main Street. They're on Route 1 in Milford or in a storefront just a stones' throw from a town hall. It's all part of what a growing number of law enforcement and local officials say is a disturbing trend - the mainstreaming of the illegal sex industry. Illegal massage parlors in Milford and neighboring towns have long been the subjects of murmuring by city residents who believe they are actually a front for a sex business or other illegal activity. "It dulls the morals of society," said Jack Fowler, a former Milford alderman who is still active in town politics. "When someone asks how to get to your house, you don't want to say, 'Well, make a right at the porn shop.' It destroys home values, property values." In March 2002, the Yo Yo Salon massage parlor on Linden Avenue in Stratford was shut down after police said a masseuse offered sex to an undercover officer. In August 2002, the Royal One spa on Route 1 in Milford was closed after police said a masseuse offered an undercover cop sex for money. Milford officials and residents say the spas and other businesses suggestive of sex are marring the city's image and they are in a perpetual fight to close the establishments. The spas are not legitimate therapeutic massage businesses. "They are a little dark," said Linda Stock, Milford zoning-enforcem | |