USD$75K to surf porn?
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/08/10/us/10obscene.html?_r=1&ref=us&oref=slogin
Federal Effort on Web Obscenity Shows Few
Results
By NEIL A. LEWIS
WASHINGTON, Aug. 9 Tom Rogers, a retired Indianapolis detective,
toils away most days in his suburban home office reviewing sexual
Web sites and other Internet traffic to see whether they qualify as
obscene material whose purveyors should be prosecuted by the
Justice Department.
His work is financed by a Justice Department grant initially
provided through a Congressional earmark inserted into a spending
bill by Representative Frank R. Wolf, Republican of Virginia.
The grant, about $150,000 a year, has helped pay for Mr. Rogers and
another retired law enforcement officer in Reno, Nev., to harvest
and review complaints about obscene matter on the Internet that
citizens register on the Justice Department Web site.
In the last few years, 67,000 citizens complaints have been deemed
legitimate under the program and passed on to the Justice
Department and federal prosecutors.
The number of prosecutions resulting from those referrals is
zero.
That may help explain why no one not Justice Department
officials, not Mr. Wolf, not even the religious antipornography
crusader who runs the program seems eager to call the project a
shining success.
The department Web site invites citizens to report material that
they believe is obscene so it can be investigated and, perhaps,
prosecuted. Clicking on the site to make a report takes the user to
ObscenityCrimes.org, which is run by Morality in Media, the grant
recipient.
Morality in Media is a conservative religious group that has worked
since 1962 to rid the world of pornography and whose headquarters
is, improbably, on the Upper West Side of Manhattan.
Morality in Media has received two annual grants from Mr. Wolfs
earmarks and is hoping that Justice Department officials decide on
their own to award a third, as Mr. Wolfs ability to obtain an
earmark for the program has apparently waned with the Democrats
control of Congress.
Department officials, however, seemed less than keen to talk about
ObscenityCrimes.org. Spokesmen for the criminal division said
officials there had nothing to do with the program, which they had
been obliged to start because of the earmark.
In the seven years of the Bush administration, the department has
prosecuted about 24 obscenity cases, several centered on film
producers who failed to keep proper records showing that their
models were not minors.
Although the Justice Department seems not to take
ObscenityCrimes.org very seriously, the Web site suggests that
prosecutors scrutinize the complaints so carefully that it warns
people considering filing a complaint that false statements could
expose the filer to federal criminal prosecution.
Would-be complainants are also advised not to trawl for obscene Web
sites, noting that men are particularly vulnerable to pornographic
addiction. Identifying Internet smut, the site advises, is best
left to professional law enforcement personnel.
The president of Morality in Media, Robert W. Peters, expressed
disappointment with the departments failure to act on any of his
groups complaints and acknowledged that he understood why some
people might say the program had been of little value.
Wed like to see some prosecutions that arose from the complaints
submitted to the Web site, Mr. Peters said in an interview. But
its ultimately up to the Justice Department, and I cant tell the
Justice Department what to do.
Like the outlook of many antipornography campaigners, Mr. Peterss
combines disappointment in the governments performance and
optimism that the situation will soon change. Mr. Peters said he
was confident that officials would eventually assume their
responsibility and go after what he described as a prime threat to
society, the growth on the Internet of sexual material involving
consenting adults.
Child pornography is dealt with through separate laws that have
been upheld by the courts, which have had far greater difficulty in
evaluating when adult sexual material may be classified obscene and
prosecutable.
Stephen G. Bates, a Harvard-trained lawyer and journalism
professor, said he was appalled when he discovered that the Justice
Department was outsourcing a search for obscenity.
Although sexual material may be distasteful to many, it is not
necessarily obscene, which the Supreme Court defined in 1973 as
material that, taken as a whole, lacks artistic merit, depicts
certain conduct in a patently offensive manner and violates
contemporary community standards.
Professor Bates, who teaches at the University of Nevada, Las
Vegas, filed a Freedom of Information Act request that helped him
discover the program by ObscenityCrimes.org.
In an op-ed article last month in The Washington Post and other
newspapers, Mr. Bates said Morality in Medias religious cast, the
sensitivity of the constitutional issue of free speech and the
outsourcing together made a mockery of the First Amendment,
chilling freedom of expression.
Mr. Wolf would not comment. Over several days, his aides said he
was too busy to do so.