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 citizensÂ’ 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. WolfÂ’s earmarks and is hoping that Justice Department officials decide on their own to award a third, as Mr. WolfÂ’s ability to obtain an earmark for the program has apparently waned with the DemocratsÂ’ 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 departmentÂ’s failure to act on any of his groupÂ’s complaints and acknowledged that he understood why some people might say the program had been of little value.
“We’d like to see some prosecutions that arose from the complaints submitted to the Web site,” Mr. Peters said in an interview. “But it’s ultimately up to the Justice Department, and I can’t tell the Justice Department what to do.”
Like the outlook of many antipornography campaigners, Mr. PetersÂ’s combines disappointment in the governmentÂ’s 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 Media’s 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.