Computer underground Digest Wed Oct 18, 1995 Volume 7 : Issue 82 ISSN 1004-042X Editors: Jim Thomas and Gordon Meyer (TK0JUT2@MVS.CSO.NIU.EDU Archivist: Brendan Kehoe Shadow Master: Stanton McCandlish Field Agent Extraordinaire: David Smith Shadow-Archivists: Dan Carosone / Paul Southworth Ralph Sims / Jyrki Kuoppala Ian Dickinson Cu Digest Homepage: http://www.soci.niu.edu/~cudigest CONTENTS, #7.82 (Wed, Oct 18, 1995) File 1--ACLU Cyber-Liberties Update 10/4 File 2--Who's Using Who? Martin Rimm and the Antiporn Activists File 3--Re: "The Emperor's New Clothes (Re CUD 7.80) File 4--Cu Digest Header Info (unchanged since 18 Oct, 1995) CuD ADMINISTRATIVE, EDITORIAL, AND SUBSCRIPTION INFORMATION APPEARS IN THE CONCLUDING FILE AT THE END OF EACH ISSUE. --------------------------------------------------------------------- Date: Tue, 17 Oct 1995 12:47:54 -0400 From: Ann Beeson (by way of pstemari@erinet.com) Subject: File 1--ACLU Cyber-Liberties Update 10/4 October 4, 1995 ACLU CYBER-LIBERTIES UPDATE **Premiere Issue** A bi-weekly online 'zine on cyber-liberties cases and controversies at the state and federal level. ------------------------------------------ FEDERAL PAGE (Congress/Agency/Court Cases) ------------------------------------------ * "Virtual" Child Pornography Bill is Overbroad and Fails to Protect Real Children Despite the FBI's apparent success in raiding alleged child pornographers on America Online, Senator Orrin Hatch decided we needed a new child pornography law. Hatch's bill would expand the existing child porn law to include materials that are: -visual depictions of what "appears to be . . . a minor engaging in sexually explicit conduct;" and -visual depictions "advertised, promoted, presented, described, or distributed in such a manner that conveys the impression that the material is or contains a visual depiction of a minor engaging in sexually explicit conduct." In its effort to outlaw "virtual" child pornography, the bill would criminalize a wide range of constitutionally protected expression. Hatch attempts to justify the new bill by reference to a widely-publicized Canadian case in which a pornographer copied pictures of clothed children from catalogs and morphed them into child pornography. Senator Hatch claims that the case would not be covered under the existing federal child porn statute, but that issue has never been decided by a United States court. While the application of the existing statute to these facts is far from clear, the Hatch bill covers *much more* than just this case scenario. The statute would cover *any* image of a child engaged in sexual behavior, including non-computer-generated drawings, cartoons, and visual images created without the use of photos of real children or even real adults. In upholding child pornography laws, the Supreme Court has stated that "the nature of the harm to be combated requires that the state offense be limited to works that visually depict sexual conduct by children below a specified age. . . . [T]he distribution of descriptions or depictions of sexual conduct, not otherwise obscene, which do not involve live performance or photographic or other visual reproduction of live performances, retains First Amendment protection." _New York v. Ferber_, 458 U.S. 747, 764-65 (1982). Hatch's "virtual child porn" law is clearly unconstitutional because it would outlaw images produced without any involvement by an actual child. Bruce Taylor of the National Law Center for Families and Children argued at a recent conference at Brooklyn Law School that a "virtual child porn" law was needed because pedophiles use virtual porn to lure children. Under that rationale, if a pedophile used a piece of candy to lure a child into sex we would have to outlaw candy. In a free society, we cannot use censorship laws to try to control "bad thoughts." Outlawing all images that might be stimulating to pedophiles would require a massive amount of censorship and would *not* cure pedophilia. The ACLU reiterates its position on child pornography laws: "The ACLU believes that the First Amendment protects the dissemination of all forms of communication. The ACLU opposes on First Amendment grounds laws that restrict the production and distribution of any printed and visual materials even when some of the producers of those materials are punishable under criminal law." "The ACLU views the use of children in the production of visual depictions of sexually explicit conduct as a violation of childrens' rights when such use is highly likely to cause: a) substantial physical harm or, b) substantial and continuing emotional or psychological harm. Government quite properly has the means to protect the interest of children in these situations by the use of criminal prosecution of those persons who are likely to cause such harm to children." The Hatch proposal only demonstrates the dangers of trying to protect children indirectly through censorship laws. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- ------------------------------------------ * Clipper II? Your electronic privacy rights are at stake . . . again. In 1993, the ACLU and an overwhelming majority of industry condemned the Clipper Chip -- the Administration's key escrow encryption scheme to equip every telecommunications device with a "chip" that would allow anyone to secure his private communications as long as the U.S. government held the descrambling key. The government insisted that Clipper would be merely a voluntary standard, but government documents requested under the Freedom of Information Act now confirm the suspicions of civil liberties advocates that the government really believes key escrowed encryption will only meet law enforcement standards if it is mandatory. (See URL:http://www.epic.org/crypto/) Now the Administration has returned with another scheme -- commercial key escrow ("Clipper II"). At close range, Clipper II is a lot like Clipper I: * Although supposedly "independent" of the government, key escrow agents will have to meet standards set by the U.S. government, and will have to reside in the U.S. or in a country with which the U.S. has entered a bilateral agreement. * The proposal provides no privacy safeguards to prevent the compromise of the key escrow agent or the key. * Offered as a "voluntary" standard, the proposal nevertheless forbids interoperability with non-escrowed encryption in exported products. * While the government says it recognizes industry's need for strong encryption, the proposal limits exportable encryption to 64 bits -- a length widely recognized to provide inadequate security. On September 6, 7, and 15, 1995, the ACLU attended meetings held by the National Institute for Standards and Technology (NIST) in Gaithersberg, Maryland. The meetings were called to solicit input from industry on the Clipper II proposal. Draft export criteria were considered on September 6-7, and the general industry response was very lukewarm -- except for a few industries that have been meeting with the Administration and are preparing to announce products that would fit the suggested criteria. The ACLU led one working group to vote 7-7 in favor of condemning the entire proposal. On September 15th, NIST discussed the implementation of a federal key escrow encryption standard. By requiring federal agencies to use commercial key escrow as a FIPS (Federal Information Processing Standard), the Administration clearly hopes to drive industry to accept commercial key escrow as the export standard as well. The ACLU issued the following statement on the current key escrow proposal: The American Civil Liberties Union's Position on the Administration's Current Key Escrow Proposal: * Encryption is speech protected by the First Amendment. The Administration's current key escrow proposal, like the Clipper proposal, continues to tread on the First Amendment rights of American individuals and businesses to use encryption technologies to secure their private communications. The current proposal, like Clipper, should be rejected on First Amendment grounds alone. * The current proposal will not accomplish its stated objectives because a wide array of encryption is available around the globe and will continue to be employed in place of American government-approved key escrow software. * The only key escrow proposal that could begin to satisfy the government's objectives would be an outright ban on the sale of encryption technologies other than those approved by the government and key escrowed. The ACLU fears that the current proposal, and similar proposals, are merely the first step towards mandatory key escrow of encryption. Mandatory key escrow is completely unacceptable to both industry and privacy advocates. * The Administration should abandon its fruitless and unconstitutional efforts to control the export of encryption technology. No legislation is needed -- the Administration has the power to lift the regulatory restrictions that it created. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- ------------------------------------------ * Call for Plaintiffs in Suit to Challenge Online Indecency Legislation Most of you know that the House and Senate have now passed two different versions of the telecommunications bill that would outlaw "indecent" speech over the Internet and other online services. This fall, a conference committee of House and Senate members will work out the differences between the two telco bills and will probably approve some form of online censorship legislation. [For a copy of the legislation, send a message to infoaclu@aclu.org, with "Online Indecency Amendments" in the subject line.] While the ACLU and other advocacy groups continue to lobby Congress to remove the censorship provisions from the telco bill, it is highly likely that some restriction on online indecency will appear in the final bill that emerges from the conference committee. A coalition of civil liberties organizations are preparing a constitutional challenge to this legislation now. The coalition includes the ACLU, Electronic Frontier Foundation, Electronic Privacy Information Center, Media Access Project, and People for the American Way. We plan to be ready to file a lawsuit as soon as the statute is signed into law -- which could be as early as October. An important first step in planning the lawsuit is the selection of plaintiffs. We need to put together a set of plaintiffs that disprove the stereotype created by proponents of the legislation that people opposed to the bill are "pedophiles and pornographers." We believe that the best plaintiffs for this challenge will be persons or entities that provide material that some may deem "indecent" but that has serious artistic, literary, and educational value to our society. We need plaintiffs who use online networks to discuss or distribute works or art, literary classics, sex education, gay and lesbian literature, human rights reporting, abortion information, rape counseling, and controversial political speech. Please contact Ann Beeson at the ACLU if your organization is interested in being a plaintiff in this ground-breaking litigation that will define First Amendment rights in cyberspace. 212-944-9800 x788, beeson@aclu.org. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- ------------------------------------------ STATE PAGE (Legislation/Agency/Court Cases) ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- ------------------------------------------ * Overbroad Searches and Seizures Threaten Electronic Privacy The latest threat to your civil liberties results from law enforcement's overzealous attempts to find evidence of crime or wrongdoing in cyberspace. As we move into the information age, traditional search and seizure rules will need to be refined to ensure fairness and respect for electronic privacy rights. Several recent cases illustrate how privacy rights can be violated when law enforcement conducts investigations in cyberspace. * The ACLU recently wrote to America Online to inquire about their cooperation in the FBI's recent raid of alleged child pornographers who used the online service. The ACLU asked, among other things, whether AOL revealed any information about individual users that was not sought by subpoena or court order; whether AOL turned over all private e-mail messages of suspects or whether they turned over only messages related to the alleged crime; whether AOL also turned over the names, addresses, and e-mail messages of persons who had communicated with the suspects; whether AOL set up accounts for the purpose of allowing government investigators to have access to public chat rooms; and what information AOL regularly keeps about its users' online activity and how long the information is kept. * In Cincinnati, Ohio, a computer bulletin board operator filed a civil rights suit against the Hamilton County Sheriff's Department after the department raided the BBS and seized computer equipment, files, and personal communications. The case argues that the indiscriminate search and seizures violated the BBS operator's free speech and privacy rights. See _Emerson v. Leis_, S.D. Ohio, No. C-1-95-608. The subscribers to the BBS have filed a separate class action suit against the sheriff's department. See _Guest v. Leis_, S.D. Ohio. Law enforcement seized the entire BBS -- all the hardware, software, files, and private communications -- in an effort to obtain 45 files on the BBS that were allegedly obscene. The case asserts that the 45 files represented only 3% of the total resources on the board. * In California, Colorado, and Virginia, the Church of Scientology has brought three copyright infringement actions against anti-scientologists who use online communications to criticize the church. The cases raise important questions about the breadth of computer communications seizures in civil cases. The ACLU of Southern California and the ACLU of Colorado continue to monitor the cases in their states. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- ------------------------------------------ * Nine States This Year Passed Online Censorship Legislation While online activists have been busy fighting the pending federal attempts to censor online communications, state legislatures have been carelessly crafting online censorship bills at home. And if you think Congress is full of Luddites, just wait until to hear what your state legislators have come up with. At least nine states (CT, GA, IL, KS, MD, MT, NJ, OK, VA) have passed legislation this year to regulate online content, and several others considered such bills, with some still pending. These bills seek to criminalize a wide range of online speech and content, including: * speech that "harasses, annoys, or alarms" * materials deemed "indecent," "obscene" or "harmful to minors" * information related to "terrorist acts" or "explosive materials" The state bills, like the federal bills, raise serious free speech and privacy concerns. None of the bills indicates an understanding of the unique nature of the online medium. Some bills purposefully, and other bills inadvertently, fail to clarify that only the initiators of the illegal images may be held liable -- so service providers can be held liable for the pedophiles and pornographers that use their networks. The laws would, at best, require service providers to snoop in private e-mail in order to avoid criminal liability. At worst, these laws would force providers to shut down their networks altogether. The draconian effect of these state bills doesn't stop at state borders. A message you post to the Internet today in New York City could travel the fifty states and the globe by tomorrow. You'd better be careful that the message isn't "obscene" according to an Oklahoman, "annoying" to a Connecticutter, "solicitous" of a minor in Illinois, or related to "terrorism" as defined by a Georgian. The wave of online censorship at the state level is far from over. The ACLU is considering constitutional challenges to the online censorship laws that passed this year. But given the continuing media hype over "cyber-porn," we are certain to see more censorship bills from the states next year. With the help of affiliate offices in fifty states, the ACLU continues to monitor these state attempts to infringe on your online free speech rights. [For a synopsis of all the online censorship bills passed or considered by the states this year, send a message to infoaclu@aclu.org with "Update of State Bills" in the subject line of the message.] ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- ------------------------------------------ * Saving the Best for Last: Good News on Cyber-Liberties ARIZONA: Another troubling application of existing obscenity laws to cyberspace was averted when charges were dropped against Arizona Department of Public Safety Officer Lorne Shantz. Shantz, who ran a community bulletin board, lost his job and endured several months of hassle and humiliation when he was arrested for allegedly "obscene" files on the board. Shantz maintains that he was unaware of the existence of the files, which represented only a minuscule fraction of all the information on the board. COLORADO: Federal Judge John Kane ordered the Church of Scientology to return computers and hundreds of files seized by Federal marshals and Scientology officials in a copyright infringement action. The judge ruled that the seizures were overbroad, and said that "The public interest is best served by the free exchange of ideas." ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- ------------------------------------------ ONLINE RESOURCES FROM THE ACLU ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- ------------------------------------------ Stay tuned for news on the ACLU's world wide web site, under construction at http://www.aclu.org. In the meantime, you can retrieve ACLU documents via gopher at gopher://aclu.org:6601 (forgive the less-than-updated state of our gopher -- we've devoted all our resources to WWW construction!). If you're on America Online, check out the live chats, auditorium events, *very* active message boards, and complete news on civil liberties, at keyword ACLU. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- ------------------------------------------ ACLU Cyber-Liberties Update Editor: Ann Beeson (beeson@aclu.org) American Civil Liberties Union National Office 132 West 43rd Street New York, New York 10036 To subscribe to the ACLU Cyber-Liberties Update, send a message to infoaclu@aclu.org with "subscribe ACLU" in the subject line of your message. To terminate your subscription, send a message to infoaclu@aclu.org with "unsubscribe ACLU" in the subject line. For general information about the ACLU, write to infoaclu@aclu.org. ------------------------------ Date: Wed, 18 Oct 1995 12:14:21 -0700 (PDT) From: Mike Godwin (mnemonic@eff.org) Subject: File 2--Who's Using Who? Martin Rimm and the Antiporn Activists From--EFFector Online Vol., 08 No. 17 Oct. 18, 1995 editors@eff.org To those who have been investigating the scandal behind the fraudulent Martin Rimm/Carnegie Mellon "cyberporn study" and the Time magazine cover story that hyped it, it's long been known that there was some kind of connection between Rimm's efforts and those of antiporn activists -- particularly those on the Religious Right. But the precise nature of the connection has not been clear until recently. Thanks to information provided by New York Law School professor Carlin Meyer and others, it is now apparent that Rimm had the assistance of antiporn activists, including Bruce Taylor of the National Law Center for Children and Families. Thus, at the same time Rimm, himself no fundamentalist, was using the antiporn activists to contrive a place for himself on the national stage, the antiporn groups were using Rimm to manufacture evidence that "cyberporn" was out of control and needed to be regulated. Figuring out the connection between Rimm and the Taylor gang is like assembling a mosaic from very numerous and very tiny pieces. Still, the whole picture begins to come together once one notes certain interesting facts: 1) On November 5, 1994, Marty posted a message in a public Usenet newsgroup that included the following response to Carl Kadie: 'You're a good guy, Carl. I'm the principle investigator of the study, "Marketing Pornography on the Information Superhighway." It is being refereed and had the assistance of a lawyer who has argued obscenity cases before the Supreme Court.' 2) Footnote 93 of Marty's article includes the following text: 'Another competing vision consists of a revised version of the Miller standard. Instead of using community standards, the proponents of the revised Miller standard advocate the creation of a per se list of sexual activities which are automatically and irrevocably deemed obscene. See Bruce A. Taylor, A Proposal for a Per Se Standard, 21 U.Mich. J.L. Ref. 255 (1987-88).' 3) The Bruce Taylor article appears in the same volume of the U. of Mich. Journal of Law Reform that includes the Dietz-Sears study, upon which Marty based his own study (see, e.g., Rimm footnotes 15 and 56). 4) After ordering a copy of that volume of the Journal of Law Reform, I discovered the following language in footnote 13 of the Bruce Taylor article (in which Taylor also boasts of his 15 years of experience in prosecuting obscenity): "In all, this author has tried over 65 obscenity jury cases in several states and has argued over 50 appeals before the Ohio Court of Appeals, the Ohio and Colorado Supreme Courts, United States Courts of Appeals for the Sixth and Ninth Circuits, and the United States Supreme Court." 5) Bruce Taylor is currently heading the National Law Center for Children and Families. This means he *currently* shares a Fairfax, Va., suite of offices with H. Deen Kaplan. 6) Kaplan, as we have long known, is a) a third-year law student at Georgetown, b) a vice president of the National Coalition for Children and Families (formerly the National Coalition Against Pornography, aka NCAP), and c) a member of the Georgetown Law Journal staff throughout last year and currently on the journal's articles-selection committee. 7) Bruce Taylor's organization, the National Law Center, formerly employed John McMickle, who is now on the staff of Sen. Chuck Grassley and who was the author of Grassley's net.indecency legislation. McMickle, who, according to Danny Weitzner of the Center for Democracy and Technology, is known to be a protege of Taylor's, was the person who had advance knowledge of Marty's study (this is clear from a letter McMickle sent to university administrators at Rimm's alma mater, Carnegie Mellon, in early November of last year), and who later planned to call Marty as a witness to Grassley's Senate hearing. A year ago at this time, McMickle was sharing offices with Deen Kaplan in Fairfax, VA. The various antiporn groups at that suite (The National Law Center, the National Coalition, and Donna Rice-Hughes's group, "Enough is Enough!") apparently prefer to office only with likeminded individuals. 8) Deen Kaplan is known to have provided Sen. Jim Exon with the "blue book" of online porn that the Senator brandished on the Senate floor. 9) Sen. *Grassley's* indecency legislation was introduced on June 6 of this year, at approximately the time the issue of the Georgetown Law Journal was originally set to be published. Hearings on the Grassley legislation were set for July 24. Coincidentally, perhaps, that was four weeks to the day after Time's "Cyberporn" cover story hit the streets. Or perhaps it wasn't purely coincidental -- Rimm seems to have known in March that his study would be featured in a Time cover story. 10) Increasingly during the spring of 1995, Rimm expressed concern to many people that his article might be perceived as anti-porn, and he redoubled his efforts to get his legal footnotes approved by civil-libertarian lawyers, including me, Danny Weitzner of Center for Democracy and Technology, and Stephen Bates, then an Annenberg Fellow. 11) Perhaps in the knowledge that the source of help on the legal footnotes could result in his study's being branded as a political, antiporn document, Rimm stressed the following in his request to me in April: "In the meantime, we would greatly appreciate an independent check of our legal notes, which the journal helped us with. (No one on our team is a lawyer)." 12) In the December, 1994, version of the study, which had undergone no editing by any of the law journal staff, we see the following text in footnote 53: 'The second of the competing visions consists of a revised version of the Miller standard. Instead of using community standards, the proponents of the revised Miller standard advocate the creation of a per se list of sexual activities which are automatically and irrevocably deemed obscene. Bruce Taylor, A Proposal for a Per Se Standard, _______ J.L. Ref. ______ (1988).' 13) Except for minor changes, the sentences from footnote 53 in the December version are echoed in footnote 93 of the final version of the Rimm study. The main difference is that the citation for the Bruce Taylor article is not complete in the older draft. The most reasonable inference from this fact is that the person who added that citation was pulling it from memory, and left blanks so that the cite checkers at the law journal would know to pull up the specifics. This is a strong indication that a) the drafter of this footnote was a lawyer or law student, and b) the drafter knew what kinds of assistance law-journal staffs could be expected to provide. Together with the citation format, it strongly suggests the likely background of the person who assisted Marty with his legal scholarship. 14) In the biographical footnote to Taylor's law-review article, the author makes a point of thanking "Len Musil, J.D. 1988, Arizona State University, who is clerking for CDL [Citizens for Decency through Law, the antiporn organization then headed by Taylor], and who used his skills as editor of his university and law school newspapers to edit this work and conform its style to proper form." 15) According to sources at the Georgetown Law Journal, the purported timetable for Rimm's and the law journal's interactions goes something like this: 11-18-94 Time article on the CMU censorship flap, written by Philip Elmer-DeWitt, becomes available on America OnLine. It is also available in the 11-21-94 issue, which may have been on the stands on 11-14-94. 11-14-94 to 12-5-94 In this 21-day interval, Meredith Kolsky, articles editor for the Georgetown Law Journal, reads about Rimm's study, gets a copy from Marty Rimm, suggests its publication to the Georgetown Law Journal staff, the GLJ meets and decides to accept the article, and Carlin Meyer is selected as a probable contributor. 12-5-94 Meredith Kolsky solicits Carlin Meyer's review of the Rimm article. 12-7-94 Kolsky thanks Meyer for agreeing to write a comment on the Rimm article and ships a copy of the then-current draft of the study to Meyer. It is from this draft -- the words "Copyright 1994" and "DO NOT CIRCULATE!!" appear prominently on the cover -- that I have taken the earlier version of Rimm's obscenity/child-porn legal footnote. Based on this breathtaking timetable (it's astonishing that the law-journal staff members physically survived the rapid acceleration of this editorial decisionmaking process), it's certain that Marty had legal assistance prior to the official formal submission article to the law journal. Who gave that assistance? The likeliest answers to this question: Deen Kaplan, the Georgetown Law Journal staff member and antiporn activist, is the author of the legal footnotes and law-related text of the Rimm article, while Bruce Taylor, who continues to spearhead the attempts to pressure Congress into censoring the Internet, is the Supreme Court obscenity litigator who served as a "referee" for Rimm. If Rimm's academic fraud were a crime, Taylor and Kaplan, among others, could easily be listed as unindicted co-conspirators. The real crime, of course, is that, even though the Rimm study itself has been discredited, the larger fraud -- the antiporn groups' ongoing efforts to paint the Internet as vice den in dire need of Congressional action -- continues unabated. POSTSCRIPT: THE OBSCENITY FOOTNOTE How much help did Martin Rimm receive in his legal footnotes and research, and who helped him? To get an idea of the assistance Marty had clearly received before his article was checked by the Georgetown Law Journal editors, take a look at Rimm's footnote dealing with the legal and constitutional status of obscenity and child pornography. The footnote appears as Footnote 2 in the Georgetown Law Journal article, but it was Footnote 1 in the version of the article the law journal sent to Carlin Meyer in December of 1994. I have marked the differences between the earlier and later versions of the footnote in the following way: Material *deleted* from the first draft of the footnote is set off and bracked with <>. Material *added to* the first draft of the footnoate (i.e., that appears in the final draft) is not set off, but appears in [[doubled square brackets]]. Here's the footnote: ------------------- The question of whether a sexually explicit image enjoys First Amendment protection is the subject of much controversy and reflects a fundamental tension in contemporary constitutional jurisprudence. While this article discusses only the content and consumption patterns of sexual imagery currently available on the Internet and "adult" BBS, the law enforcement and constitutional implications are obvious. Thus, it is necessary to briefly discuss the constitutional status of sexually explicit images. Obscene material does not enjoy First Amendment protection. See Roth v. United States, 354 U.S. 476 (1957) <<(opinion of Brennan, J.)>> ; Miller v. California, 413 U.S. 15 (1973). In Miller, the Supreme Court established the current tripartite definition for obscenity. <> In order to be obscene, and therefore outside the protection of the First Amendment, an image must (1) appeal to a prurient (i.e., unhealthy or shameful) interest in sexual activity, (2) depict real or simulated sexual conduct in [[a]] manner that, according to an average community member, offends contemporary community standards[[,]] and (3) according to [[a]] reasonable person, lack serious literary, artistic, political[[,]] or scientific value. Id. at 25-27; [[see also]] Pope v. Illinois, 481 U.S. 497, [[500-01]] (1987) [[(rejecting "ordinary member of given community" test, in favor of "reasonable person" standard for purposes of determining whether work at issue lacks literary, artistic, political, or scientific value)]]; Pinkus v. United States, 436 U.S. 293, [[298-301]] (1978) [[(excluding children from "community" for purpose of determining obscenity, but allowing inclusion of "sensitive persons" in the "community")]]; [[Ginzburg v. United States, 383 U.S. 463, 471-74 (1966) (allowing courts to examine circumstances of dissemination to determine existence of literary, artistic, political, or scientific value);]] see also United States v. Orito, 413 U.S. 139, [[143]] (1973) [[(holding that constitutionally protected zone of privacy for obscenity does not extend beyond the home)]] <> To complicate matters, all adult pornographic material <> [[is initially]] presumed to be nonobscene. <> Fort Wayne Books, Inc. v. Indiana, 489 U.S. 46, 62 (1989) <<.>> [[(requiring judicial determination of obscenity before taking publication out of circulation);]] <> Marcus v. Search Warrant, 367 U.S. 717, 730-31 (1961) [[(requiring procedures for seizure of obscenity which give police adequate guidance regarding the definition of obscenity to ensure no infringement on dissemination of constitutionally protected speech)]]. Accordingly, law enforcers and prosecutors attempting to pursue an obscenity investigation or prosecution face constitutionally mandated procedural obstacles not present in other criminal matters. See New York v. P.J. Videos, Inc., 475 U.S. 868 (1986). For instance, the so-called "plain view" exception to the Fourth Amendment warrant requirement, whereby contraband plainly visible to a law enforcement officer may be seized, does not apply to allegedly obscene material because, prior to a judicial determination, nothing is obscene and therefore, a fortiori, nothing be can be considered contraband. See Lo-Ji Sales, Inc. v. New York, 442 U.S. 319, 325 (1979) [[(requiring that search warrants contain specific description of allegedly obscene items to be seized)]]. In addition to obscenity, one other type of sexually explicit material does not enjoy constitutional protection. In New York v. Ferber, 458 U.S. 747 (1982), the Supreme Court explicitly removed pornography depicting minors from the protective aegis of the First Amendment. That is, obscene or not, visual depictions of children engaged in sexual conduct are not constitutionally protected. Because the government interest <> identified [[by the Supreme Court]] as justifying removing child pornography from the protection of the First Amendment is more urgent than the government <> [[interest]] which <> [[justify]] denying protection to obscenity, and because the child pornography standard is far less vague than the obscenity standard, law enforcers and prosecutors are not bound by any unique procedural burdens here. See United States v. Weigand, 812 F.2d 1239 (9th Cir.), cert. denied, 484 U.S. 856 (1987). In sum, the constitutional regime that the Supreme Court has established for pornography creates two distinct categories of sexually explicit imagery <> [[that]] are not protected by the First Amendment. While ascertaining whether a particular digital image contains a minor is not [[a]] Herculean labor, ascertaining whether a particular digital image is obscene in the abstract is well-neigh impossible. Accordingly, <> [[the research team]] will not attempt to pass on the question of obscenity as it applies to the digital images that are the subject of this <
> [[article]]. --------- Two things are immediately clear to anyone accustomed to reading law-review articles. The first is that Marty's footnote was scarcely edited at all by the law-journal editors -- it was published in much the same form as it appears in the December draft. The second is that Marty's handling of legal citation form is amazingly good for someone who, supposedly, doesn't have a lawyer on his research team. It is this more than anything that makes clear that Marty had assistance from someone who wanted to make his legal scholarship look good enough for a law journal Finally, I suspect the transmutation of "this Author" to "the research team" came at Marty's suggestion, and not the law-review editors'. ******** More information on the Rimm/CMU/Time "CyberPorn" scandal is available at: ftp.eff.org, /pub/Censorship/Pornography/Rimm_CMU_Time/ gopher.eff.org, 1/Censorship/Pornography/Rimm_CMU_Time http://www.eff.org/pub/Censorship/Pornography/Rimm_CMU_Time/ ------------------------------ Date: Thu, 12 Oct 95 14:16 EDT From: "Dinty W. Moore" Subject: File 3--Re: "The Emperor's New Clothes (Re CUD 7.80) Re: "Emperor's Virtual Clothes" Ofer Inbar criticizes the promotional brochure for my book because it implies that people who discuss sex on the Internet are not "thoughtful intelligent people who care about ideas and issues ... (or care about) the people in their Internet communities." Well, he is dead right in his criticism . I apologize for the juxtaposition of phrasing (in the brochure, not the book) that makes this implication. As Ofer Inbar mentions in his response, the Internet has strong communities of intelligent caring people formed around sexual issues. One of the happy surprises of my research for THE EMPEROR'S VIRTUAL CLOTHES: THE NAKED TRUTH ABOUT INTERNET CULTURE was the number of caring, supportive people in Internet homosexual groups, transgender groups, and transsexual groups. Time and time again Internet users with sexual problems, questions, or 'issues' told me in person and by e-mail that this faceless, semi-anonymous technology was instrumental in letting them confront their problems, fears, desires, or what have you, and that they would have been stuck in some place of guilt or confusion had they not one day logged onto alt.discuss.sexuality (or whatever.) My book documents these positive testimonials and profiles two individuals particularly -- one transgendered, the other a post-op transsexual -- who praise the Internet high and low for being supportive, informative, and ultimately allowing them to confront their choices/lifestyle more positively. Brief blurbs and brochure material, even if they are electronic, are tricky matters, and the misimpression left in this case is regrettable. I thank Ofer Inbar for pointing this out. Dinty W. Moore Author, THE EMPEROR'S VIRTUAL CLOTHES The Naked Truth About Internet Culture (Algonquin Books, September 1995) to order by e-mail: svobooks@aol.com ------------------------------ Date: Sun, 18 Oct 1995 22:51:01 CDT From: CuD Moderators Subject: File 4--Cu Digest Header Info (unchanged since 18 Oct, 1995) Cu-Digest is a weekly electronic journal/newsletter. Subscriptions are available at no cost electronically. CuD is available as a Usenet newsgroup: comp.society.cu-digest Or, to subscribe, send a one-line message: SUB CUDIGEST your name Send it to LISTSERV@VMD.CSO.UIUC.EDU The editors may be contacted by voice (815-753-0303), fax (815-753-6302) or U.S. mail at: Jim Thomas, Department of Sociology, NIU, DeKalb, IL 60115, USA. To UNSUB, send a one-line message: UNSUB CUDIGEST Send it to LISTSERV@VMD.CSO.UIUC.EDU (NOTE: The address you unsub must correspond to your From: line) Issues of CuD can also be found in the Usenet comp.society.cu-digest news group; on CompuServe in DL0 and DL4 of the IBMBBS SIG, DL1 of LAWSIG, and DL1 of TELECOM; on GEnie in the PF*NPC RT libraries and in the VIRUS/SECURITY library; from America Online in the PC Telecom forum under "computing newsletters;" On Delphi in the General Discussion database of the Internet SIG; on RIPCO BBS (312) 528-5020 (and via Ripco on internet); and on Rune Stone BBS (IIRGWHQ) (203) 832-8441. CuD is also available via Fidonet File Request from 1:11/70; unlisted nodes and points welcome. EUROPE: In BELGIUM: Virtual Access BBS: +32-69-844-019 (ringdown) Brussels: STRATOMIC BBS +32-2-5383119 2:291/759@fidonet.org In ITALY: ZERO! BBS: +39-11-6507540 In LUXEMBOURG: ComNet BBS: +352-466893 UNITED STATES: etext.archive.umich.edu (192.131.22.8) in /pub/CuD/ ftp.eff.org (192.88.144.4) in /pub/Publications/CuD/ aql.gatech.edu (128.61.10.53) in /pub/eff/cud/ world.std.com in /src/wuarchive/doc/EFF/Publications/CuD/ wuarchive.wustl.edu in /doc/EFF/Publications/CuD/ EUROPE: nic.funet.fi in pub/doc/cud/ (Finland) ftp.warwick.ac.uk in pub/cud/ (United Kingdom) JAPAN: ftp://www.rcac.tdi.co.jp/pub/mirror/CuD The most recent issues of CuD can be obtained from the Cu Digest WWW site at: URL: http://www.soci.niu.edu:80/~cudigest/ COMPUTER UNDERGROUND DIGEST is an open forum dedicated to sharing information among computerists and to the presentation and debate of diverse views. CuD material may be reprinted for non-profit as long as the source is cited. Authors hold a presumptive copyright, and they should be contacted for reprint permission. It is assumed that non-personal mail to the moderators may be reprinted unless otherwise specified. Readers are encouraged to submit reasoned articles relating to computer culture and communication. Articles are preferred to short responses. Please avoid quoting previous posts unless absolutely necessary. DISCLAIMER: The views represented herein do not necessarily represent the views of the moderators. Digest contributors assume all responsibility for ensuring that articles submitted do not violate copyright protections. ------------------------------ End of Computer Underground Digest #7.82 ************************************