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By Laura Sullivan Sun National Staff Originally published April 6, 2004 WASHINGTON - Lam Nguyens 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 Departments 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 HBOs 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. 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. A recent episode of Showtimes 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. 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.
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 hasnt been prosecuted at the federal level for more than 10 years. Since the last time he faced Taylor, Flynts 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 companys dozens of mens clubs, sex stores and more than 30 magazines. Hes basically crusaded against everything Ive fought for for the past 30 years, Flynt said. They have the right to view what they want to in the privacy of their own home. And even if they dont enjoy these materials, they still dont 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. 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 pornographys 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. 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 Clintons 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 divisions 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 HBOs 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.
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 theyre seeing and how it is affecting them. This stuff isnt the easiest to deal with, Nguyen said recently while at his computer. But I think were going after the bad guys and were making a difference, and thats what makes it worthwhile. Copyright 2004, The Baltimore Sun Get home delivery Talk about it E-mail it Print it Contact us Top news headlines.
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