Senators Debate Online Adult Content

Deputy Asst. Attorney Gen. Laura Parsky said Congress’s ratification of the Council of Europe’s Convention on Cybercrime could help with international investigations. The treaty, which was negotiated during the Clinton Administration, has stagnated on Capitol Hill several years. The Senate Foreign Relations committee approved the convention last year (WID July 27 p3) after a hearing with State and DoJ testimony, but no further action has been taken. FBI Deputy Asst. Dir.-Criminal Investigative Div. James Burrus said his agency’s investigations and prosecutions have been “wildly successful.”

DoJ is focusing its efforts on everyone from the consumer, to the website operator, to intermediaries -- including those who provide credit card processing and subscription services, Parsky said. The 94 U.S. attorneys’ offices are also critical to enforcing federal laws prohibiting crimes against children, prosecuting large numbers of cases, she said. Total federal prosecutions of child porn cases rose from 352 in 1997 to 1,486 in 2004 -- a 422% increase, Parsky said. Meanwhile, the FBI has opened 79 Interstate Transportation of Obscene Material cases since 2001 and 52 of them were opened since the start of 2004, Burrus said. The agency has also teamed successfully with the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children and international public and private sector players, he said.

But the problem isn’t going away, they said. In the past several years, children shown in the images have been consistently younger and the abuse depicted has been more severe, Parsky said. That abuse is exacerbated by pedophiles that disseminate images to millions of others online, she said, reiterating DoJ’s commitment to “obliterating this intolerable evil.”

Tackling minors’ exposure to lawful adult content online is a different matter, Internet industry witnesses said in a 2nd panel. Representatives from AOL, the Internet Education Foundation (IEF) and the Adult Freedom Foundation (AFF) expressed optimism about high-tech solutions, like filtering and blocking software, that protect underage Web surfers.

In his testimony, IEF Exec. Dir. Tim Lordan cited a March 2005 report by the Pew Internet & American Life Project that showed a sharp increase in the percentage of parents who used filters, compared to those who used filters 5 years earlier. AOL Chief Trust Officer Tatiana Platt ticked off a list of ways her company helps parents safeguard what their children access online, including child-friendly sections, tracking devices and timers. Technology tools aside, Lordan said there’s no substitute for “old-fashioned parenting” to keep kids safe online and away from adult content. “Filtering and other parental empowerment tools are supplements, not substitutes, for parenting in the online age,” he said.

While the committee separated Internet issues from a broadcast decency hearing earlier in the day, the areas are merging, Lordan told members. “More and more audio and video segments are coursing through online and wireless networks, increasingly untethered from the common Web browser,” he said. “Filters will have to evolve to keep up” and ratings information embedded digitally into the content would be invaluable in developing “powerful and flexible content control tools.” Eventually, parents will demand that they have the same ability to control their kids’ access to multimedia content online as they do content from their TV, DVD player, local cinema or record store, he said.

Thus far, the adult entertainment industry has lacked structure and discussion with other businesses and govt., but it’s “ready, willing and able to discuss a rating system,” AFF Gen. Counsel Paul Cambria told lawmakers. This was the first time his industry had been invited to Chmn. Stevens’s (R-Alaska) committee and he said it was reminiscent of the first time the motion picture industry came before Congress. The MPAA’s rating system emerged from those discussions and he indicated something similar could be created for adult content.

Stevens warned they “better do it soon because we'll mandate it if you don’t.” Ranking Member Inouye (D-Hawaii) agreed, warning “oftentimes, Congress does a lousy job” at setting standards for industry. Cambria welcomed the senators’ “shot across the bow rather than one between the eyes” and said he'd take the message back to his industry. Cambria also touched on proposals to cordon off sites with special domain name suffixes. He said a .kids domain could be the Web equivalent of the cable companies’ family tier. A .kids domain would be a “workable solution” and is “far more beneficial” than .xxx, he said.

Internet porn is “one of the most complicated challenges of our time,” Va. Tech Prof. James Weaver said. It’s big business and mainstream media has helped render porn “'normal’ and ‘commonplace’ for millions of Americans,” he said. In his written testimony, he said the U.S. could support research that: (1) Better documents incidence and prevalence of kids accessing online porn. (2) Better shows porn use’s impact on the stability of family ties and economics. (3) Helps counter “distorted, redundant stereotypes perpetuated by an industry designed to sell sex as an entertainment commodity.”

Voicing fear that too many Americans of all ages rely on porn as a “primary sex educator,” Weaver called for a well-designed, extensive media literacy campaign on how to use the Internet while avoiding porn sites. Govt. should treat porn like “a public health crisis,” he said, likening the best response to something akin to those launched against tobacco and alcohol. This campaign would try to persuade citizens “porn is not something that’s cool and hip -- it’s something else,” Weaver said, calling it crucial for society to speak up. “We're staying quiet and by staying quiet we're conveying acceptance or approval,” he said.

The hearing resulted in relatively few action items from lawmakers. Sen. Pryor (D-Ark.) expressed interest in the Commerce Committee examining the potential of the .xxx domain, and Sen. Allen (R-Va.) used the opportunity to take a jab at adware and spyware purveyors whose insidious content is sometimes paired with pornography. Sen. Lincoln (D-Ark.) made a push for legislation she introduced last year that would impose a 25% excise tax on adult site operators (WID July 28 p1).

S-1507’s levy would support a govt.-managed trust fund underwriting a 24-hour DoJ cybertip line, state-based Internet Crimes Against Children Task Forces, grants for research into Web filtering and state-level training to boost child Internet safety and reduce sex trafficking and sex crimes against children. The adult entertainment industry rakes in an estimated $12 billion profit annually -- more than the 3 major TV networks combined -- and they should foot the bill, Lincoln said.