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Date: Fri, 26 Jul 1996 21:13:52 -0700 (PDT)
From: Declan McCullagh <declan@well.com>
Subject: File 5--Net Porn: The Communism of the 1990s

[Bob Chatelle has an interesting essay about child pornography (below
namd as the "Communism of the 90s") and the limits of free expression
somewhere near <http://world.std.com/~kip/>. --Declan]


---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date--Fri, 26 Jul 1996 11:00:18 -0400
From--Noah Robischon <noah@pathfinder.com>

>From this week's Village Voice

Who Opened Their E-mail?

It's the Kiddie Porn Crusaders

by ANNETTE FUENTES

Don't look now, but some FBI suits may be lurking around the chat
room or, worse, secretly surveilling your e-mail and other private
cyberspace communications. And chances are it's all in the name of
fighting child pornography.

That's what two New York City women learned recently when each
received certified mail from the U.S. Justice Department. The
letters, dated May 20, explained that "between the dates of August
1, 1995 and August 26, 1995, electronic communications involving you
or persons using your America Online username were intercepted."

The letters listed six targeted AOL account numbers and their
respective screen names, like Cyberqueer, Yngcumlvr, and Borntocum
none of which had any connection to the women.

"I was horrified," said Elizabeth Ewen. "At first I didn't
understand what it was all about. I didn't recognize any of the
screen names."

Ewen, a professor at SUNY Old Westbury, called the assistant U.S.
attorney who'd signed the letter, John David Kuchta, in Virginia. He
told her the rationale for the surveillance was child porn. She told
him she felt her privacy and civil rights had been violated.

"He said, 'Don't worry, you were just caught up in the net. You
didn't do anything criminal, and you should support what we're
doing,' " Ewen recalled.

Two days after Ewen got her letter, a friend of hers got the same
thing. Margaret S. (she asked that her last name not be used), an
educator in the Queens library system, was stunned to learn that
almost a year after the fact, the FBI was disclosing that they'd
been spying on her travels through cyberspace.

"I don't expect total privacy online the same way I know the
telephone isn't really private," she said. "But how often will the
government raise the specter of child porn to justify this? We're
just supposed to forget our civil rights in the name of it."

Margaret e-mailed AOL with a message of outrage.  In return she got
a form letter from Jean Villanueva, a vice president for corporate
communications, stating that AOL had merely complied with a court
order obtained by the Justice Department when it "monitored" the
e-mail of six AOL subscribers. It was part of Justice's campaign,
"Innocent Images," Villanueva wrote. In closing, he referred
members to a special Justice Department hotline set up to deal with
AOL subscribers like Margaret and Ewen, innocents caught in the web.
(By deadline, AOL had not responded to several calls seeking
comment.)

Margaret called the hotline, left a message, and two weeks later got
a call back from Tonya Fox at Justice. Fox told her there were some
840 other AOL subscribers like her who'd accidentally stumbled into
the FBI's cyber wiretaps. "She kept telling me over and over that I
was 'clean,' that I shouldn't worry," Margaret said. "She also
said if I wanted to read the file on my surveillance, I should get a
lawyer."

How Ewen and Margaret were scooped up by the FBI they can't figure
out. If one of them tripped into FBI surveillance of a suspected
pornographer, did she then lead the feds to her friend through their
e-mail correspondence? ACLU associate director Barry Steinhardt says
that while it's legal for the government armed with a warrant to
surveil the e-mail and other private cyber communications of
suspected criminals, it is not legal to extend the surveillance to
unrelated communications of innocent bystanders who chance into chat
rooms or read electronic bulletin boards while a suspect is also
present.

"What has happened here is the most intrusive form of e-mail
interception," Steinhardt said.  "The government can get a
subpoena to intercept real-time e-mail, which is the equivalent of
phone wiretapping. They can also use a variety of devices to
retrieve stored e-mail." But, adds Steinhardt, what is legal and
what should be lawful are two different things.

Mike Godwin, an attorney with the San Francisco'based Electronic
Frontier Foundation, a civil liberties organization, warns that as
government expands its reach into cyberspace, such incursions into
private lives will pose a greater threat to civil liberties than
simple phone taps.  "It was necessary for law enforcement to learn
how to narrow the scope of wiretapping, but here you have this
technology where you're always making copies, always storing
material somewhere," Godwin said. "It makes it very easy to get
even deleted files that stay around for a while. That's not true
about telephone calls."

Justin Williams, chief of the Justice Department's criminal division
in Alexandria, Virginia, could not comment on the particular
investigation that snared Ewen and Margaret. But he insisted that
what happened to them "was not a surveillance."

"You wouldn't say their e-mail was read," Williams said. "It
could be they were surfing the Internet and happened into a
particular room where by chance there is an [individual] under
electronic surveillance."

Williams said their hotline received 160 calls from AOL subscribers
such as Ewen and Margaret.  While the statute regulating government
surveillance Title III requires Justice to notify the targets of
eavesdropping, notifying innocent bystanders is discretionary, he
said.

Williams could not say how many such online surveillances the
Justice Department is conducting. But ACLU lawyer Steinhardt says in
the past year, the government's pursuit of child porn in cyberspace
has reached a fever pitch.

"Most online surveillance by the government is now centered on
child porn," he said. "It has people assigned to child porn
investigations who are fascinated by the use of the Internet to
distribute it. They're no longer going after the producers who
actually abuse children. They're going after consumers. It's easier,
splashier."

Splashy and messy for those who happen to be in the wrong cyber
place, if only for a nanosecond.  For Ewen, the witch-hunt has begun
again.

"Child porn will become the communism of the '90s," she said.

------------------------------

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