BONN, Germany (Reuters) - German investigators said Thursday they had detained five more suspects as part of a worldwide crackdown on an Internet child pornography ring and still more could be rounded up.
The Federal Criminal Agency said a total of 23 people had been detained in Germany since the coordinated operation began Wednesday. Most were released after questioning.
Suspects from Berlin, Stuttgart and Naumburg had confessed to exchanging child pornography and information over the Internet, German police said.
The BKA said it did not have a precise picture of how many computer terminals and video cassettes had been seized. In some cases, thousands of files had been seized, a spokesman said.
Dubbed ``Operation Cathedral'' and coordinated by British police, the crackdown involved raids in Europe, the United States and Australia, in which police seized computers, video cassettes and databases of pornographic material.
More than 100 people were arrested in 12 countries on the first day of the operation, officials said.
In Britain, Internet monitoring bodies welcomed news of the raids but said the problem would not go away.
``We see the tip of the iceberg and don't know what's underneath,'' said David Kerr, chief executive of the Internet Watch Foundation, which investigates reports of illegal and pornographic material on the Internet.
The U.N. Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization said it was convening a conference of experts in January to discuss pedophile activity on the Internet.
The Internet has made it easier for pedophiles to contact each other and pass illegal material around the world at the press of a button.
``This is the recruiting ground, and then people go into more closed communication,'' said Nigel Williams, director of Childnet International, a British-based body promoting the interests of children in Internet communications worldwide.
``As yesterday demonstrates, it is now so easy for people to contact each other for good or bad purposes, which presents a series of dangers,'' Williams said.
From the 9/7/98 issue of Time:
As porn-video rentals and sales have steadily grown into a $4.2 billion-a-year business (nearly 14% of all video transactions and more than a quarter of the home-video industry's revenue), the mainstream media have started to cash in on the growing celebrity of hard-core performers. Howard Stern, Jerry Springer and the E! channel regularly feature porn stars as guests on their TV shows, while film directors like Spike Lee and John Frankenheimer use them in cameos as a hip name check. The industry's reigning star, Jenna Jameson, told TIME she's quitting the business to pursue a clothes-on acting career. Having become a World Wrestling Federation manager and landed a speaking part in Stern's film Private Parts, Jameson says she is receiving scripts unsolicited. "Nowadays it's kind of a cool thing to have adult stars in other movies," she says. "It's the right time for someone like me to hit in Hollywood."
The major players in the porn industry are so confident of their growing acceptability that they seemed unfazed when New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani padlocked sex shops this month in Times Square. That's because most of the industry's money is made in suburban video stores. Almost as much is earned on cable-TV systems that make sexually explicit films available on pay-per-view and adult channels. Steve Hirsch, president of Los Angeles-based Vivid Video, the world's largest producer of adult films, dismisses the loss of Times Square: "We're not going to lose any customers."
Vivid, with $25 million in annual sales, has focused on producing couples-friendly, plot-heavy 35-mm films costing up to $200,000 and selling them to the Playboy Channel, the Spice Channel, Spectravision systems in hotel rooms, and foreign television.
With Playboy, Vivid co-owns AdulTVision, an adult-movie channel available on many cable systems. And Vivid is negotiating with Playboy to buy Hot Spice, a new hard-core cable channel.
At retail, the selling of porn has become less lurid. Vivid is happy to peddle videotapes in a more Main Street manner through the Adam & Eve catalog, which is mailed to 2.5 million people a month, and Tower and Virgin record stores, where the "Vivid girls" have done signings.
The industry got these opportunities to open up to a larger audience partly because young adults grew up with VCRs, cable TV and the Internet and thus have been exposed to more adult material. And the AIDS epidemic has prompted a turn to voyeurism as a prudent alternative to sex. But an equally big factor, say the porn manufacturers, is that since Bill Clinton took office, the Justice Department hasn't prosecuted any new interstate transportation of obscenity cases.
So the video companies have started to market their products more aggressively. For big releases, there are screenings and premiere parties. VCA, one of the four big adult-film companies, has put promotional billboards along Sunset Boulevard in Los Angeles, and Vivid has placed ads at the Burbank airport as well as along Sunset. Vivid's actresses also appear in ads for Fresh Jive clothing and Black Flys sunglasses.
Intellectuals have just about accepted pornography's place in pop culture. This month's World Pornography Conference in Los Angeles, sponsored by California State University at Northridge, included a Georgetown University professor talking about "Gonzo Pornography."
There are degrees to which a producer (porn and "legit") can introduce -- wittingly and unwittingly -- social and political statments into a film and still come up with a good film. "Saving Private Ryan" is a good film -- and makes many political and social statements. Spielberg didn't go into the film intending to make those socio-political statements, although I'm sure he was aware that the book and story he based the movie on did indeed make them.
Similarly, porn can -- and often does -- make socio-political statements. For instance, gay porn -- by its very existence -- proclaims that gay people do exist, despite those who would rather have gays be the new "invisible men" (apologies to Ralph Ellison). Gay porn often makes the "we are everywhere" statement (countering the stereotypes and negative images often sold by some elements of society) whenever it makes a film about sports figures, soldiers, priests, teachers, politicians, or movie stars and sets it in the present or the past. The ABSENCE of facials and oral cumshots in gay porn is a testament to the omnipresence of HIV in the gay community. The ABSENCE of blacks, latinos, asians and other non-Caucasians in gay porn today (compared to films made in the 1970s and early-to-mid 1980s) is a statement about the changes that have rent the gay community since those heady years after Stonewall.
The lack of performers with long hair, facial hair, body hair, uncircumcized penises, tatoos, and body piercings makes a statement about the acceptability of such personal adornment in the gay community, reinforces such norms, and tells us a great deal (when compared to other films from previous years) about the increasingly homogeneous nature of gay society.
All things are political. Even the decision to keep something "personal" and out of the political (e.g., public) arena IS ITSELF a political decision -- and one that can be debated. For example, is sex a private matter? Yes. Then why has society made it a public matter by legislating about obscenity, about who may marry whom, about what age one may engage in sexual intercourse, about what may be shown (violence, gore, etc.) when sex is shown?
Isn't porn BY ITS VERY NATURE a subversive thing? Isn't porn saying, "Sex is not procreation only. Sex is not only for married people. Sex IS about pleasure, and pleasure for pleasure's sake."
A while back, here on RAME, I reviewed porn critic and erotic fiction writer Michael Bronski's book "The Pleasure Principle" and tasked Bronski for failing to discuss porn in anything more than a passing note. However, let me quote from the first chapter in his book. Read "porn" instead of "homosexual," and see how radical porn is:
"One of the most persistent myths of the gay rights movement, and of liberal thinking, is that the dominant culture's fear of homosexuality and hatred of homosexuals-- what is commonly called 'homophobia' -- is irrational. This is untrue: It is a completely rational fear. Homosexuality strikes at the heart of the organization of Western culture and societies. Because homosexuality, by its nature, is nonreproductive, it posits a sexuality that is justified by pleasure alone. This stands in stark and, for many people, frightening contrast to the entranched belief that reproduction alone legitimates sexual activity. This belief, enshrined in religious and civil law, is the foundation for society's limiting gender roles and the reason why marriage, traditionally, has been the only context recognized by society and by law for sexual relationships between men and women. It is the underpinning for the restrictive structure of the biological family unit and its status as the only sanctioned setting for raising children. It is the hidden logic determining many of our economic and work structures. In profound, if often unarticulated ways, this imperative view of reproductive heterosexuality has shaped our world.
"Although heterosexuals individually, throughout the centuries, have engaged in sex for pleasure, attempts to unseat the ideology of sex-as-reproduction have continually been resisted. Until recently, explicitly sexual material (that which portrays sex as simply pleasure) has routinely been censored, medical information about birth control has been banned, and access to contraceptives has been limited by law. ... Even for heterosexuals, securing personal and sexual freedom has been a long and difficult battle.
"The imperative of reproductive heterosexuality has had enormous effects on homosexuals as well. It is the basis for the labeling of homosexual activity as 'unnatural,' sinful, and sick. ... It has prompted contemporary measures to curtail, regulate, and punish homosexual behavior and deny homosexual people such rights of citizenship as free association [and] freedom of expression... It has fuelded and inflamed attacks on gay people who fight for these freedoms.
"These attacks occur because homosexuality and homosexuals present attractive alternatives to the restrictions that reproductive heterosexuality and its social structures have placed on heterosexuals. The real issue is not that heterosexuals will be tempted to engage in homosexual SEXUAL activity (although the visibility of such activity presents that option) but that they will be drawn to more flexible norms that gay people, excluded from social structures created by heterosexuality, have created from their own lives. These include less restrictive gender roles; non-monogamous intimate relationships and more freedom for sexual experimentation; family units that are chosen, not biological; and new models for parenting. But most important, homosexuality offers a vision of sexual pleasure completely divorced from the burden of reproduction: sex for its own sake, a distillation of the pleasure principle.
...
"In his provocative analysis 'Anti-Semite and Jew,' Jean-Paul Sartre argued that the fear and hatred of Jews was not a political or social 'opinion' but a 'passion,' meaning not that it is emotional or irrational, but simply that it is the basis for a cohesive, sustained view that is held independently of material reality. It is 'the IDEA of the Jew' that incites the anti-Semite, not necessarily any specific action or person.
"So it is with homosexuality. It is the IDEA, the concept of homosexuality – that is, sexual pleasure without justification or consequences – that terrifies the gay-hater. …
"Like anti-Semitism, the hatred of homosexuality serves the function of valorizing the 'normal'; it bonds hterosexuals, rallying them against a collective, and by implication more powerful, enemy. The creation of the 'homosexual menace,' not unlike the fantasy of a worldwide Jewish conspiracy, transforms the average man into a valiant defender of the 'normal' – a process that celebrates and reinforces the sexual status quo while at the same time granting enormous importance to sexual differences. Just as the mythology of anti-Semitism magnifies the power of the Jew, gay-baiting recasts the homosexual as sexually and socially dangerous. Yet because this fantasy homosexual also embodies a sexual freedom that stands in sharp relief to the restrictions of institutionalized heterosexuality, he is an object of envy as well as scorn.
"But the creation of the homosexual menace – at once a threat and a temptation – is complicated by the fact that gay culture actually does, if its alternatives to institutionalized heteroseuxality are embraced, present a threat to basic social structures. This poses a difficult dilemma for the dominent culture. If homosexuality is accepted, it challenges the status quo overtly; if it remains demonized, it presents a seductive vision of alternative possibilities."
How like porn!!! Porn, too, threatens to make pleasure the sole reason for sex. Porn thus makes hash of the legal and religious bases for marriage. Porn upsets the power relationship between the genders, and renders senseless gender roles (women as "wife," women as "barefoot and pregnant," women as "devoted to the husband"). Porn, by reconfiguring the nuclear family and the role of the genders in the world, lashes out at political structures that have come to rely on these for support. If the world of porn were real, where would the Republicans be? Where would interest groups whose only purpose is to defend the existing social and political order be? Which groups -- which do NOT rely on the existing social and political order, such as environmental advocates -- would find themselves MORE powerful? Would mobility between rich and poor, strong and weak, black and white, suddenly become fluid as individuals no longer feel trapped by or tied to existing social and political structures? In a world where pleasure reigns, is the state forced to start giving to the people the things the people want -- health care, child care, poverty assistance, more equal distribution of income -- thus enabling them to pursue happiness? Or can the state and its supporters continue down the path it is already on -- repressive, patronizing, increasingly active in private and social affairs and refusing to rein in destructive economic forces?
Pat Riley writes on RAME:
The reason the guy says "all anal or I don't buy" etc. is because he is confronted with such a lack of quality in more comprehensive productions that by experience he has only been able to extract one or perhaps no scenes that satisfy his erotic needs. Hence he concentrates on a particular attribute and demands a product that only addresses that need. After a while he finds that even that aspect becomes boring (even I tire of cheerleader movies) but now if he wishes to change he has to go to another all-something group which on the face of it doesn't appeal anyway. Further because the market is splintered, even his particular perversion(s) end up being poorly done because not enough can be invested in each little segment to make a good movie.
Let me jump to the mainstream "Titanic" as an example. (Note: I haven't seen the movie and I'm not criticizing it or that Monica look-a-like Kate Winslet <heh, heh>.) As I understand it Titanic has several aspects to it: good FX of the ship sinking etc, a love story with Leonardo and Kate, great set design, lots of human interest stories,...etc.
If it were the porno industry doing the movie, they would say "Gee, we've got an almost guaranteed market in the teenyboppers for a romance between L & K so why don't we just save money and not do all the FX and interior sets... We'll just do it on a sound stage. And there's the other group who love the FX so we won't pay the hefty fees for L & K. We'll just eliminate the romance part. And then there's the group that just want the human interest stories and a bit of drama created by the sinking. They don't care about the FX and the expensive L & K as performers. We'll just use some no-name actors and they can muddle through."
Instead of one Titanic we get 10 subsets of Titanic but each one of the subsets won't be able to afford the production values of the whole. L & K's romance will take place on a poorer quality set, with maybe a no-name director, and the script writer will be some left-over hack from the soap operas.
At the start of this process, the teenyboppers won't see much difference but then as they take this same approach to other movies Hollywood will start asking "Just how low can we get those production values and keep all/most of the teenybopper audience?" By then they'll have lost the capital and the ability to turn it around. If they say "We need to produce a $100M+ movie" the investors/studios will retort, "You're not listening to your audience. Nine out of ten teenyboppers say the thing wrong with your movies is that L's hair is parted on the wrong side. Change that and we'll be back in the gravy." Try the porn equivalent: "If only the movie maker would understand that the facial has GOT to go in the mouth."
Looked at another way, in the full movie the teenyboppers are subsidizing the FX people and the FX people the teenyboppers but without the cross-subsidization neither will get what they want. Some teenyboppers might also find the FX exciting and the FX fanatic might be taken with the romance aspect.
Isn't that what we have in porn today? No one can produce a high quality movie because the market has been segmented into such a plethora of tiny little slices. Unfortunately, absent dictatorial power, there doesn't seem to be a way to get it back together again.
From Businesswire:
Juno Online Services, L.P. today announced that it has successfully located Ronald Alvin, the elusive chief of alleged porn marketer TCPS, Inc., and has successfully served court papers on Mr. Alvin at his Brooklyn, New York residence.
As a result, Juno expects its four-month old, million-dollar lawsuit against TCPS, Mr. Alvin, and Financial Planning Associates, another affiliate of Mr. Alvin, to proceed to a jury trial soon in federal court in New York.
In May 1998, Juno filed a federal lawsuit seeking damages against a number of defendants it alleges have forged the Juno name into unsolicited commercial e-mail (commonly known on the Internet as "spam"). Among the most notorious parties named in the lawsuit is TCPS, a Brooklyn, NY company that has flooded the Internet with hundreds of thousands of unsolicited e-mail messages touting sexually explicit videotapes, including such titles as "World's Biggest Gang Bang" and "Gang Bang II."
TCPS is well known within the Internet community for having frustrated the detection efforts of Internet service providers and law enforcement officials nationwide through a sophisticated network of fictitious business names and mail drops. As a result, several months of detective work were required before Juno was able to confirm the alleged spammer's physical whereabouts and serve him with court papers.
"A large number of ISPs and a larger number of individual users of the Internet have been victimized by TCPS, but until now no one has been able to take effective action against this spammer. I am pleased that Juno was finally able to locate Ron Alvin, and I know we will have broad support across the Internet for our efforts to put an end to TCPS' pernicious and ongoing spam campaigns," said Richard Buchband, senior vice president and general counsel of Juno.
In its lawsuit against TCPS and others, Juno notes that the practices of spammers have caused interference with its business and the use and enjoyment of its services by legitimate subscribers. Juno is seeking punitive damages in excess of $1,000,000 against TCPS and Mr. Alvin for damage to Juno's reputation, as well as damages for federal trademark infringement, false designation of origin, fraud, and unjust enrichment. Additionally, the suit asks the court to grant a preliminary and permanent injunction against TCPS and Mr. Alvin.
Like other major online services, Juno prohibits its subscribers from using its service for the transmission of spam and from using Juno accounts as "drop boxes" to receive replies to spam sent through other service providers. Under the guidance of its Security and Abuse Department, Juno has implemented numerous proprietary measures, including strict outgoing mail limits, designed to prevent the use of Juno for the transmission of spam. Juno also utilizes technical measures to make it impossible for spammers to use Juno's computers to "relay" their messages. The policy of Juno's Security and Abuse Department is to investigate spam-related complaints and to take action against any subscriber found to be in violation of these prohibitions.