Stark revelations: Internet porn by numbers.

• Author: Howley, Kerry
• Position: Citings - Brief article

LAST YEAR the U.S. Department of Justice hired Philip B. Stark, a statistician at the University of California at Berkeley, to scour the Web for porn. The government wanted hard numbers to bolster its defense of the Child Online Protection Act, a 1998 law requiring commercial websites to verify users' ages before allowing access to anything deemed "harmful to minors." The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) had challenged the law on constitutional grounds, and the Supreme Court had sent the case back to the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania.

When the trial began last October, the Department of Justice was ready with some shocking revelations from Stark's report, which cost upward of $1 million, required a subpoena to pry private data from Google, and took months to complete. Among them: "The number of sexually explicit websites is huge"; "Search results often...