Virtual community standards.

• Author: Godwin, Mike
• Position: The Law

Prosecutors are using local definitions of obscenity to censor the global Net.

WE'RE NOW PAST THE FIRST wave of Internet publicity. That was the wave in which mainstream news stories about the Internet increased one hundredfold--the wave in which jokes about the "information superhighway" crept into Letterman and Leno monologues.

But the second wave of Internet publicity--the one warning of the darker, more dangerous aspects of global computer networks--is now upon us. And for many journalists and prosecutors, no specter is darker than that of pornography online.

Take for example the July 12 Los Angeles Times story about the discovery of a pornography cache on the computers at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratories. The story, by Times staff writer Adam Bauman, is a hopelessly confused mishmash of various computer terrors: computer crime, espionage, criminal copyright infringement. The lead paragraph of the piece breathlessly combines those threads with the notion that computer "hackers" were using pornography on government computers in ways that Bauman told readers "[d]ramatically illustrat[e] the security problems posed by the rapid growth of the Internet computer network."

Never mind that careful readers of the Los Angeles Times story could find no evidence that the porn had ever been used in any way that compromised the system's security--the hook had been set. Bauman and his editors knew that sex on the Net was a guaranteed draw. Of course, to Net habitues, a report that a government computer had been found to contain "more than 1,000 pornographic images" was anything but news. As students of the history of communications media could have predicted, users of Usenet and similar networks began exploring ways of transmitting sex-related material as soon as scanners and bandwidth became reasonably cheap. In the online crowd, stories about stockpiles of pornographic GIF (Graphic Image Format) files are unlikely to inspire much more than a yawn.

But in the law-enforcement community and the mainstream press, the prospect of online obscenity is still an eye-grabber (although it should be noted that the Lawrence Livermore worker who stashed porn on government systems has been indicted on theft-of-computer-services charges, not obscenity charges). That factor does much to explain the hoopla surrounding the obscenity prosecution of Robert and Carleen Thomas of Milpitas, California.

AT FIRST GLANCE, THE CASE MAY SEEM little different from the...