| Your tax dollars at work… (or … How do I get that job???) |
| Tom Rogers, a retired Indianapolis detective, toils away most days in his suburban home office reviewing sexual Web sites and other Internet traffic to see whether they qualify as obscene material whose purveyors should be prosecuted by the Justice Department.
His work is financed by a Justice Department grant initially provided through a Congressional earmark inserted into a spending bill by Representative Frank R. Wolf, Republican of Virginia. The grant, about $150,000 a year, has helped pay for Mr. Rogers and another retired law enforcement officer in Reno, Nev., to harvest and review complaints about obscene matter on the Internet that citizens register on the Justice Department Web site. The number of prosecutions resulting from those referrals is zero. The department Web site invites citizens to report material that they believe is obscene so it can be investigated and, perhaps, prosecuted. Clicking on the site to make a report takes the user to ObscenityCrimes.org, which is run by Morality in Media, the grant recipient. Morality in Media is a conservative religious group that has worked since 1962 to “rid the world of pornography” and whose headquarters is, improbably, on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. Morality in Media has received two annual grants from Mr. Wolf’s earmarks and is hoping that Justice Department officials decide on their own to award a third, as Mr. Wolf’s ability to obtain an earmark for the program has apparently waned with the Democrats’ control of Congress. Department officials, however, seemed less than keen to talk about ObscenityCrimes.org. Spokesmen for the criminal division said officials there had nothing to do with the program, which they had been obliged to start because of the earmark. Would-be complainants are also advised not to trawl for obscene Web sites, noting that “men are particularly vulnerable to pornographic addiction.” Identifying Internet smut, the site advises, is best left to professional law enforcement personnel. Stephen G. Bates, a Harvard-trained lawyer and journalism professor, said he was appalled when he discovered that the Justice Department was outsourcing a search for obscenity. Source: "Federal Effort on Web Obscenity Shows Few Results" By NEIL A. LEWIS - NY Times - August 10, 2007 |
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