Date: Fri, 26 Jul 1996 21:13:52 -0700 (PDT) From: Declan McCullagh 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 . --Declan] ---------- Forwarded message ---------- Date--Fri, 26 Jul 1996 11:00:18 -0400 From--Noah Robischon >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. ------------------------------