From declanm@netcom.com Mon Sep 18 19:22:10 1995 Return-Path: Received: from po7.andrew.cmu.edu by mail4.netcom.com (8.6.12/Netcom) id TAA02960; Mon, 18 Sep 1995 19:09:29 -0700 Received: (from postman@localhost) by po7.andrew.cmu.edu (8.6.12/8.6.12) id WAA15019; Mon, 18 Sep 1995 22:10:46 -0400 Received: via switchmail for fight-censorship+@andrew.cmu.edu; Mon, 18 Sep 1995 22:10:45 -0400 (EDT) Received: from po5.andrew.cmu.edu via qmail ID ; Mon, 18 Sep 1995 22:09:38 -0400 (EDT) Received: from netcom9.netcom.com (netcom9.netcom.com [192.100.81.119]) by po5.andrew.cmu.edu (8.6.12/8.6.12) with ESMTP id WAA23044 for ; Mon, 18 Sep 1995 22:09:22 -0400 Received: by netcom9.netcom.com (8.6.12/Netcom) id SAA23765; Mon, 18 Sep 1995 18:40:50 -0700 Date: Mon, 18 Sep 1995 18:40:49 -0700 (PDT) From: D B McCullagh Sender: D B McCullagh Reply-To: D B McCullagh Subject: Marty, the GLJ, and his reviewers (WELL posts) To: fight-censorship@andrew.cmu.edu Message-ID: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; CHARSET=US-ASCII Status: RO X-Status: For those folks on the list who don't have WELL accounts, I thought I'd forward these posts by Mike. Note Marty's patterns of interactions with his reviewers. -Declan ----------------------------------------------------------------------------- Topic 1067 [media]: Martin Rimm and the Cyberporn Scare #721 of 782: Avant Garde A Clue (mnemonic) Sat Sep 16 '95 (16:56) 25 lines Just spoke to Carlin Meyer, the anticensorship law professor who published a comment to accompany Marty's GLJ article. Among other things, I learned that: 1) Carlin Meyer never reviewed Marty's legal footnotes, although Marty at one time claimed she did. 2) The version of the article Meyer read is not the version that was published. (Among other things, it lacked footnote 21, Marty's late addition about the nonefficacy of software filters.) 3) Marty initiated phone contact with Meyer, in order, he said, to be helpful in any way. In a series of phone conversations, Marty provided the information that Meyer cites in her footnotes, but which does not appear in the article. 4) The original draft of Meyer's article actually contained no mention of the study. In the published version of Meyer's article, however, she praises the study in Footnote 3. According to Meyer, Footnote 3 was her response to a request from Rimm that, if possible, it would be nice if she could include some good words about the study. Meyer says Marty even made some suggestions as to what she might say. ----------------------------------------------------------------------------- Topic 1067 [media]: Martin Rimm and the Cyberporn Scare #723 of 782: Avant Garde A Clue (mnemonic) Sat Sep 16 '95 (17:25) 83 lines Meyer's at New York Law School (not the same as NYU). Here's something from an article I'm working up: ******* Now, the next interesting question is how Marty conned Carlin Meyer. It helps to read Meyer's article with special attention to her footnotes. Footnote 3 of the Meyer piece is unremarkable. Meyer identifies the Rimm article, states that she will refer to Marty's work as "the Study," adding that "the Study makes an important and original contribution. " Meyer comment, Footnote 3. It's helpful at this point to remember another footnote in another article-- Marty's Footnote 8: '[8] "Study" hereinafter refers to all data collected by the research team, whereas "article" refers only to those findings reported here.' The nice thing about this footnote is that it allows Marty to cite results of "the Study" without having to explain where those results appeared in "the Article." Hence, except for the first footnote citing Marty's article, Meyer's footnoted references to "the Study" seem to be based on what Marty told her in telephone interviews. Here are the relevant quotes from Carlin Meyer's comment on Marty Rimm's article, coupled with the relevant footnotes. === 'A recent Carnegie Mellon study has confirmed that a lot of people are looking at a lot of explicit sex on computer screens.3 ' 3. Marty Rimm, Marketing Pornography on the Information Superhighway, 83 Geo. L.J. 1849 (1995) [hereinafter Carnegie Study or the Study]. As one of a handful of systematic studies of pornography consumption patterns, the Study makes an important and original contribution for all those seriously interested in examining sexuality in American and Western culture. The Study defines pornography to include imagery and text depicting both sexual contact (labeled "hard-core") and nudity or lascivious exhibition (labeled "soft-core"). For purposes of this comment, I adopt the study"s definition. Id. at 1849-50 n.1. ------------ 'Pedophilic imagery can easily be described in terms unlikely to be included in a dictionary of off-limits terminology, such as "young girls" or "lovely young girls."86' 86. Although the imagery described in the Study is marketed by the "adult" BBS in quite graphic terms (such marketing takes place even on the Internet and Usenet), it is easy for BBS to change terminology to avoid software screening dictionaries. Amateur Action BBS may have switched its descriptions of some "pedophilic" imagery from "she is spreading" to "girl, naked" to avoid easy identification of illegal child pornography. Telephone Interview with Marty Rimm, Carnegie Study author (Feb. 28, 1995). ------------ 'Interestingly, the Carnegie Study never found such descriptors as "snuff," "kill," "murder" and rarely found such others as "pain," "torture," "agony," "hurts," "suffocates," and the like. The term "rape" appeared less than a dozen times in descriptors of over 900,000 images.97' 97. Telephone Interview with Marty Rimm, Carnegie Study author (Feb. 22, 1995). ------------ "Thus, any effort to block access to a particular file, bulletin board, or set of files is nearly impossible to effectuate because such blocks can be easily circumvented. As computer hackers are fond of saying, "for every roadblock, there is a detour."109 " 109.I am grateful to Marty Rimm, Carnegie Study author, for bringing this cyberspace aphorism to my attention. ----------------------------------------------------------------------------- Topic 1067 [media]: Martin Rimm and the Cyberporn Scare #731 of 782: Avant Garde A Clue (mnemonic) Sat Sep 16 '95 (19:17) 11 lines I'm very interested in Meyer's footnote about Marty's roadblock/detour comment. Is there any independent documentation that this saying of "computer hackers" is in fact in wide circulation? To me, it sounds like a ripoff of John Gilmore's famous censorship/damage line, and there's correspondence from marty asking about that Gilmore quote that dates from last spring. [General agreement that Rimm's "aphorism" was a ripoff of Gilmore. -DM] ----------------------------------------------------------------------------- Topic 1067 [media]: Martin Rimm and the Cyberporn Scare #747 of 782: Avant Garde A Clue (mnemonic) Sun Sep 17 '95 (10:42) 34 lines Okay, enough suspense. This from something I've been working on: This and other evidence suggest to me that a standard Rimm tactic was to tell the person whose help or support he wanted that his work complemented theirs. Take the three law professors whose commentary follows Rimm's work. For Anne Branscomb, who has written in her book WHO OWNS INFORMATION? and elsewhere about the issues of collection of personal data, Marty's work stands in support of her claim that A great deal of information we consider to be highly personal, and of interest to ourselves and the town gossip our names, telephone numbers, marital status, educational accomplishments, job and credit histories, even medical, dental, and psychiatric records is now being sold on the open market to anyone who believes he or she might be able to use such information to turn a profit. These transactions usually take place without our knowledge or consent. Anne Wells Branscomb, Who Owns Information? 3-4 (1994) (quoted in the section IV of Rimm's article). Compare Branscomb's comment to the first three sentences of the Rimm article: As Americans become increasingly computer literate, they are discovering an unusual and exploding repertoire of pornographic imagery on computer networks.[2] Every time consumers log on, their transactions assist pornographers in compiling databases of information about their buying habits and sexual tastes. The more sophisticated computer pornographers are using these databases to develop mathematical models to determine which images they should try to market aggressively. ----------------------------------------------------------------------------- Topic 1067 [media]: Martin Rimm and the Cyberporn Scare #752 of 782: Avant Garde A Clue (mnemonic) Sun Sep 17 '95 (16:37) 17 lines Talked to Anne Branscomb. She says Marty contacted her by phone around the Christmas season and solicited her comment for the Georgetown Law Journal. Marty and Branscomb had several phone conversations last spring, in many of which she solicited his help in downloading images (she found it difficult to do it herself). She says she did not actually review the methodology of the Rimm article -- "I'm not a social scientist, I'm not a statistician" -- but assumed it was valid since Marty's adviser was Sirbu, whom she had known when he was at MIT and they had taken a seminar together from Ithiel de Sola Pool. At one point in the spring, she says, Marty contacted her by phone and casually mentioned that it would be nice if her comment included something complimentary about the study. She says she thinks her comment already mentioned the study, so she is doubtful whether she changed anything pursuant to Marty's request. ----------------------------------------------------------------------------- Topic 1067 [media]: Martin Rimm and the Cyberporn Scare #753 of 782: Avant Garde A Clue (mnemonic) Sun Sep 17 '95 (16:45) 13 lines Branscomb says she also recalls seeing a listing of the names of those persons in foreign countries who downloaded pornographic images. I asked her whether she thought there are ethical questiosn to be raised if those names, or other users' names, were disclosed to the government in the context of seeking a grant from the Department of Justice. She says she thought there are. She says that when she had difficulty successfully downloading any images from Usenet, Marty helpfully sent her a collection of images, complete with BBS ads inset in the images. ----------------------------------------------------------------------------- Topic 1067 [media]: Martin Rimm and the Cyberporn Scare #762 of 782: Avant Garde A Clue (mnemonic) Mon Sep 18 '95 (00:26) 4 lines You read me correctly. Carlin Meyer was required to sign a nondisclosure agreement. [Above was in response to a post by Jim Thomas -DM] ----------------------------------------------------------------------------- Topic 1067 [media]: Martin Rimm and the Cyberporn Scare #781 of 782: Avant Garde A Clue (mnemonic) Mon Sep 18 '95 (17:48) 46 lines December 7, 1994 Professor Carlin Meyer New York Law School 57 Worth Street New York, NY 10013 Dear Professor Meyer: I am very pleased you have agreed to write a response to Martin Rimm's study for The Georgetown Law Journal. I enjoyed talking with you yesterday and look forward to hearing your thoughts upon reading the study. Enclosed is a draft of the study; I will send you an updated version once Mr. Rimm sends it to me. As you know, we are concerned with keeping the information in the study from becoming public. We appreciate your cooperation in not circulating the study or discussing its findings. It has come to my attention that I made a factual error in the letter I sent you; the study is of images on the Usenet, not the Internet. Mr. Rimm has assured me he will explain the difference in the revised introduction - however, if you need an explanation sooner, I can try to get one for you. Please feel free to call if you have any quostions or just want to talk about ideas for your comment. You can reach me during the day at the Law Journal office (202)662-9240 or in the evening at home (703)521-1560. I look forward to working with you! Sincerely, Meredith Kolsky Senior Articles Editor ###