Marty Rimm's Moral Mazes

Index:

Plagiarized footnotes
Other plagiarism charges
Refused to allow replication
Lied about making Usenet posts
Adult BBS operators and confidentiality
Claimed Carolyn Speranza as illustrator
Registered "Carnegie Press"

Marty Rimm's cyberporn study is a case study in how to conduct unethical research. Rimm's research methods are fraudulent; the study has been contaminated by his alliance with anti-porn advocacy groups; the data-gathering techniques violate fundamental ethical principles in a reckless and dangerous manner.

A number of researchers have already published criticisms of the study's ethics, most notably Professor Jim Thomas of Northern Illinois University's Department of Sociology. His criticisms largely revolve around the responsibilities of a researcher to his subjects. In social science, that responsibility of beneficence is paramount, and is one of the basic values of the profession.

This report is not meant to be an exhaustive treatment of the Rimm study, its methodological and procedural errors, or the fallout from its publication. Vanderbilt University professors Donna Hoffman and Thomas Novak have already published a lengthy critique and detailed analysis of the conceptual and methodological flaws of Rimm's article. Some of the ethical questions raised elsewhere include how Rimm:

* Misrepresented his study as "Carnegie Mellon Study"
* Enticed BBS operators into study with "Pornographer's Handbook"
* Lent help to Justice Department in prosecuting same BBS operators
* Has a longtime history of deception and fraudulent research
* Orchestrated secrecy deals with the law journal and TIME
* Worked with anti-porn advocacy groups to craft study
* Spied on Andrew computer users' actions
* Denied he wrote the Pornographer's Handbook, then admitted it
* Published unsupported generalizations

This report's purpose is to investigate the ethical questions raised by apparent scientific misconduct that have received relatively comparatively attention elsewhere. Scientific misconduct is a broad term, and extends to any sort of fraud or deception in scientific inquiry. Some of the commonly-accepted aspects of misconduct are:

* Fabrication of scientific data
* Falsification of scientific data
* Selective reporting of data
* Plagiarism of another's work
* Failure to release data and measuring devices
* Conflicts of interest
* Deception in research or data-gathering
* Failure to protect human subjects
* Failure to meet legal or ethical requirements

Plagiarized footnotes

Cheating is "submission of work that is not the student's own for papers, assignments, or exams," according to the Carnegie Mellon University student handbook. Plagiarism is "failure to indicate the source" in written text, or in "an idea derived from the work" of another. Even if the other party agrees to the unattributed use, the conduct still is plagiarism -- and a violation of academic and research standards.

Evidence presented elsewhere shows that Rimm, not a lawyer, plagiarized his well-written footnotes from one. But which attorney? Who was the author? The Electronic Frontier Foundation's staff counsel, Mike Godwin, reports:

Who knows what Philip [Elmer-DeWitt] might have learned if he'd done what I just did this afternoon -- namely, talk to *another* faculty adviser listed in the biographical note in the Rimm study? [...] My source told me that the famous legal footnotes were actually written by someone other than Rimm. "It almost appears," I then said, "that the legal footnotes were added on in order to qualify the Rimm article as something fit for a law journal." "Yes, that is exactly the way it appeared."

Rimm's contradictory reports on the composition of his research team provide even more reason for suspicion. In November 1994, Rimm declares that "four lawyers" are on his "team of researchers." Months later, the team suddenly has no lawyers, and Rimm has no explanation for the apparent change:

From: Martin Rimm
Newsgroups: cmu.cs.discussion
Subject: Re: More Censorship
Date: Fri, 4 Nov 1994 00:31:15 -0500
The team of researchers consists of seven professors, three deans, four lawyers, two lobbyist groups, six undergraduate research assistants, three doctoral students, three programmers, and an art instructor.
Martin

Date: Tue, 4 Apr 1995 21:25:59 -0400 (EDT)
To: mnemonic@eff.org
Subject: Fwd: INTERNET ADULT BBS STUDY
We appreciate your interest. We are making every effort to get you a complete copy of the study before publication. In the meantime, we would greatly appreciate an independent check of our legal notes, which the journal helped us with. (No one on our team is a lawyer). We need to return our final edits to the journal on Thursday, April 14. If before then you have a chance to review the attached, your comments would be most appreciative.
Thanks again,
Martin Rimm
Principal Investigator

Godwin writes:

It's certain that Marty had legal assistance prior to the official formal submission article to the law journal. Who gave that assistance?
At this point in the inquiry, the likeliest answers to this question appear to be:
1) That either Deen Kaplan (the Georgetown Law Journal staff member and antiporn activist), or Len Munsil (the antiporn activist who, as a law student, helped Bruce Taylor craft his law-review article and who would no doubt be able to recall it from memory) crafted the study is the source of Rimm's legal footnotes and of the law-related text of the Rimm article.(Catharine MacKinnon is also a possible candidate), and
2) That either Bruce Taylor, who continues to spearhead the attempts to pressure Congress into censoring the Internet, or Catharine MacKinnon, the controversial University of Michigan law professor is the Supreme Court obscenity litigator who served as a "referee" for Rimm.

Rimm has denied receiving unreported assistance with his footnotes from Bruce Taylor or Deen Kaplan, two leading anti-porn activists. (Knowing that Rimm's paper would contribute to the national hysteria over pornography on computer networks, Kaplan successfully placed the study in the Georgetown Law Journal, where he worked.) However, when confronted with the evidence that he received unattributed legal help from an unnamed source, Rimm has not denied it.

As a researcher, even as an undergraduate, Rimm has an ethical responsibility to follow accepted ethical standards. Plagiarism is not one of them.

Godwin on Rimm, footnotes, and anti-porn activists (11/95)

Godwin on "Who's Using Who?" (10/18/95)

Email exchange in which Rimm calls Mike Godwin "fatty" (10/18/95)

Other plagiarism charges

Michael Mehta was a doctoral student at York University in Ontario when Rimm contacted him and asked to share information. Rimm represented himself as a professor leading a large interdisciplinary research team at Carnegie Mellon University; Mehta was flattered by the attention. He sent "everything they had" to Rimm, and never heard from him again.

After Mehta learned about Rimm publishing his study, he read an online copy. "I don't think the parallels between the two studies are coincidences. There are a lot of similarities that can't be accounted for by chance," he said. Rimm responded by denouncing Mehta in a letter to the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, and calling the charges part of a "witchhunt" against him.

It is deceptive for Rimm to misrepresent himself as anything but an undergraduate engineering student -- albeit an 30-year-old undergraduate with previous engineering skills through service in the military. As defined earlier, scientific misconduct extends to any sort of fraud or deception in scientific inquiry. There certainly must be room for misunderstanding and accidental errors. But repeated attempts at research-related deception are not consistent with the truth-seeking nature of scientific inquiry.

The Case of the Two Cybersex Studies (7/95)

Rimm denies plagiarism charge in letter to the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette (7/30/95)

Refused to allow replication

Scholarly, peer-reviewed journals require that the authors of submitted papers reveal their methodologies in detail, to allow for replication and verification. To avoid the rigors of peer review, Rimm submitted his work to the Georgetown Law Journal, a non-peer reviewed publication.

This also allowed Rimm to avoid revealing details on his methodology. No details on his methodology can be found in his paper, a choice he defended as made by the law journal. The Georgetown Law Journal certainly has a right to conduct business as it sees fit. However, when Rimm was asked to provide copies of his software, he refused. In academia, this is regarded as a breach of a basic norm of modern science.

Jim Thomas wrote on October 26, 1995:

Amongst reputable academics, it's considered fully appropriate to ask for, and obligatory to provide, coding or analytic mechanisms of this kind used in producing published results. Asking Rimm for his scripts is akin to asking a scholar to produce the raw data or (for example) the SPSS JCL used in statistical analysis.
Others here were able to critique such works as The Bell Curve or Sex in America because--whatever else the flaws--the authors displayed their methodological framework for the reader. Rimm's parsing software is as relevant to his "study" as were M&H's logit regression tables in TBC.

Donna Hoffman wrote on August 12, 1995:

You know, in the top scholarly journals in the marketing and behavioral science fields, it is a requirement that the authors of submitted articles make their instruments and data available to reviewers, if the reviewers should request it, for example, to run their own analyses.
It is also a requirement that the methodology be clearly detailed, either in the main text and/or a technical appendix, so that subsequent sets of scholars may attempt to replicate the work in other contexts.
Not providing such information is grounds for rejection or, at the minimum, a hasty return of the manuscript to the author with a polite request to provide such information so it can be properly reviewed...
I've reviewed hundreds of scholarly manuscripts over the years for journals that run the gamut in quality and do have to say that I have never encountered a paper that appeared to be so fraudulent in its approach to research and scientific inquiry.

According to the National Academy of Sciences' Statement on Responsible Conduct in Research:

After publication, scientists expect that data and other research materials will be shared with qualified colleagues upon request. Indeed, a number of federal agencies, journals, and professional societies have established policies requiring the sharing of research materials. Sometimes these materials are too voluminous, unwieldy, or costly to share freely and quickly. But in those fields in which sharing is possible, a scientist who is unwilling to share research materials with qualified colleagues runs the risk of not being trusted or respected.

One of the values of science is shared knowledge. Ever since the Royal Society of London established the Philosophical Transactions journal more than a century ago, the practices of peer review and openness in sharing findings have been fundamental values of western science.

Rimm denies request for his parsing software (10/26/95)

Lied about Usenet posts

On September 17, 1995, Rimm posted two message to Usenet, apparently seeking vindication in the comments of a British professor who also decried the prevalence of Internet pornography. Referring to the newspaper articles that had revealed his background, Rimm posted:

Then again, perhaps if you conducted a background "investigation" of this Professor, you might learn that he read the report in an Arab headdress, and that in his youth he conducted a study of watermelons in Queen Elizabeth's garden, concluding that they indeed had pits (though the cantelope industry vehemently denied this). Any one of these rumors, if confirmed, would immediately discredit his research.

Lillie Wilson from the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review read Rimm's posts and decided to mention them in an article. The next day she called CMU's University Relations office and spoke to Vice President Don Hale, who confirmed that Rimm had made the posts. Rimm declined to be interviewed. But a few hours later, Rimm posted a followup message to Usenet saying he did not make the posts; he claimed they were forged.

However, according to the message-tracking headers on the posts stored on the Andrew news servers, the posts originated from Rimm's account.

While not directly related to the content of Rimm's study, this public incident related to the fallout from its publication is a useful barometer of his conduct in dealing with criticism. Rimm acted in a manner that was less than virtuous. Here, though, we can try to envision the moral maze Rimm may have been facing. He likely was under some pressure to post a retraction. Since the PR office knew about the phone call from Wilson, perhaps the pressure came from CMU itself, which was trying to minimize publicity related to the study. Since Rimm was being investigated for ethical misconduct, the administration would have a lever to use against him. If the administration had prompted Rimm to act in this manner, Rimm's choices -- given that his degree was at stake -- become much less clear.

Rimm's post to Usenet (9/17/95)

Rimm claims Usenet forgeries (9/18/95)

More evidence that Rimm made posts (9/19/95)

Reuters article on Thimbleby (9/12/95)

Pittsburgh Tribune-Review article on Rimm's posts (9/19/95)

Atlantic City Press on Rimm's pre-CMU activities (8/29/95)

Adult BBS Operators and Confidentiality

Rimm deceived operators of adult BBSs in order to gain access to their confidential files cataloging the downloads of images. The deception occurred when Rimm neglected to inform them that he was doing research for a university-sponsored research project. This duplicity violates the fundamental ethical principles of social science, which require that subjects enter into a project voluntarily and with adequate information. Rimm's deception made it impossible for them to do so. In his paper, Rimm even admits to concealing his identity: "Members of the research team did not, as a rule, identify themselves as researchers." When asked by investigative journalist Brock Meeks how he managed to acquire sensitive information on user habits from the BBS operators, Rimm replied:

Dispatch asked Rimm: "Did your team go uncover, as it were, when getting permission from these [BBS operators] to use their information?" He replied only: "Discrete, ain't we?"
When asked how he was able to obtain detailed customer profiles from usually skeptical operators of adult BBSs he says: "If you were a pornographer, and you don't have fancy computers or Ph.D. statisticians to assist you, wouldn't you be just a wee bit curious to see how you could adjust your inventories to better serve your clientele? Wouldn't you want to know that maybe you should decrease the number of oral sex images and increase the number of bondage images? Wouldn't you want someone to analyze your logfiles to better serve the tastes of each of your customers?

Not only did Rimm resort to deception to acquire confidential data, he apparently was careless about keeping the data confidential himself. When he wrote to Anne Branscomb, one of the reviewers commenting on his study, he included a listing of the names of persons in foreign countries who downloaded pornographic images from Amateur Action BBS. Mike Godwin wrote:

I asked her whether she thought there are ethical questions 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.

By itself, the release of this information is a serious enough ethical violation to justify censure. Rimm had an ethical responsibility to ensure the safety and confidentiality of his subjects. Given the possibility of prosecution or persecution, the consequences of that information leaking could be severe. Rimm also obtained BBS subscriber data and published the names of the cities and small towns where the subscribers lived. He did not obtain permission from the subscribers to do this.

Protecting the confidentiality of research subjects is a basic responsibility for a researcher, especially when there may be significant negative, possibly even legal, consequences for the subjects if their identities were to be made public. Rimm's recklessness in not considering the consequences of his actions is distressing.

Rimm calls Thomas "a fucking genius." (8/11/94)

Rimm's Amateur Action BBS membership application (5/10/94)

TIME sidebar on Robert Thomas (7/3/95)

Claimed Carolyn Speranza as Illustrator

Rimm listed Carolyn Speranza as an illustrator for his "Pornographer's Handbook," apparently without her consent. Speranza, Rimm's former girlfriend and faculty advisor, says she never gave him permission and did not know he had done so. On July 16, 1995, she posted this message to Usenet:

1. My name was listed in Books in Print as an illustrator for the Pornographer's Handbook without my knowledge or consent.
2. The Pornographer's Handbook was an idea that Martin Rimm spoke of frequently to me, but I have never seen it in either printed or electronic form. I have never written, or helped anyone write the excerpts from The Handbook which have been posted on the net, quoted in Brock's article or any other. I have never published material, written or illustrated under this title in any format. Martin Rimm has never given me copies or excerpts from the Pornographer's Handbook, nor have I taken them from him without his consent.

As of October 21, 1995, she also has asked that her name be removed from the Books in Print entry that showed her as an illustrator:

In correspondence with Dan Dickholtz, editor for Books in Print, published by R.R. Bowker, I have requested that my name be removed from the Pornographer's Handbook listing. I have received a letter from him stating that it has been removed from the electronic versions of Books in Print, (ie the databases the bookstores receive) and will be removed from the hardbound, printed version for its next publication. You can verify this situation with Dan at R.R. Bowker in NJ.

Carolyn Speranza posts and email (7/16/95)

Registered "Carnegie Press"

Marty Rimm registered Carnegie Press on March 10, 1994, according to the Corporation Bureau in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. In Books in Print, he lists Carnegie Press as the publisher of his "Pornographer's Handbook." Years earlier, Rimm had self-published a collection of short stories, An American Playground, using the name of a vanity "Atlantic City Press."

Carnegie Press is not a true company -- the Corporation Bureau calls it a "fictitious name" -- since it's owned by a single individual and trading under a business name. Rimm paid $52 to register it, and the registration is good for his lifetime. According to the bureau, the given purpose of Carnegie Press is "book publishing." At the time of the company's registration, Rimm was working on the "Pornographer's Handbook" project that apparently was used to entice adult BBS operators into participating in his study.

Apart from the ethical issue raised by Rimm's intention to profit from grant-funded research on nonconsenting subjects, there also may be an ethical issue raised by the misleading name, "Carnegie Press." It capitalizes on the name of Carnegie Mellon University and lends an unwarranted aura of credibility to a project that was not truly associated with the school.