Date: Fri, 27 Oct 1995 00:17:30 -0700 (PDT) From: Declan McCullagh To: fight-censorship+@andrew.cmu.edu Subject: Re: My Attempts at Cyberporn Research In-Reply-To: Message-ID: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII X-Status: On Thu, 26 Oct 1995, Brock N. Meeks wrote: > All this may be so, Seth. One piece of this puzzle that's never been > fully explored is investigating the attempt by Prof. Sirbu to apparently > sell these parsing programs to the Dept. of Justice. > > I'd like someone at CMU to bust Sirbu's ass about this and make *him* > tell the truth about his involvement here. In early July, I was working on an oped piece that eventually was rejected by some of the finer newspapers on this mailing list. :) I interviewed David Banks on July 5: The funding was a SURG grant. We are now hoping for DOJ money. DOJ has confiscated log files of pornographers they are prosecuting. It's the same type of info that Martin analyzed. They want to do a bivariate cluster analysis to determine whether bestiality is a narrow interest or whether people who look at bestiality also have shoe fetishes. The DOJ's interest is prosecutorial. They'd like to do things like quietly deciding whether a commerical BBS is highly offensive or whether they should go after someone else. If you can say systematically that BBS operators are building up collections of pedophilia because they find it profitable, you can make a much stronger case in court. There may be impliations for community standards, comparing Georgia vs. New York. The DOJ, back in October, we satdown -- anyone who funds research -- the DOJ project was natural place to look. Martin spoke with someone there. I wrote a proposal and sent it to Martin and Marvin. It was a joint decision. Adam Spector in the DOJ's Office of Justice Programs told me: There isn't any type of DOJ research program for universities. The Department of Justice will solicit research proposals on various subjects. In many cases, the proposals and some of the awards will go to a university or university-affiliated origination. I'm with the Office of Justice Programs. In terms of research, the primary [unclear from my notes]. The permanent research arm of the DOJ is in the Office of Justice Programs. It's called the National Institute of Justice. I'm not aware of any research program or solitication that is pornography-related -- within the Office of Justice Programs. I'm not aware of any research project related to pornography. Finally, I interviewed someone in, I believe, the DOJ Child Exploitation and Obscenity Section. I can't immediately locate my interview file, but I remember him telling me that they were planning to call Rimm as an expert witness to testify against pornographers. -Declan // declan@eff.org // My opinions are not necessarily those of the EFF //