Calls for animal sex referendum

DENMARK’S Council for Animal Ethics said today there was no need to ban sex with animals unless it took place in pornographic films or sex shows.

Only one of the 10 members of the council, set up by the Danish Justice Ministry to establish and uphold animal ethics, wants bestiality expressly forbidden.

A senior member of the right wing Danish People’s Party was shocked by the recommendation and said the subject should be put to a referendum.

"Then there wouldn’t be any doubt about the result," Christian Hansen said.

A Justice Ministry spokesman was not available for comment.

Jeff Pierson is a photographer whose action shots of hopped-up American autos laying waste to the asphalt at Alabama dragways have appeared in racing magazines and commercial advertisements.

Pierson’s Web site boasted he has the "most wonderful wife in the world and two fantastic daughters." And until recently, he ran a business called Beautiful Super Models that charged $175 for portraits of aspiring models under 18.

In a federal indictment announced this week, the U.S. Department of Justice accused Pierson, 43, of being a child pornographer–even though even prosecutors acknowledge there’s no evidence he has ever taken a single photograph of an unclothed minor.

Rather, they argue, his models struck poses that were illegally provocative. "The images charged are not legitimate child modeling, but rather lascivious poses one would expect to see in an adult magazine," Alice Martin, U.S. attorney for the northern district of Alabama, said in a statement.

Pierson’s child pornography indictment arises out of an FBI and U.S. Postal Inspection Service investigation of so-called child modeling sites, which have been the subject of a series of critical congressional hearings and news reports in the last few years. An August article in The New York Times, for instance, called the modeling Web sites "the latest trend in child exploitation."

In addition to Pierson, the U.S. attorney also announced indictments against Marc Greenberg, 42, Jeffrey Libman, 39, partners in a Fort Lauderdale, Fla., business called Webe Web, which in turn ran the now-defunct ChildSuperModels.com site. It was one of the larger sites that featured photographs of child models, allegedly from Pierson, and became the target of a report on Florida’s NBC6 affiliate suggesting that it was a magnet for pedophiles.

First Amendment scholars interviewed Wednesday raised questions about the Justice Department’s attack on Internet child modeling. They warned that any legal precedent might endanger the mainstream use of child models in advertising and suggested that prosecutors’ budgets might be better spent investigating actual cases of child molestation.

"I don’t know what the DOJ’s trying," said Lee Tien, an attorney at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a civil liberties group. "The best I can say is that it’s puzzling that they would devote investigative and law enforcement resources to something (like this). This is a far cry from what folks normally think of as child pornography."

The Web sites that prompted the indictments are now offline. But copies saved in Google’s cachesweaters to, more frequently, swimsuits and midriff-baring attire. Parents appear to have given their consent. and through Archive.org show the photographs in question depicted girls wearing everything from

Richard Jaffe, Pierson’s attorney, said he could not immediately comment because he was in court on Wednesday. Jill Ellis, a spokeswoman for the U.S. Attorney’s Office in the northern district of Alabama, confirmed to CNET News.com that no nudity was involved. An arraignment for Pierson has been scheduled for December 14 before U.S. Magistrate Judge Robert Armstrong.

No sex, no nudity
Because no sex or nudity is involved, the prosecutions raise unusual First Amendment concerns that stretch beyond mere modeling-related Web sites: children and teens in various degrees of undress appear in everything from newspaper underwear advertisements to the covers of Seventeen and Vogue.

When actress and model Brooke Shields was 15 years old, for instance, she appeared in a racy Calvin Klein jean advertisement featuring the memorable line, "Nothing comes between me and my Calvins." Shields also appeared nude at 12 years old in an Oscar-nominated movie called Pretty Baby that was set in a New Orleans brothel. Similarly, 14-year-old Jodie Foster, wearing revealing clothing, played a pre-teen prostitute in Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver.

Sally Mann, named Time magazine’s "photographer of the year" in 2001, was attacked by critics for featuring nude images of her own children in a book called Immediate Family. Famed photographer Jock Sturges’ photos often feature nude boys and girls on the beaches of California and France–images that are far more revealing than those of swimsuit-clad youths.

All of that makes the distinction between legal child photography and illegal child pornography a particularly subjective one. It may come down to, as the Justice Department’s Alice Martin put it, seemingly ephemeral factors such as the poses the model strikes and the camera angles the photographer chooses.

"Prosecuting cases on this borderline presents difficult First Amendment problems," said Amy Adler, a New York University law professor who has written about pornography, culture and the law. "The sexy teenager is sort of a mainstream trope. It’s very different from babies being molested, and child pornography law doesn’t make a distinction."

That’s no exaggeration: The same section of federal law punishes a pedophile who makes a video recording of a baby being molested, as well as someone who possesses an image of a 17-year-old striking an unlawfully racy pose.

The explanation for that lies in a criminal statute called 18 USC 2252A, which Pierson is accused of violating. Child pornography is defined as the "lascivious exhibition of the genitals or pubic area of any person" under 18 years old.

Until a 1994 case called U.S. v. Knox, judges interpreted that language to mean either images of nude minors or of minors having sex. In that case, however, the 3rd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals extended that definition to include videotapes of girls in leotards, and upheld Stephen Knox’s conviction on child pornography charges.

"The genitals and pubic area of the young girls…were certainly ‘on display’ as the camera focused for prolonged time intervals on close-up views of these body parts through their thin but opaque clothing. Additionally, the obvious purpose and inevitable effect of the videotape was to ‘attract notice’ specifically to the genitalia and pubic area. Applying the plain meaning of the term ‘lascivious exhibition’ leads to the conclusion that nudity or discernibility are not prerequisites for the occurrence of an exhibition within the meaning of the federal child pornography statute," the 3rd Circuit wrote.

Courts have also looked to a 1986 case called U.S. v. Dost for guidance on what’s "lascivious" and what’s not. Among the factors they evaluate: whether the focus is on the child’s genitalia or pubic area; whether the image suggests sexual coyness; and whether the visual depiction is intended or designed to elicit a sexual response in the viewer.

A crackdown’s mixed results
Prosecutors have tried to target child modeling Web sites before, with mixed results.

In 2002, Colorado prosecutors charged James Grady with more than 719 felony charges–ranging from sexual exploitation of children to contributing to the delinquency of minors–for operating TrueTeenBabes.com. The Web site bills itself as "America’s premier teen glamour publication" and sells subscriptions for access to nonnude shots of models between 13 and 17 years old.

TrueTeenBabes.com drew the attention of local television reporters, whose reporting sparked a police investigation. But a jury acquitted Grady, and he subsequently filed a lawsuit asking for $10 million in damages for wrongful arrest, according to the Rocky Mountain News. TrueTeenBabes.com is back online today.

In an unrelated prosecution of two Utah men, Matthew Duhamel and Charles Granere currently are facing federal criminal charges of child pornography. They’re accused (click for PDF) of running a child modeling site–again, no nudity is alleged–that featured minors in lingerie.

They filed a joint motion in July, which was rejected, asking that the case be dismissed in part on First Amendment grounds. "It seems clear," the motion said, "that the genitals or pubic area of the person must be actually exposed or visible to fall within the proscription against exhibition."

The U.S. Congress tried to clear up some of the ambiguity around what is and what isn’t legal but never actually enacted legislation.

In 2002, Rep. Mark Foley announced a bill called the Child Modeling Exploitation Prevention Act that would effectively ban the sale of photographs of minors. But under opposition from civil libertarians and commercial stock photo houses like Corbis, it never left committee. (Foley, of course, is the same politician who resigned in September after disclosures of inappropriate conversations with a teenage page.)

That leaves judges and juries faced with the difficult task of making distinctions between lawful and unlawful camera angles and facial expressions–an exercise that proves to be impossible to do without running afoul of the First Amendment.

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"How do we distinguish pictures like these (on child modeling sites) from the everyday photos that our culture tolerates and even prizes?" said Adler, the NYU law professor. "For instance, who’s modeling in Vogue? A lot of those people are 15 and in scantily clad or suggestive photos."

Paris Hilton hardcore? Nope. Pamela Anderson hardcore? Nope. Screech? Nope How about a STAR WARS KID!!!

The footage was eventually encoded as a Windows Media (.wmv) file and spread using a peer-to-peer file-sharing network. It grew ever more popular, with nearly 180,000 people signing an online petition that unsuccessfully called for Mr. Raza to have a cameo in the third episode of the modern Star Wars franchise.

Mr. Raza said the publicity caused endless humiliation and he sued for $250,000. An unspecified settlement was reached this spring, though it appears to have done nothing to slow the spread of the video. According to numbers from the Viral Factory, a British firm, it has been seen by nearly one of every seven people on Earth.

A couple of hundred million views behind Mr. Raza was a more recent performance by Gary Brolsma.

Also an unknown teen before the spread of his video, the 19-year-old is now known as "Numa Numa" and his lip-synch of a Romanian pop hit has been seen by 700 million people.

Trailing in third place was 1 Night in Paris, the infamous sex tape of Ms. Hilton and her then-boyfriend that has been seen online by 400 million.

Next came the saucy advertisement filmed by pop star Kylie Minogue for the British lingerie company Agent Provocateur, the choice of 360 million.

Other popular video clips included the dynamiting of a dead whale and a salmon commercial depicting a man fist-fighting a large bear.

When violent crime strikes a social network, the ghosts of the dead start roaming the machines.

from Wired Magazine 

DEANNE BAYS WAS WORRIED about her kid brother, Daniel. His girlfriend hadn’t heard from him for a day and a half. There was no sign of him online, even though he usually spent hours a day on MySpace. And he’d been hanging out a lot with that drug dealer. Bays hoped that didn’t mean young Daniel Varo was back in jail. All day long on February 7, even as Bays crammed for Accounting 211 and Spanish 102 and took her daughter to the dentist, she wondered where he could be. That evening, two hours into her 4-to-10 pm shift at the Norm Thompson catalog company, just outside Portland, Oregon, Bays finally got a chance to check her own MySpace page for messages. There was one from her husband, frantic, telling Bays to phone right away – even though he knew that she wasn’t allowed to make personal calls on the job. Bays’ inbox also had emails from two of Varo’s ex-girlfriends. "What did he do now?" she groaned to herself, clicking on one of the notes: im freekin out i cant stop crying and i dont want to believe its true. he cant be gone … please call me or someone call me please.

Bays, a petite redhead with a broad, smooth face, walked into the Thompson break room. She called her husband. "You have to come home," he whispered.

Varo, 22, was dead – shot in the head as he sat at his computer. Varo’s friend Darren Christian, 28, and one of Christian’s friends, 21-year-old Lindy Cochran, had also been killed in the same gangland style.

In the days and weeks that followed, Deanne Bays followed a path familiar to families involved in a violent crime – she sobbed in grief and anger, numbly arranged a funeral, turned to friends for comfort. But Bays did it in two worlds at once – the virtual and the real. Bays suffered in private, but she also shared her pain on MySpace. The aftermath of the murders resonated through the social network – touching the investigating detectives, the lawyers and even the victims. Daniel Varo was dead, but he didn’t disappear. He had lived so much of his life online that pieces of him lingered on the Web – a ghost in the machine.

PEOPLE DROVE FOR HUNDREDS OF MILES to have Daniel Varo work on their cars. It was easy for him, and he loved it – he’d do it for strangers stuck on the side of the road, in the rain, in the middle of the night. And good luck getting him to charge for the work; maybe instead of cash he’d take parts for his Acura Integra Type R, a street racer he drove on the twisting roads of suburban Portland at five times the speed limit – holding his cell phone against the dashboard so a buddy could hear the engine growl. He was a 6′2", 220-pound overgrown kid, a mile-a-minute goofball talking at hurricane speeds, hoovering up fast food, bopping around raves like a noodle-armed maniac.

But Varo was also a "magnet to trouble," his sister says. "All the cops knew his plates." He rolled with a tough crowd. He had served six months in the Shutter Creek Correctional Institution for intent to sell 76 hits of ecstasy. He had even managed to get busted for jaywalking. The threat of parole violations always loomed. i need to get on the ball, he once posted on his sister’s MySpace page. i am getting old already haha.

Then in January 2005, intent on making a clean start, Varo and his girlfriend – a sinewy, 18-year-old blonde named Ashley Foley – moved from Portland to a secluded suburb 30 miles north of Tacoma, Washington, to live with Varo’s mother. Away from friends, they started spending more and more time on MySpace, uploading their personalities, preferences, and relationships to the social network. She’d post flirty comments and decorated her page in pink, with pictures of herself in garters and thongs; he posted an online kissing test and a picture of a Type R.

They spent the better part of a year keeping to themselves, mostly. Foley danced at Fox’s, a local strip club. Varo delivered pizzas and prepped for computer science classes – he rebuilt computers almost as well as cars. But on New Year’s Eve, Varo and Foley went to a rave called Apocalypse 2 at a club in a trashy little exurb southeast of Tacoma. Varo was excited; he kept telling Foley that he was hoping to run into an old Seattle rave buddy, "DC." They met up with drug dealer and party promoter Darren Christian just after midnight.

Six feet tall, with sculpted shoulders and pale-green eyes, Christian was charismatic, oozing confidence. He’d drop three grand at a bar without blinking and bought a motorcycle before he knew how to ride. One time, about to go snowboarding, he handed a friend a 4-inch wad of beer-soaked cash to hold while he was on the slopes. Christian hadn’t bothered to count it, but his friend did: $28,000. Fueling all this was an ecstasy business with hundreds of thousands of pills in inventory. "He got the most ass, kicked the most ass, drove the fastest car, had the coolest dog and the dopest house," says Sherri Jensen, another Fox’s dancer. "Everything about him made you want to hang out with him, all the time."

Christian and Varo had a bond that was almost chemical. "A little match made in heaven," Foley says. "Both really loud, always going-going-going." The pair partied for a full day after the New Year’s rave. Within days, Varo was crashing at Christian’s rental house, a white stucco place on Sixth and South Union avenues in Tacoma’s emerging-from-seedy Hilltop neighborhood. Foley built Christian’s MySpace page; he used it to promote his parties and hook up with girlfriends. Christian decorated the page like his house, with pictures of Japanese motorcycles and Al Pacino in Scarface. Soon after he started his online life, girls were leaving notes, telling him, I can’t wait to touch you!

Through a fellow car junkie, Varo met Ulysses Handy III. Known on MySpace as Lucifer – he had hellraiser tattooed across his back and 666 on his caramel-brown abdomen – Handy had just finished serving nearly eight years in jail for beating a guy with a baseball bat. Since his release, Handy had been suspected of shooting two people and molesting his 14-year-old cousin. A 1998 hospital psychological evaluation mentioned past diagnoses ranging from "impulse control disorder" to "Jekyll/Hyde personality shifts."

The first time Handy went over to Christian’s house, he figured he’d rob the place; Christian kept a safe in the bedroom, supposedly packed with drugs and money. But Christian was "so cool," Handy told friends, he couldn’t bring himself to do it. In fact, he could barely bring himself to leave Christian and Varo at all.