The headline:
U.S. declares war on porn (more)
Obscenity: For the first time in 10 years, the U.S. government is spending millions to file charges across the country.
The fact that they're starting to arrest people doing normal pornography in America is pretty scary… It was bad enough when you just had to constantly fight for your financial rights as an adult content provider, but threatening to take someone's freedom away because they sold a video of a facial or something is frightening.
The Justice Department is being very clear that this is not about “edge” porn like rape, snuff, and so on — this is about shutting down the porn mainstream in America as well. I highly doubt that it'll survive in court, but they don't care — because they have money and time on their side. When you start arresting webmasters and levelling false charges, you do put the little guys out of business, even when the charges are thrown out. Just like Todd Bertrang has had to sell his house to defend himself against false charges like “kidnapping” because his girlfriend referred to herself as his “slave” (as probably a million other people in BDSM relations do as well), and you can bet he's not getting it back even if/when he wins in court.
If you want to make it a little scarier, a man was just arrested on some terrorism charger here in Canada after the NSA tracked him down via email monitoring (more). I'm not going to comment on the details of the case, what's scary is the monitoring ability. As the NSA points out, because so many of the big international communications hubs are in the US, they have not only the ability to monitor it, but, in their mind, “the NSA has a perfect right to monitor all Internet traffic”.
Every day I feel more and more like I'm watching “first they came for the pornographers…” play out right in front of my eyes.
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