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| Think at your own risk. |
| Tuesday, October 11, 2005 |
Uncensored |
The owner of the Florida web site that traded free access to its porn content to U.S. soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan in exchange for pictures proving they were serving overseas is cooling his heels in jail, charged with 300 misdemeanor and one felony obscenity counts.
The question initially wasn't so much the porn arrest last week, it's whether Chris Wilson (a former cop, btw) is being singled out specifically because he crossed the U.S. military brass, which certainly didn't want the more gruesome pictures of dead Iraqis shown. Wilson's lawyer was on Air America's morning show "Morning Sedition" Tuesday morning saying he was having trouble bonding Wilson out, and the prosecutor in this case has admitted to being in touch with the military (which isn't prosecuting the G.I.'s).
Of course, there's more to the story than that, and Wilson isn't exactly a golden boy:
Wilson had been investigated by the Sheriff's Office before. Charlie Gates, a detective who specializes in criminal activity involving computers, received a complaint about Web sites run by Wilson in March 2003. The Web sites were called www.core39.com and www.messedup.com.
Gates contacted Wilson by telephone and told him he might be in violation of Florida's pornography statute. Wilson agreed not to promote or distribute pornography in Polk County in the future, according to a report by Gates.
In November 2004, Gates began another investigation into Wilson, regarding his current Web site. Gates was off for some time because of an illness, but when he returned he saw an article in The Ledger about the Web site.
He contacted prosecutor Brad Copley and told him he was conducting a possible obscenity investigation. Gates purchased a membership to the Web site and began documenting what he saw.
He collected 80 graphic images and 20 short movies that appeared to be obscene, and presented them to County Judge Angela Cowden, who determined there was probable cause to think all of the images were obscene.
"From September 28 until October 7 I accessed Wilson's Web site many times. The Web site almost always had over 1,000 people logged on at any one time," Gates said in the affidavit. Still, whatever you think of Wilson, the idea that his porn site was singled out, with so many others out there, and given the connection between the site and unedited images of the war that Pentagon types certainly wanted squashed, the case is an unsettling First Amendment test (we won't even go into whether the government in a free society should even be able to censor pornography that doesn't arise from some clearly illegal underlying act, as in child pornography...) In this case, Wilson is charged with violating Florida laws, not federal laws, although the Supreme Court has been known to step in on the Sunshine State from time to time.
Florida has strict and exhaustive obscenity laws on the books, and even sports statutes forbidding adultery and cohabitation, to go with the specific 2005->Ch0847->Section%200135#0847.0135">laws against computer pornography (which deal almost exclusively with the abuse and depiction of abuse of minors). There's some evidence that Wilson knew -- or at least suspected -- that he was under investigation and that he continued to operate anyway (perhaps the lure of press attention was too much to resist?)
Bottom line: this might be a good First Amendment case saddled with a relatively unsympathetic lead character -- kind of like Larry Flynt Goes to Washington...
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The war on pictures
Tags: Iraq, Middle East, War, Foreign Policy, Media |
posted by JReid @ 11:54 PM   |
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