WASHINGTON — The House of Representatives returned to a favorite topic Tuesday: the dangers of child pornography and the Internet.
During an hour-long discussion on the House floor on National Missing Children’s Day, a procession of legislators stood up and warned that America’s children must be protected from online predators.
“We should all care about kids and child porn and its impact on children,” said Representative Jerry Weller (R-Illinois).
Representative Nancy Johnson (R-Connecticut) said, “These people are out there lurking in cyberspace and any child on the Internet can fall prey to these pedophiles.”
The House is scheduled to vote on the Drug Free Borders and Prevention of On-Line Child Pornography Act bill by Thursday morning.
“It is designed to capture online pedophiles and run a cyber-tipline that helps identify and locate online predators,” Johnson said. “As more kids go online every day, we need to ensure their safety.”
The measure would authorize US$10 million to the Customs Service to be used in fiscal year 2000 to “carry out the program to prevent child pornography/child sexual exploitation established by the Child Cyber-Smuggling Center of the Customs Service.”
The center’s current budget for the fiscal year ending in September 1999 is about $2.4 million. The center’s funding is included in a broader appropriations authorization bill for the Customs Service introduced in early May.
“What we do is investigate crimes on the Internet. The CyberSmuggling center does [investigations of] child pornography and financial crimes, smuggling and fraud,” said spokeswoman Deborah DiFalco.
The Customs Service, which is part of the Treasury Department, participated in 162 convictions and 167 seizures in the 1997 fiscal year, according to agency data.
Another Treasury agency, the Secret Service, has provided help to the Fairfax, Virginia-based CyberSmuggling Center in areas such as handwriting, voice analysis, and polygraph exams.
The proposed legislation, introduced by Representative Philip Crane (R-Illinois), gives 3.75 percent of the total cash — or $370,000 — to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children.
The debate came before a Congress increasingly nervous about children and the Internet following the Littleton, Colorado, school massacre.
The Senate has also tried to broaden child pornography laws. The most recent change, sponsored by Senator Orrin Hatch (R-Utah) and Senator Dianne Feinstein (D-California), punishes transmitting or possessing even “lascivious” morphed images of a minor with up to 10 years in prison.
Child pornography laws did not exist until about two decades ago. The Supreme Court first ruled in 1982 that the government could ban sexual images with serious literary or artistic value in the interest of preventing “the harmful employment of children to make sexually explicit materials for distribution.”
Two years later, the justices said the government could outlaw not just the distribution but also the possession of child porn. And in a 1994 Pennsylvania case, an appeals court ruled that a suggestive videotape of clothed girls in leotards was child pornography.
The move towards ever-tougher penalties has its critics, who accuse politicians of grandstanding through child pornography legislation. Lawrence Stanley, a New York attorney, blasted this trend in a Cardozo Law Journal article that said just about all the images at issue date from the 1970s.
“There is no question but that the propaganda concerning child pornography has been and continues to be used by law enforcement officials and politicans, religious leaders, and the media to create confusion, feelings of powerlessness, and fear among the populace,” he wrote. “This manipulation makes curtailment of First Amendment freedoms and expansion of police powers easier.”
FBI director Louis Freeh in March 1998 told a Senate appropriations panel that the threat of child pornography on the Internet means that government might have to outlaw anonymity online.
The House also discussed another bill that would give annual grants to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children. At a press conference Tuesday, House Republican Conference chairman J.C. Watts (R-Oklahoma) urged all sites on the Internet to link to a a cyber-tipline
