Does the net push porn?

Last week nine men in the UK were arrested and charged with using computers to distribute child pornography. The Daily Mail's "Internet police crack child porn network" was typical; then the Daily Record proclaimed "The filth that lurks on the information superhighway - The kids who can surf a sea of sex". So as soon as one connects to the internet, do harrowing images of child abuse leap out of the computer?

Detective Inspector David Davis of the West Midlands Commercial Vice Unit, who headed the investigation, first told Channel Four News that the arrests were on suspicion of "publishing" pictures where others could find them, and later that they were for circulating them privately. A spokesperson for West Midlands police "believes" the allegation relates only to private circulation. DI Davis is on holiday.

The distinction may be irrelevant to the heinousness of the charges: but it is vital to the politics and media presentation of the internet.

Do internet services push porn at users? Consider the internet's publishing medium, the World Wide Web. There are services which assist chance discoveries on the Web by jumping to a random "page". Might that be porn?

The Lycos search engine at Carnegie-Mellon University in Pittsburgh had by July 25 indexed the text of 5,535,148 World- Wide Web pages. Any child who does not try a search on the word "sex" when first left alone with Lycos should probably be referred to a psychologist for under-inquisitiveness.

So: that search produces 7814 documents. Of the top 100, 22 lead to "safer sex" information at the University of California, San Francisco. One of the 100 had pictures. The odds against a random pornographic image thus seem to be worse than 70,000:1 (one per year of 8-hours-a-day random jumping).

Half a dozen contained references to the Web pages of Playboy and Penthouse magazines (usually unobtainable) or to the revolting Hustler (which requires electronic payment).

Of the others, several exist specifically to spoof Lycos: one is really bad fish jokes, and one reports "409 SEX NOT FOUND The requested URL /sage/sex.htm does not exist. Get a life."

Where porn is publicly accessible is in Usenet news. Of the over 15,000 news-groups, about 20 distribute "erotica". You have to choose to go to them. You can choose an internet service provider which doesn't have them.

Much is made of the percentage of Usenet "traffic" which is porn -- and indeed in June, 15 of the top 40 news-groups measured by megabytes of messages were such. But the busiest of these groups had 6736 messages in 205 megabytes, compared to 33,891 messages in 50 megabytes for a group listing job openings. A picture may be "worth 1000 words", but it takes up at least 5000 times the disk space. (Should there be a curfew on innumerate journalists?)

To download an image, or any non-text file, from Usenet takes effort. You receive a text file which encodes it -- a meaningless stream of gibberish. Then you work out what program to use to decode the original file, and what to use to view the result. Only then do you discover what you have.

Journalists "investigating" the net hunt the -- often elusive -- really transgressive image. Presumably, porn addicts do the same. The psychology could be compared to that of a lottery card which takes five minutes to scratch.

The most imaginative tactic against net.porn was the text message saying "CLAUDIA.JPG -- now *that's* disgusting!". A dozen nerds demanded to see the file, which never existed. A week later someone else posted it -- depicting a fat man in a transparent plastic mac and waders.

People who have monitored net.porn from the US -- even less scientifically than the notorious Rimm study for Time magazine -- report that most images in the "child porn" groups are "nudist": maybe illegal in the UK but often scanned from magazines available at station bookstalls in Germany.

At the time of the vote on the Exon "Communications Decency Bill" there was a spate of montage images which, if real, would have been seriously illegal. Indeed, Section 79 of the Criminal Justice and Public Order Act 1994 specifically criminalises such "virtual porn" in the UK.

Last week, after the arrests, a series of photos appeared, from one Compuserve address, depicting serious offences. Even in the abstracted absolute-free-speech atmosphere of debate about pornography on the net, the fact that these might be used by abusers to show targets "what other people do" makes them deeply disturbing. A policeman connected with last week's arrests said "it's hard-core pornography we're looking at, not just nudity".

One "netizen" response is summed up by Joan Tine: "Y'know, the badness of child porn is something everybody can agree about.... This has NEVER been about child porn, and if there was nobody posting child porn, you can guarantee that some would manage to get posted so the bureaucrats would have the excuse they needed to agitate for greater powers..." Joan Tine is a computer scientist in San Diego and an "out" transsexual.

The other point of view -- anonymously from Northern England -- has the normally voluble netizens, who've stayed silent about the latest arrests, asking themselves "If I accept that the paedophilia groups need destroying am I therefore condemning other areas of the net with a sexual bias to censorship?" This netizen thinks it likely that "if net users are not prepared to make a moral stand and show non-net users that we are really a normal, responsible group of people, then the overwhelming drive will be to restrict the net."

Either way, "the net" is a medium not a message. The anonymous UK user says: "to blame the internet for the pictures is like blaming the highways department for the stuff the post-person walks to your door." Or, as US Senator Russ Feingold put it: "there are those who will try to harm our children, either for profit for even more perverse reasons... In trying to protect our children, we must recognize the Internet for what it is, simply a new way of communicating."

Those who are obsessed with such images will try to get them, whether on foot or by ftp. The problem which net.porn poses for law-enforcers is that digital images can be encrypted so that they can never be produced in evidence: but the problem of pornography for society as a whole is the same however it is transported.

Children will access pornography. Almost whatever "filters" are put in place, the inquisitive will learn a lot about computers by finding ways around them. But the author first saw "porn" at 12: airbrushed pictures which the Guardian could now print, but shocking for the day, and a secret from the author's mother until this moment. And that perhaps is one point of the hysteria: for adults to invent an innocent childhood for themselves.

The other point may be to reduce the complexity of the issues which the internet raises for society -- a change as significant as the application of printing, and all that -- to an unpleasantly familiar moral absolute. The first words which Emma Nicolson MP ever said to the author were a despairing "You don't want to talk about porn, do you?". One could suspect that, for politicians who are less enthusiastic than she to come to grips with the more complex issues, net.porn comes as rather a relief.