Consider the recent Blue Orchid child pornography ring and Web site, based in Russia, which at last count has involved people in over 24 different countries. The U.S. purchasers of their videos could be sentenced to 15 years in prison, but in Russia there is no legal distinction between child porn and any other kind of pornography.
Offenders there could get two years, at best.
Or consider the example of Patrick Naughton, former Infoseek executive vice president, who in 1999 was charged with possession of child pornography downloaded from the Internet and for crossing state lines to have sex with a 13-year-old girl. Of course, the 13-year-old was really an FBI agent, who had been posing as a minor on the chat room dad&daughtersex. They arranged to meet at a pier, where Naughton was arrested upon arrival.
Naughton spent the weekend in jail--arguably two days too long--because the day after Naughton's conviction, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit overturned the law on which he was indicted, the Child Pornography Prevention Act of 1996. The Act defined child pornography as sexually explicit images that conveyed the impression that a minor was involved. This means that a picture of a 25-year-old woman dressed as a schoolgirl having sex is considered child porn.
Wow.
It is this section of the law that was found unconstitutionally too broad; and if a law is struck down, convictions derived from it must also be overturned.
The structure of the Internet makes finding pornography easy, but catching pornographers very difficult. Current police maneuvers are based primarily on going to sites or chat rooms with suspicious names (like dad&daughtersex) and posing as a minor or a pedophile. But how many people are going to be caught this way, and how long will it take?
Furthermore, it allows for the capture of only the least-savvy Internet users. Sure, there are child pornographers on sites and chat rooms like dad&daughtersex--a testament to how cavalier and secure the majority of pedophiles are with regard to the possibility of being captured; but the majority of the porn is where you wouldn't expect to find it. Recently, child pornography was found in a newsgroup on ferrets and high school football!
Who's going to look there, when there are at least a hundred sites that begin with the word "teen"? And there isn't any child porn in regular pornographic Web sites because those sites exist to make money; and you can't make money if the FBI sends you to prison.
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