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New Law Targets Internet Porn
By David McGuire
President Bush today signed legislation that would hand out prison sentences to online pornographers who deliberately mask their Web sites behind innocuous domain names.
The provision is part of a larger bill that strengthens penalties for sexual abuse or exploitation of children, provides funding for a national child-abduction alert system and bolsters prohibitions against child pornography. The proposal is frequently referred to as the "Amber Alert" bill.
The law also bans the distribution of "virtual" child pornography -- pornographic images of adults that have been digitally altered to look like children having sex.
The misleading domain name provision will insure that children do not walk into a "fraudulent storefront on the Internet ... and find themselves in the adult section -- triple X -- when they came in looking for Hardy Boys," said Rep. Mike Pence (R-Ind.) earlier this month. Pence was the key sponsor of the provision
Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.) has voiced concerns that prosecutors could misinterpret the legislation. Web site operators who feature sexually oriented art or graphic safe-sex demonstrations could face criminal prosecution if their Internet addresses are deemed misleading, Leahy said.
The law says that online pornographers who include terms like "sex" and "porn" in their domain names would not be prosecuted.
Civil libertarians have expressed concerns about both the misleading domain name provision and the digitally "morphed" child pornography ban.
Pence said he attempted to sidestep these concerns by restricting false advertising, rather than banning types of speech.
Last May, the Supreme Court in a 6-3 decision struck down portions of the Child Pornography Prevention Act, which outlawed the possession and distribution of pornography containing computer-generated images showing children apparently engaged in sex acts.
The morphed child porn and deceptive domain names prohibitions were added to the Amber Alert bill at the insistence of congressional Republicans. Several other additions include: allowing federal judges to
order supervision of released sex offenders for the rest of their lives; making it illegal to attempt to take or keep a child outside the United States to avoid custody battles; and requiring convicted child
pornographers to register in the National Sex Offender Registry.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
