An overview of issues related to pornography and abusive images. Intended for computing students as part of a professional and ethical issues module. Warning - Unpleasant Content.

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Pornography and Abusive
Images
Computer Law and Ethics
Michael Heron
Denis Edgar-Nevill

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Introduction
 In many ways, technology adoption is driven by pornography.
 Sex sells
 Sex sells particularly well to the demographic most likely to adopt
new technology.
 Young men
 You know who you are.
 Pornographers adopting VHS is cited sometimes as the reason
the format survived over the Betamax.
 Adoption of DVDs killed off the video tape in part because of the
easy ability to skip to ‘favourite scenes’
 The internet is a vast reservoir of porn and smut.
 A 2001 review found 80,000 major adult websites on the internet.

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Pornography
 But, what is pornography?
 The line varies from person to person.
 ‘I know it when I see it’ as Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart said in 1964
 Not all nudity is porn.
 Some of it is art.
 Not all sex scenes are porn.
 Some of them are art.
 Not all pornography is visual.
 Sex novels, ‘porn for the blind’
 Adult, mature dramas often include full frontal nudity and are not
considered pornographic.
 By most.

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Pornography
 Many definitions exist, but the usual rule is ‘explicit section
material delivered with the primary intention of provoking a
sexualised reaction’
 A spectrum exists between ‘erotica’ and ‘porn’
 Pornographic material covers a wide range of niche fetishes
and topics.
 And manifests itself in a huge variety of formats and styles.
 http://www.onlinemba.com/blog/stats-on-internet-pornography/
outlines some interesting stats on the prevalence of
pornography online.

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Lady Chatterley’s Lover
 Written by D.H. Lawrence 1928
 Printed privately in Florence in 1928, it was not printed in the United
Kingdom until 1960 (other than in an underground edition issued by Inky
Stephensen's Mandrake Press in 1929
 Frequent use of the graphically sexual terminology.
 1960, the trial of the publishers, Penguin Books, under the Obscene
Publications Act of 1959
 Found ‘Not Guilty’
 ‘Is this the kind of book you’d want your wife or servant to read?’ – Mervyn Griffith
Jones, Chief Prosecutor.
 Prosecution was lambasted for being out of touch with social norms.

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Pornography Stats
 12% of the websites on the internet are pornographic.
 Every second, $3,075 is spent on porn, and 28,258 internet
users are watching it.
 1 in 3 porn viewers are women.
 70% of men aged 18-24 visit porn sites in a typical month.
 The worldwide porn industry is worth $4.9 billion
 2.5 billion emails every day are pornographic (8% of all emails)
 25% of all search engine requests are pornographic.

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Pornography Stats
 35% of all internet downloads are pornographic.
 20% of men admit to watching porn online at work.
 Compared to 13% of women.
 The average porn site visit lasts 6 minutes and 29 seconds.
 Interpret that figure in any way you see fit.
 The average age at which a child first sees porn online is 11.
 There are 116,000 searches for “child pornography” every day.

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Pornography
 Pornography is a huge industry.
 And beyond the obvious titillation factors it’s difficult to have a serious
conversation about it.
 Technology has greatly changed the business and dynamics of
pornography.
 Salaries have plummeted as a response to free porn online.
 The original tern meant ‘writing about prostitutes’
 From the greek ‘prone’ and ‘graphine’
 The term itself is a made up word coined in England around 1850.
 It quickly expanded to encompass writing about anything with an
explicitly sexual content.

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Pornography in Pompeii
 Archaeologists of Pompeii began uncovering it in the 18th century
 1820s, certain objects were exhibited in a public museum, but they were quickly
whisked away after King Francis I found it embarrassing to view them with his
wife and daughter.
 That led to the creation of a Private Room of Obscene Objects, open only (as an
official edict said) to "persons of a mature age and a well-known morality." This, of
course, greatly enhanced the collection's reputation.
 Giuseppe Garibaldi's government in the 1860s let the public see it, but when
power passed to the Savoy kings, they buried the collection again. It was largely
hidden during the period of Benito Mussolini, from 1922 to 1943. Even in the late
1940s, anyone wishing to see it needed written permission from a government
official.
 Pompeii' erotica has led some to suggest that it was another Sodom whose
wickedness brought down the wrath of God

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Pornography in Chaucer
 Chaucer’s ‘Canterbury Tales’ were considered to be pornographic
at the time.
 Similarly Giovanni Boccaccio’s Decameron.
 In the 14th century, the landed elite of England spoke as much
French as they did German.
 The Italian language was a melting pot of Latin derived languages that
varied from city state to city state.
 Both of these books were passed in manuscript form from hand to
hand and then read aloud to a largely illiterate populace.
 They are credited with being instrumental in creating national languages
in both countries.
 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EtuJ0PUoM94

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Photography
 We owe the name “photography” to Sir John Herschel who first
used the term in 1839.
 The word is derived from the Greek works for light and writing.
 The first successful picture was produced in June/July 1827 by
Niépce, using material that hardened on exposure to light. This
picture required an exposure of eight hours.
 19 August 1839, developing photographic plates to make images
permanent, Daguerre named it the Daguerreotype.
 1839 Fox Talbot produces Calotype process which allows
unlimited copies to be made of a negative
 The first picture was taken in Lacock Abbey in England.

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Photography
 Almost instantly, photographs turned to produce pornography.
 Such as the incredibly popular ‘what the butler saw’ penny arcade
machines.
 These mostly took the form of a series of photographs that were viewed
as a slideshow.
 They are almost impossibly tame by modern standards of indecency,
 During the American Civil War, soldiers demanded more than
letters from home.
 They wanted porn, including books and photographs.
 Modern sensibilities towards depictions of sex have of course
changed tremendously over the years.
 But with photography, they drove widespread adoption.

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Other Technological Marvels
 Cable television
 First came channels like HBO and Showtime, which pioneered pay per
access models.
 One of the first truly successful uses of pay per access were hardcore
pornography channels.
 Video was developed originally by Sony as Betamax, and they
predicted that the thing most people would do would be
‘timeshifting’
 Recording something at the time and then watching it later.
 The Betamax tape was designed with a one hour playing time.
 Pre-recorded movies became the surprise hit, allowing VHS to
dominate.
 Guess what most of their movies were.

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Other Technological Marvels
 The telephone network.
 Driven by phone sex lines.
 CD-ROMs and Laser Discs
 Large capacities, high quality images, used for… well, I’m sure you
can guess.
 Minitel, the french national network.
 Sexting
 Pornography follows the path of maximum access with
minimum resistance.
 It thus thrives in new areas with high attention and minimum
regulation.

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Digital Images – Ranger VII
 The first digital images were used by NASA in the 1960s for
receiving telemetry from spacecraft and sending back pictures
from the moon and Mars and Venus.

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Digital Image – Google Earth

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Digital Porn
 Low storage capacities and limited bandwidth for digital transfer
put limits to how digital pornography could originally be
represented.
 Much original ‘porn’ was in the form of ASCII art.
 More traditionally sexually explicit stories transferred via BBS and
FTP.
 Hard to view most of this as anything other than desperate:
 http://www.asciipr0n.com/pr0n/pinups/pinup17.txt
 Technological progress brought about a change in digital
pornography.

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The Bits of Images
 Original images broken down into two categories.
 Bitmaps
 Literally, a map of bits
 Vectors
 Drawing instructions.
 Pictures presented at a particular resolution.
 Dimensions of the screen.
 A certain number of bits used to represent colours at each pixel.
 Pixel – Picture Element
 2 bit colour provided four colours.
 8 bit colour provided 256
 16 bit colour provided 65.536

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Properties of an Image
 More pixels = better resolution
 More resolution equals a clearer image
 Expressed in dots per inch.
 Colours stored (usually) in terms of additive colour in the RGB
model.
 The brain interprets different merging of values as distinct colours.
 Other models include the HSB model
 Hue, saturation and brightness.

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Early images
 Home computers had tremendously limited memory and
storage.
 Thus, there was a technical limit to how detailed pornography could
be.
 Not very detailed at al.
 Many sexually explicit computer games were developed to
incorporate ‘interactivity’
 Laughable within the constraints of the technology.
 As computers became more spacious and image technology
increased, it became possible to both transmit and process
sexual imagery directly on the computer.
 Via compression, for example.

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Computer Pornography and the Law
 The possession of pornographic images for private use is permitted in the
UK.
 Except, of course, for child pornography.
 However, the UK government has a classification for ‘extreme
pornography’, possession of which carries a three year sentence.
 defined as an image "of such a nature that it must reasonably be assumed to
have been produced solely or principally for the purpose of sexual arousal") which
is "grossly offensive, disgusting or otherwise of an obscene character" and
portrays "in an explicit and realistic way" any of the following:
 An act threatening a person’s life
 An act which results (or is likely to result) in serious injury to a person’s anus,
breasts or genitals
 An act which involves (or appears to involve) sexual interference with a human
corpse
 A person performing (or appearing to perform) an act of intercourse (or oral
sex) with an animal (whether dead or alive)

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Computer Pornography and the Law
 Whether an image is pornographic is up to the discretion of
magistrates, judges and juries in individual cases.
 Context also matters.
 What is illegal in one context may not be illegal in another.
 Pseudo-photographs are also covered by the law.
 “an image, whether made by computer-graphics or otherwise
howsoever, which appears to be a photograph”.
 Specifically in relation to children for the purposes of the law.
 Indecency in the case of indecent material for children is
interpreted by a jury, but apply ‘recognised standards of
propriety’

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Legal defences
 Accused has not seen the photograph and has no reason to know it was
indecent.
 An unread message in an email
 A file in an unopened archive
 Legitimate reason for possession of material.
 Training aids for police officers.
 Material held for categorisation.
 If the image is of a under-age individual legally married or living with the
defendant.
 And if the defendant consented.
 Specific defences available to the security services and GCHQ.
 Created for the purposes of criminal proceedings.

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Determining Legality
 A semi-objective scale of reference exists for categorising
‘extreme’ or child pornography.
 The Copine Scale.
 ‘All images are bad, some are worse than others’
 The scale was originally developed for psychological purposes.
 As a tool to differentiate between ‘child erotica’ and ‘child pornography.
 Child erotica concerns non or semi-nude pictures of children in
suggestive poses.
 Significance of this distinction is to emphasise the potential sexual
qualities of a whole range of kinds of photographs (and other
material as well) not all of which may meet obscenity criteria.

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Copine Scale
Level Category Examples
1 Indicative Non-erotic and non-sexualised pictures showing
children in their underwear, swimming costumes
from either commercial sources or family
albums. Pictures of children playing in normal
settings, in which the context or organisation of
pictures by the collector indicates
inappropriateness.
2 Nudist Pictures of naked or semi-naked children in
appropriate nudist settings, and from legitimate
sources.
3 Erotica Surreptitiously taken photographs of children in
play areas or other safe environments showing
either underwear or varying degrees of
nakedness.

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Copine Scale
Level Category Examples
4 Posing Deliberately posed pictures of children fully
clothed, partially clothed or naked (where
the amount, context and organisation
suggests sexual interest).
5 Erotic Posing Deliberately posed pictures of fully, partially
clothed or naked children in sexualised or
provocative poses
6 Explicit Erotic
Posing
Pictures emphasising genital areas, where
the child is either naked, partially clothed or
fully clothed.
7 Explicit Sexual
Activity
Pictures that depict touching, mutual and
self-masturbation, oral sex and intercourse
by a child, not involving an adult.

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The Copine Scale
Level Category Examples
8 Assault Pictures of children being subject to a sexual
assault, involving digital touching, involving an
adult.
9 Gross Assault Grossly obscene pictures of sexual assault,
involving penetrative sex, masturbation or oral
sex, involving an adult.
10 Sadistic
Bestiality
a. Pictures showing a child being tied, bound,
beaten, whipped or otherwise subject to
something that implies pain.
b.
b. Pictures where an animal is involved in
some form of sexual behaviour with a child.

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SAP Scale
 The SAP (Sentence Advisory Panel) scale is much simpler, and
adapted from Copine.
1 Nudity or erotic posing with no sexual activity
2 Sexual activity between children, or solo
masturbation by a child
3 Non-penetrative sexual activity between adult(s)
and child(ren)
4 Penetrative sexual activity between child(ren) and
adult(s)
5 Sadism or bestiality

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Operation Cathedral
 Led by the British National Crime Squad.
 In collaboration with 13 other forces around the world.
 UK, USA, Australia, Belgium, Finland, Germany, France, Norway,
Italy, Portugal and Sweden.
 75,000 pictures and 1800 movies seized.
 100 men detained.
 12 arrests in the UK – 9 resulted in charges.
 8 were sentenced to prison terms of between 12 and 30 months.
 One committed suicide before sentencing.

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Operation Avalanche
 Conducted in Texas, 1999
 Dallas police traces a website advertising child pornography to a company
called Landslide Inc, which acted as a credit card clearing company for access
to over 5,700 pornographic websites.
 Police seized a list of 45,000 subscribers (including people from the UK and
Canada).
 Eventually 250,000 subscribers were identified.
 Thomas and Janice Reedy operated Landslide Inc, and were offered reduced
terms of 20 and 5 years for cooperating with police.
 They refused. Thomas Reedy was sentenced to 1335 years in prison.
 Reduced to 180 on appeal.
 Janice sentenced to 14 years.
 Business turnover was $1.4 million a month.

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Operation Ore
 Operation Ore was the UK investigation, using information
gathered by the USA as part of operation avalanche.
 3774 arrests were made under the Protection of Children Act
1978.
 In comparison to only 100 arrests made in the USA.
 Most found not guilty.
 They were victims of credit card theft and identity fraud.
 In the end, 1451 were convicted, and 140 children were removed
from suspected dangerous environments.
 33 people committed suicide rather than face the consequences.

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Escalation of Technology
 Much of the child pornography still in circulation is old.
 Efforts are made to trace the children in the images and prosecute
those involved in its production.
 The investigation into the production and distribution of such
images has led to an ‘arms race’ between investigators and
producers.
 Encryption is used to protect files to keep them safe.
 It is now illegal for an individual to withhold the provision of an
encryption key from law enforcement.
 Steganography is used to hide data inside other kinds of files.
 Nobody would know they were there on a casual inspection.

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Escalation of Technology
 The distribution of child pornography is not a computing era
phenomenon.
 Like most crimes computers simply scale up what was already possible.
 Social networks like Facebook allow for easy sharing of images
within closed social groups.
 And thus are aggressively policed.
 Modern algorithms allow for automatic classification of obscene
images.
 But there are ethical problems here too.
 Ease of access to virtual worlds and chat channels has created
new opportunities for individuals to exploit children and trade
obscene material.

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Porn and the Digital Economy
 A scenario outlined in http://www.zdnet.com/digital-economy-
act-what-will-granny-think-4010026508/
 A kid visits his grandparents and downloads some porn over
the internet.
 Grandparents get a Copyright Infringement Report (CIR).
 Let’s assume that the report spells out what files are being
accessed.
 What is the choice of the grandparents?
 Shop little Jimmy?
 Accept an allegation of ‘pirating’ pornography?

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Conclusion
 Pornography drives technological adaption.
 Original pornography seems very tame by modern standards.
 A consequence of the mores at the time and the increased
sexualisation of contemporary society.
 Technological limits influenced development of pornography.
 Storage, memory and bandwidth
 However, the technology soon expanded and brought with it
increased opportunities for abusive images and child
pornographers.