A day in the burbs and the forensics conference

To go right to the “real or virtual” article, skip all the emo in italics. I won't be offended!

A funny thing happened to me this weekend in Huntington, Long Island. I’d taken a commuter train there from Manhattan, to interview someone in a neighborhood that’s walking distance from the local railroad station.

• (In case you're wondering why I haven't posted lately, I'm really busy with other work these days. Why else would I go to Huntington?)

So I was hoofing it down New York Avenue when a cabbie screeched up and offered me a ride – for free. “Thanks,” I said, leaning into his window. “But why?” “Because you have to pass the day-labor site. There’s lots of men there from Central America. They yell bad words to women going by.”

I’m 57 years old and slowly shrinking, maybe, but people seldom mistake me for a shrinking violet. I can deal with a few catcalls and “Mami’s” (assuming my wrinkled old self could evoke them in the first place). I tried to elucidate my philosophy to the driver: It’s always worth a few bad words to learn about stuff – then communicate the stuff to others.

Well lah-dee-dah, you’re probably saying. Nice story, but what’s the point? Especially when the real subject of this post is…Child Porn®.

So here’s the point. Lately, when it comes to writing about child pornography issues, I suspect I’ve caught Huntington’s Taxi Disease from my colleagues in the journalism biz. I notice that whenever I get an urge to report on the subject, I start worrying that if I publish it, I’ll hear “bad words” from people from “Central-Weirdo America” – people who actually like child porn.

I’ll have to read their emails (some of which make interesting points about free speech, the fourth amendment, government repression, etc.), then decide whether or not to post them. And if I post, the journos of MSM-ville — my colleagues! — might look askance. After all, some have already told me that they, themselves, will not write about child pornography for precisely this reason: it freaks them out to get follow-up email from the pedos.

I’m also afraid my colleagues will tsk-tsk about why I write about this icky subject in the first place. “Is she obsessed or something?” they could be thinking. Perhaps they ask why I don’t insert boiler plate into the first paragraphs of my articles. Riffs like, “Of course, child porn is the most horrible thing in the world, and the people involved deserve strong punishment.”

This is supposed to show everyone the writer is a normal person who does not want to hear from pedos. I try to avoid such verbiage because I think it’s knee jerk and stupid. Besides, I’m extremely reluctant to close off communication with anyone. I get some of my best tips about the malfunctioning of our various civic institutions from people close to those institutions – who are often criminals, both apprehended and as yet uncaught. (“M” is still one of my favorite movies.)

I went to a conference a couple months ago where law enforcement officials gave fascinating presentations to other cop types about the state of child pornography on the net.

• How much of it is real?
• How much is virtual?
• How do you tell?

This is not stuff the authorities want to talk about openly with the public (or with reporters).

On my own dime, I schlepped to Washington, DC to attend. Then I queried a couple of editors about assigning me a piece. No interest. “Whatever,” I thought – “I’ll put it up on this blog.”

But weeks have gone by and I just haven’t been able to do it. I finally asked myself why. I realized it’s because I’ve come down with Huntington’s Taxi Disease. I’m afraid. Scared of those emails. Frightened that people I respect will think I’m a nut.

But hey – I’m not a nut. I am obsessed, though: with finding out things other people don’t want me to know, then passing the secrets on, in print. I’ve always been like this. In grade school I held drinking glasses against the wall to hear adult talk on the other side. I got sent to the cloak room after telling my first-grade class there was no Santa Claus. I brought John Howard Griffin’s “Black Like Me” to Girl Scout camp (Texas, early 1960s, where every store still had two water fountains) and was told I couldn’t read it because it was too “controversial.” I made a stink, and let other girls read it too.

I have a healthy mistrust of the status quo, especially when it starts trucking in fears about sex, kids, or Sex & Kids®. I don’t like it when the press rolls over and swallows government claims without examining them. Even when they’re about Child Porn®. the one subject that 99.9 percent of supposedly critical journalists won’t touch.

Well, then, who will? Someone’s got to; guess it’ll have to be me. It’s my mitzvah, my deber social as they say in Spanish – my obligation as someone who hates panic, censorship, religion invading civic life, and the crummy feeling of life getting squeezed and shrunk and stupid because of a frightened world and frightened people. That’s about it for my motives. They’re simple. I just took an Advil® for the taxi-itis.

So — on with the blog and report from that conference.

It was the American Academy of Forensic Sciences annual confab, held this year, like I already said, in Washington. Over 4,000 people attended: police detectives, coroners, fire investigators, anthropologists who can gather dis-articulated skeletons from a crime scene and put them back together, complete with ersatz faces. The panels were a heady mix of low morbidness and high nerdity.

• “Identification of Incinerated Root Canal Filling Materials After Exposure to High Heat Incineration.”
• “Fracture Patterns in Fleshed and De-Fleshed Pig Femora Inflicted with Various Ammunition Types.”
• “A Test of an Age-at-Death Method Using the First Rib.”

Then, there were the child porn presentations. Their purpose was to discuss everything the Department of Justice (and, for some reason, the Department of Defense) know about how to tell sexualized images of real children – which are illegal to make and possess – from “virtual,” or computer-generated (“CG”) images. The latter are created from scratch and pixels. They don’t show actual kids being victimized. They’re fantasy. So they’re constitutionally protected under the First Amendment. At least for now.

Back in the 1990s, the government outlawed even CG images of sexualized children. But a few years later, ruling in a case called Ashcroft v. Free Speech Coalition, the Supreme Court said CG child porn is legal. That was in 2002, when the general consensus was that the technological state-of-the-art for CG human images wasn’t so good anyway. If you concocted a CG image of a child having sex, the thinking went, it wouldn’t fool anyone because it was too low-tech to seem real.

Within a couple of years, though, people caught with child porn images were going to court and claiming they didn't have anything real, only CG — and that if the government thought otherwise, it would have to prove it.

The government developed several responses.

• One: find the actual child depicted in the pornography, and bring that real child into court, or bring in the cop who handled her case. This would show beyond a doubt that the defendant’s material was not CG.
• Another strategy is to match the images in evidence to others previously collected by the feds, then show that the whole set dates to pre-Photoshop times, back when anything that looked like a photograph of a real kid really was real. But what if child victims and old photo sets aren’t available?
• A third government technique is to tell courts that the average person (an FBI agent, a jury member) can still distinguish what’s real and what’s CG, just by looking with the naked eye.

Is this true? The government would like us to think so. But in point of fact, the boundary between real and CG is getting fuzzier by the year – and the feds are nervous.

A couple of years ago, a Dartmouth University computer forensics professor, Haney Farid, did an experiment. He pulled a bunch of CG images off the Net that had been posted during the past few years on graphic arts hobby sites. He also collected real photos. Then he mixed them up and randomly showed real images and CG to lots of people, without telling them which was which.

When viewers saw images depicting non-human themes, like landscapes, they made a lot of mistakes: they couldn’t tell real from virtual. They were much better at distinguishing real people from fake people. Up to a point, that is. Their accuracy only held up with CG’s produced in 2002, 2003, 2004 and 2005. But 2006 images were much more sophisticated and real looking. Farid’s subjects’ accuracy dropped precipitously with this new material. About a third of the time, they got CG and real images mixed up.

• So what’s going to happen with 2008 images?
• 2009 and beyond?
• Real or fake?
• Will cops be able tell the difference?
• What if they can’t?
• And what the hell is on the web right now?
• Digitized records of real children being victimized?
• Or slick CG, showing nothing but some digi-nerd's fantasies?

Ergo, the Washington, DC forsenics workshops.

First up was FBI agent Amanda Broyles, from Quantico. She reminded her audience of last year’s ruling out of a federal Circuit Court of Appeals: that the government doesn’t have to produce an expert – someone like Dartmouth professor Farid – if a defendant claims his porn was CG instead of real. “This is good,” Broyles told the audience. She reiterated the mantra that laypeople, such as juries, can tell the difference between real and virtual images just by looking.

But Broyle was contradicted by the next speaker, Michael Salyards, who hails from the Department of Defense’s Cyber Crime Center, in Linthicum, Maryland.

• (You may be asking why the DoD is investigating child porn. I don’t have the answer. But I suspect it’s a political maneuver — related in some way to how, immediately after 9/11, the Justice Department started cooking up new ways to suspend people's privacy rights in the name of fighting terrorism.
  After that played poorly with a lot of Americans, Attorney General Alberto Gonzales and other government bigwigs started justifying mandatory Internet data gathering, and the Patriot Act's use of warrantless internet and and other searches, by saying they are necessary to combat child porn.
  Likewise, the Department of Homeland Security is running “Operation Predator,” a program to do things like inspect people's computers at the border for child porn — though what this has to do with homeland security is not clear, and the program has led to arrests of Homeland Security's own bureaucrats on child sex charges.)

The first thing Salyards did was PowerPoint a bunch of images that looked like photographs. Only one was genuine, he said. He showed an Asian woman, then another Asian woman. “Which is real?” he gleefully asked the audience, and joked about placing bets. When he revealed which was which, it seemed to me (and many others who were glad we didn't gamble) that the virtual Asian woman looked realer than the real one. The same was true when Salyards showed images of two females clad in bikinis.

Salyards said that the Ashcroft court ruling, providing First Amendment protection to virtual child porn, has created “legal chaos.” He then spent much time describing tests which go far beyond the capabilities of the naked eye. For instance, you can use digital technology to search an image for “hash marks,” 32-character strings embedded in digital images, including those made by cameras. The feds keep records of hash marks left by cameras that took pictures of real kids being exploited. Meta-data, Salyards said, shows the brand and model of camera used, and even if a flash went off.

Salyards added that you can analyze images down to the pixel level to check for lifelike color ranges. “Real skin is not the same as CG skin,” he noted. “We see more red in CG images.”

Someone in the audience asked if a savvy child pornographer could beat the forensic analysts by inserting CG elements into a real, digital photo. How about if he removed pixels to make it look fake to those DoD examiners? Or added extra color? “You could use Adobe and take out details,” Salyards answered. In a forensic analysis, a real photo would then “pop up as computer-generated.”

After these presentations, it seemed clear that the technology exists to make real child porn look fake. And — much more significantly — to make CG porn which looks genuine enough to fool ordinary people. An obvious question that comes to mind, then, is: how much of this sophisticated child CG is already on the Internet?

My sense from attending the workshops is: Probably hardly any. But the scarcity has little to do with technology. The digital world is now rife with graphics professionals and hobbyists who spend lots of time creating reasonably real-looking virtual people as still images – adults and kids.

CG adults (especially women) often look “sexy.” Sometimes they’re even having sex. But virtual kids are not portrayed sexually (though teen girls often look “come hither”). CG kids remain chaste, probably, because there’s no commercial market for child porn and thus no significant money to be made by doing virtual renditions of the stuff. Hobbyists, of course, don't need money to pursue their passions.

But even they are probably reluctant to do CG child porn. It’s not like they can post it on graphic arts websites and get props from fellow artists. Plus, virtual child porn is legal in the US, but it’s outlawed in many other countries. If an American’s CG smut got emailed overseas, he could get in big trouble.

Given the above, I bet most defendants and their attorneys who raise the CG defense are bullshitting. They've probably been caught with the real thing.

But for how long will almost everything on the net be real?

One thing is certain: if something becomes possible for human beings to do, someone will do it.

Salyard, the DoD guy, said that over the past several years, he’s already seen three CG child porn images that were good enough to need analysis by an expert like him. And all the conference speakers expressed trepidations about the next big thing: child porn video.

We heard a lot about Tom Hanks' animated feature film, “Polar Express,” and about “Final Fantasy: the Spirits Within.” We also were instructed to check out  www.virtualeve.com, to peruse naked (adult) avatars having sex. But avatar sex is still about “dead eyes” and “plastic-looking ears,” according to the speakers. Nevertheless, asked one, “In ten years are we going to be able to tell” if videos with kids having sex are real or CG? “We have to wait and see.”

In a recent “Savage Love” column, sex advisor Dan Savage discussed David Levy’s book Love and Sex With Robots. Levy predicts that in a couple of generations, people will be having romances and copulating with humanoid robots – including, as Savage said with a verbal wince: “kid robots.” Sex robots, he added, will eventually

• “make fantasies that are currently unrealizable for reasons of biology, logistics, or morality suddenly very, very realizable.”

Well, if 2-D fantasies are just as potent as 3-D for many people, then the time has already come. If the pedo-weirdies that most of us don’t understand can cathect onto visual, CG child porn — thus leaving real kids alone – maybe CG isn’t such a horrible thing.

It’s kind of like Henry Darger. He was a reclusive Chicago janitor who, in the 1950s and 1960s, secretly made brilliant, deeply disturbing “outsider” art depicting children with transgender genitals, in scenes of bloody violence, including sexual violence. Darger didn't have a computer back then. He had only scissors, paper, crayons, and lots of Sear’s kiddie clothing ads. (I've mounted one of his tamer productions, above.) His were DG (Darger-generated) works, and as far as anyone knows, he never touched a real child. Was he so different from the pedophiles of today?

Who knows if CG would be enough for these people? The government doesn’t even want to think about it. Most of the feds would rather ape other countries and just ban virtual child porn. To do that, however, they’ll have to prove it has proximate anti-social effects – that it pushes pedophile viewers to act out on real children. So far, claims to this effect have been junk science. But who knows? Maybe real research will turn up. Or maybe not.

If Free Speech were the solar system, everything I’m writing about here would be Pluto – or that unseen eleventh planet that’s even farther out. Questions about child pornography push us to the far, cold reaches of outer space. To Huntington, Long Island, as Woody Allen might say. Where that nice cabbie wanted to whisk me past the unpleasantries, but being just me, with little choice in my me-ness, I had to tell him I’d rather walk … through whatever this Central/Middle America thing was, up ahead.