Issues@Hand
AFA initiatives, Christian activism, news briefs
November-December 2002 – A new effort on the part of the Bush administration to attack the purveyors of Internet child pornography is a good first step, according to AFA, but completely avoids the major players who facilitate the distribution of obscene materials.
For over a year AFA has been leading a campaign to convince Yahoo!, the nation's most popular Internet portal, to shut its pipeline of porn. The company has flatly refused.
At a White House meeting in October, President George Bush told law enforcement officials and other invited guests – which included a representative of Yahoo! – that he was committed to prosecuting child exploitation on the Internet.
"Sexual predators use the Internet to distribute child pornography and obscenity...," the president said in his speech. "It's unacceptable to America. We don't accept offensive conduct like this in our schools, in the commercial establishments, and we cant accept it in our homes. We cannot allow this to happen to our children." He added, "Our government, at every level, must take the side of responsible parents, and we will."
AFA Executive Assistant Buddy Smith said the president's speech was fine, as far as it went. "AFA certainly doesn't disagree with what President Bush said," Smith said, "but he apparently missed the elephant that was sitting in the room – Yahoo!
Smith said he was stunned to learn that a representative from Yahoo! was present at the meeting, "as if that company were a conscientious corporate citizen, concerned about Internet pornography just like everybody else."
The Bush administration is apparently blind to the fact that Yahoo! is perhaps the nation's largest distributor of Internet child pornography and obscenity," he said.
"The only way a Yahoo! representative should have been at that meeting is to hear Attorney General John Ashcroft threatening a broad-based prosecutorial campaign against the company."
The problem, he said, is that Yahoo! hosts thousands of "groups," which are online communities of people who share common interests that can range from gun aficionados to gamblers to movie buffs.
They can also share a taste for the worst sorts of perversions. Smith said a person can download a software application advertised on Yahoo! that contains more than 19,000 links to Yahoo! groups with pornographic and obscene materials.
"These groups are often communities of sexual deviants who swap pornographic images dealing with adult-child sex, rape, incest, bestiality, sadomasochism, and homosexuality," Smith said. "And they exchange links to other porn sites, or even arrange sexual liaisons."
Smith added, "All this Internet traffic occurs under the auspices of Yahoo!, with the companys full knowledge and with the company turning a big fat profit from it."
AFA has made available to the Attorney General's office conclusive proof of the nature of these Yahoo! groups, but so far has seen no federal action.
That led AFA to take another step: the accumulation of thousands of online signatures in an effort to convince the Attorney General's office to go after Yahoo! and other Internet portals. More than 53,000 signatures were collected and mailed to the Department of Justice in late October.
"At best, the new White House effort is an incomplete strategy; at worst, it is a negligent one," Smith said.
"A failure on the part of the Bush administration to grasp the importance of prosecuting Yahoo! and others could have devastating ramifications on the futures of untold thousands of children." 
