Child Porn Will Get You Into Legal Hot Water- Unless You Work For The Feds

Child Porn Will Get You Into Legal Hot Water (Unless You Work For The Feds?)
Forbes  -  July 8, 2011

Looking at child porn online is a sure-fire way to get yourself into serious legal trouble — even if you were only looking at it for the sake of academic research. Internet law guru Eric Goldman calls child porn “toxic;” any brush with it results in potential criminal charges as well as civil liability if the victim decides to seek damages. The war on child porn is the justification given for many a government initiative to curb Internet freedoms and reduce Internet users’ ability to stay anonymous on the Web.  So, it was with a great deal of surprise that Senator Chuck Grassley learned that an Assistant U.S. Attorney had child porn on his computer (for his pleasure, not as part of an investigation) — but faced no legal consequences.  Grassley wrote a letter to U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder asking why the unidentified government lawyer has not been charged with a crime. He cites an Inspector General’s report from May which recounted the lawyer’s tendency to surf XXX sites during work hours (assumedly, not in the line of duty):  “The OIG conducted an investigation concerning allegations that an AUSA was using his government computer to view inappropriate material on his government computer. The investigation determined that the AUSA routinely viewed adult content during official duty hours, and that there was at least one image of child pornography recovered on the AUSA’s government computer. The AUSA acknowledged that he had spent a significant amount of time each day viewing pornography. The U.S. Attorney’s Office declined prosecution. Disciplinary action against the AUSA is pending.”  Apparently, the Securities and Exchange Commission, the National Science Foundation, and the National Park Service are not the only agencies with federal employees who are bored at work. (That probably applies to non-federal employees too. Every porn site proprietor I talk to tells me that their traffic is highest during weekday work hours.)  The Justice Department tells the Washington Times that the lascivious lawyer no longer works for them, but “would not comment on why it did not press criminal charges or on whether the attorney had been charged at the state level.”  Grassley wants Holder to tell him why the lawyer wasn’t prosecuted, what kind of cases he worked on, and why the pornography was able to slip through the DoJ’s filters. A question he didn’t ask, but perhaps should have, is why a government attorney has several hours of free time every day to look at porn if he’s not on the porn squad.