Suicide Girls responds to post on FBI and image takedowns
http://www.boingboing.net/2005/09/29/suicide_girls_respon.html
Disclaimer: Suicide Girls is a Boing Boing sponsor.
Responding to a Boing Boing post from earlier today, Steve Simitzis of
Suicide Girls says:
Well, since you posted about the criminal case (which isn't over yet),
the case is United States vs Chad Grant, not Suicide Girls vs Chad Grant.
It's a criminal case - your post would imply that it's a civil dispute
between us and him, which it's not. We reported the intrusion to the FBI,
and from there, the government decides whether or not to prosecute. I
already gave my testimony (yesterday) so I feel okay talking about it.
But anyway, the reason why the two situations (the criminal case and the
upcoming government crackdown) are connected:
During the investigation, the FBI asked us to provide them a list of
every single photo set that contains bondage, blood play, urination, etc. In
short, anything a jury might find "obscene". The idea was that the defense
would try to discredit SG by displaying in graphic detail how we're
disgusting and therefore evil. And the prosecution wanted to be ready for
this attack, by knowing everything we had in advance, so they could either
try to downplay it or make some other point about it. Either way they wanted
to be prepared. But of course that's irrelevant to the case, since the
defendant (a) also worked for an "adult entertainment" company, and (b)
we're not on trial anyway - he is, for computer intrusion.
So, as requested, we started assembling the list of photos containing
said naughty content, when news of the upcoming crackdown started to
surface. And it immediately became crystal clear: if we were handing over a
list of every photo on our site that contains the content they're about to
start prosecuting, and if someone in the Attorney General's office would
have that on file, it would be a quick and easy few steps from there to
going after us, a fairly well-known site. We felt that we were too close to
the fire at that point, and took the content down.
So - were we contacted by the FBI specifically because of the "war on
porn"? No. Were we contacted by the FBI and asked for a list of all our
"obscene" content? Yes. So when people were asking "were you contacted by
the FBI?" we really couldn't give a straight yes or no answer without
talking about something we couldn't talk about.
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