See [Protecting Our Innocents]
The Electronic Telegraph 3 February 1995 THE SPECTATOR
[LA: these extracts are from an article which appears in the
Electronic Telegraph (ET)
archive under 3 Feb to 10 Feb 1995,
however it is labelled The Spectator' and 3 Feb - confused.
I am unable to use a hyper-text link to the original ET article
because you must "register" with ET and all access is through
cgi-bin scripts.
Note: The Electronic Telegraph is a Registered Service Mark
of The Telegraph plc.]
An electronic sink of depravity
Simon Winchester was a starry-eyed admirer of
the global information superhighway. Then he discovered
alt.sex....
IF LAST YEAR it was merely modish to be seen speeding
down the information superhighway, this year it is
fast becoming essential, at least in America. [...]
[...]
But this week, while I was peering into an area of
the Internet where I have hitherto not lingered, I
discovered something so appalling as to put all such
high-minded sentiments into a quite different perspective.
I had stumbled into a sinkhole of electronic
but very real perversion
I had stumbled, not entirely accidentally, into a
sinkhole of electronic but very real perversion. The
first thing I read, almost as soon as I entered it,
was a lengthy, very graphic and in stylistic terms
quite competently composed narrative that presented
in all its essentials the story of a kidnapping, and
the subsequent rape, torture, mutilation and eventual
murder of the two [child] victims. The author called himself
by a code-name, Blackwind; [...]
[...]
[...]
Others [newsgroups in alt.sex.*]
are more horrifying still - those that end
with the invariable 'snuff' scene, but whose enticements
on the way include 'best', 'torture', 'gore' or amputees',
and which refer to sex with animals, bloodlettings,
sadistic injury, and the limitless erotic joy of stumps.
[...]
The Internet, we smugly say, has become
a means of circumventing the restrictive codes of
tyrannies. But the reverse of this coin is less attractive:
it also allows an almost exclusively American contagion
to ooze outwards, unstoppable, like an oil spill,
contaminating everyone and everything in its path.
The Jeffersonian model for universal freedom
could not take into account the barbarisms of the
modern mind
[...] But, surely, science and the public can somehow
conspire and co-operate to see that such writings
as are represented by 'scat.pedo.torture.snuff' and
the like are neither published nor read, [...]
[...]
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