Were you ever a member of AVS, the Adult Verification System? If so, the Feds have you on a list of potential pedophiles.

November 15, 2001 8:53 AM

Were you ever a member of AVS, the Adult Verification System? If so, the Feds have you on a list of potential pedophiles. I remember AVS from the mid-1990s; they were one of the easiest ways to generate revenue from an adult Web site, using the same business model as AdultCheck does today. A very few of the hundreds of sites AVS "fronted" for contained child porn, and the owners of the service are now in federal prison as a result. Even though they knew differently, federal authorities claimed that they had "dismantled the largest-known commercial child pornography enterprise ever uncovered," and for the past two years have been sending offers of child porn to some of 30,000 people on the AVS membership list, the vast majority of which have no interest in child porn.
posted by tranquileye (19 comments total)

Why isn't that entrapment? I'm definitely not defending the purchase of child porn, but those tactics seem pretty underhanded to me.
posted by Samsonov14 at 9:09 AM on November 15, 2001

dossier building?
posted by clavdivs at 9:11 AM on November 15, 2001

Unfortunately, entrapment (as I understand it, from watching years of "Law & Order") is when the government puts you in a position where you have no choice but to commit a crime. In this case, they were just offering kiddie porn; no one had to buy it.
posted by yerfatma at 9:17 AM on November 15, 2001

Jesus, $1.4 million *a month*. I'm in the wrong business.....

It's difficult to feel any sympathy for anyone caught in this manner, but I am a bit wary of the FBI describing any consumer of pr0n as a potential paedophile, as is implied in the article. What next, anybody who works with children?
posted by salmacis at 9:26 AM on November 15, 2001

> Were you ever a member of AVS

Anyone who voluntarily puts his name on any kind of pr0n customer list is a prime candidate for a Darwin award.
posted by jfuller at 9:27 AM on November 15, 2001

But, if the site the FBI operated used pop-up ads, and those ads contained photos that were automatically saved as a temp file by the users' browsers, then it would be entrapment.

Isn't it wonderful how "harm to children" is an absolutely untouchable trump card that nearly guarantees the sanctity of draconian measures?

BTW - I didn't see anything in the linked article about AVS. Did I just miss it?
posted by yesster at 9:27 AM on November 15, 2001

tranquileye, you make statements in your post that are not substantiated in the article you linked to. AVS is not even mentioned once. Upon what are you basing your assertions that Landslide Productions = AVS? Or that only a few of the sites were child porn? Or that federal authorities "knew differently" when they "claimed that they had 'dismantled the largest-known commercial child pornography enterprise ever uncovered'?"
posted by internal at 9:29 AM on November 15, 2001

"Anyone who voluntarily puts his name on any kind of pr0n customer list is a prime candidate for a Darwin award."

That would probably be true of the Soviet Union and The People's Republic of China. I certainly hope it's not true of the U.S., or any other Western Democracy! I'm an occasional buyer of naughty material, and I'm certainly on the Good Vibrations customer list if nothing raunchier. And their book and video section isn't exactly R-rated, nudge nudge wink wink.

Why exactly am I stupid to let someone know I buy erotica / pornography / naughty stuff? Because some right-wing administration might hassle me about it someday? Is it also stupid to buy books about Communism, or put a Greenpeace sticker on your car, or speak up at public meetings?

I think there's a difference between stupidity and an unwillingness to be cowed by a potentially repressive government. But maybe that's just me... *8)
posted by davidchess at 10:38 AM on November 15, 2001

internal, I have been following this case on and off for some time, and also worked with someone who used to use AVS (and other similar services) for their site. Landslide ran services called AVS and KeyZ, as detailed in a couple of the stories linked below.

As far as number of sites goes, the federal indictment lists 87 counts but only names five people: the Reedys (who ran Landslide) and three child porn Web site owners (two Indonesian citizens and a Russian). There may have been more than two Web sites, but I don't think the entire Landslide business depended on those foreign sites. I have read that AVS/Keyz was used at around 5,000 sites.

I am not suggesting that the Reedys didn't know about the child porn, since there appears to be clear evidence that they did.

Here is some further information on the Landslide case.

- Cyberpunk Hyperarchive
- APBNews.com (Google cache)
- celebritywebmasters.com
- Complicity
posted by tranquileye at 10:58 AM on November 15, 2001

tranquileye, Thanks for the additional links!
posted by internal at 11:20 AM on November 15, 2001

yerfatma, yesster: Here's more information on entrapment, from the Emanuel Capsule Summaries. Excerpt: "X, an undercover narcotics operative, offers to sell V heroin for V's own use. If the offer originated entirely with X, and V had never used or sought heroin, V would have a good chance at an entrapment defense..."

So it would seem that this (the kiddie porn stuff at issue here) would be entrapment, or pretty close to it; pornography per se is not illegal, nor does consumption (so to speak) of pornography in general indicate interest in child pornography. Thus it cannot be said that the AVS subscribers "used" or "sought" any illegal activity. The federales are soliciting them out of the blue, in a decent parallel to the example I quoted above. But then again, I'm not a lawyer or law student...
posted by letourneau at 11:20 AM on November 15, 2001

tranquileye: some quick education for you.

AVS = adult verification service, GENERIC TERM as in 'credit card' of which there are many, AdultCheck being a current one and Landslide being the questionable one being investigated by the FBI.

Yes there WAS a service with that specific name (AVS) many years ago (ancient 'net ~ 1995-7) but that is NOT what is mentioned in the article.
posted by HTuttle at 1:17 PM on November 15, 2001

Other than the presence of the 70 images on his machine (hard to explain, but also pretty damn vague- could have been pop-up images from his cache), and the fact that two of the 5,000 or so websites using their service were foreign child porn sites, it doesn't sound like there's any evidence these two were child pornographers. The entrapment issue is also a real worry- while these people shouldn't have bought child porn, would they ever have purchased or sought it, or had it in their possession, if the Feds hadn't come calling with offers?

And what's with the disparate sentencing? He gets 1,300+ years, she gets 14? If they were guilty, they were guilty together. More discrimination by our court system, *sigh*.

Unrelated interesting thing: letourneau also happens to be the last name of Mary Kay LeTourneau, that famous teacher from here in Washington State who had 2 kids fathered by her 15-year-old lover.
posted by hincandenza at 1:37 PM on November 15, 2001

HTuttle, AVS and KeyZ were the names of the services run by Landslide Productions, and are mentioned in some of the articles I linked to. The service may have had different ownership prior to 1997, but that would not preclude the member lists being transferred.
posted by tranquileye at 2:14 PM on November 15, 2001

HTuttle, AVS and KeyZ were the names of the services run by Landslide Productions

Wait- HTuttle was the name of one of their services, just like this HTuttle?!
posted by hincandenza at 10:22 PM on November 15, 2001

Anyone who voluntarily puts his name on any kind of pr0n customer list is a prime candidate for a Darwin award.

...but only under the Taleban where your reference to Darwin would land you in bother as well. Life sucks in those sorts of places. AFAIK very few western democracies use the death penalty for ending up on any kind of mailing lists.
posted by vbfg at 6:14 AM on November 16, 2001

NB. Child abuse is not neccessarily connected to use of child pornography. Notwithstanding the actual collection of the images.
By far the majority of child abuse happens within the family/close friends, there is no correlation that i am aware of between the use of child pornography and familial abuse.
If this society is serious about tackling this issue, then a paradigm shift of understanding needs to take place.
The lone paedophile is not the cause of any substantial amount of abuse in comparison with abuse by a known assailant.
posted by asok at 7:44 AM on November 16, 2001

Anyone who voluntarily puts his name on any kind of pr0n customer list is a prime candidate for a Darwin award.

Anyone who pays for porn...
posted by adampsyche at 8:01 AM on November 16, 2001

http://web.archive.org/web/19961109044514/http://www.landslide.com/
posted by tranquileye at 9:52 PM on November 16, 2001