'Virtual' Porn: Born of Digital Wizardry
It's an image that seems weirdly incongruous: a computer-created picture of the head of wholesome, underage Britney Spears electronically pasted onto the body of an adult engaged in an explicit sexual act.
Fake? Of course, but the picture, and countless others patched together using similar techniques, have become a staple of online kiddie porn.
Between the clearly fake world of pornographic cartoons and the clearly real realm of actual children engaged in lurid sexual acts sits the amorphous field of "virtual child pornography."
Advances in computer technology have allowed photo enthusiasts, artists and movie makers to create images that are nearly indistinguishable from reality.
Pedophiles have embraced the same technology. Using easily available programs, such as Adobe Photoshop, pedophiles have poured out a flood of fake erotic photographs, in which one person's head, often a young celebrity's, is electronically pasted onto another person's body.
They can use the same tools to modify hard-core photographs of adults to make them seem younger than they actually are. And tapping into animation tools similar to those used by Hollywood's visual effects community, it is possible to create explicit sex scenes with children without using real children.
Law enforcement officials say that the vast majority of child pornography is real, not virtual. Yet they realize that, because of the increasing power of computers, that equation could be turned around soon.
Battle Brewing Over Morality, Technology
The U.S. Supreme Court's decision Tuesday was the first salvo in this futuristic battle over morality and technology. The court ruled that truly virtual kiddie porn, no matter how realistic it appears, is protected by the 1st Amendment.
"Clearly, the court is saying that it is not child pornography if there's no real child involved," said attorney H. Louis Sirkin, who represents the Free Speech Coalition, a collection of adult-film makers that challenged the federal statute before the Supreme Court. "Our position has always been simply that you can't prove that a person engaged in an activity is under age 18 if the person doesn't even exist."
This fight is, in essence, a product of the Internet revolution, which created a global marketplace for child pornography and spread the popularity of powerful digital tools to modify images.
