While our government was busy using enhanced interrogation methods on suspected terrorists, they were engaging in a shadowy quasi-legal battle against simulated torture, according to the directors and producers of the documentary Graphic Sexual Horror.
Other than the railroading of Paul “Max Hardcore” Little, the government’s resurgence of pornography prosecutions under Bush has met with little success, which must be why they have also been trying a more underhanded approach.
Apparently, the Department of Homeland Security was sending notices to various banks telling them that violent porn websites were known to funnel money to terrorists. Because of this, banks stopped processing credit cards for sites that seemed to fit that description.
The documentary is about one such site, insex.com, which was driven out of business by this tactic. Here’s an interview with some of the filmmakers:
(I’m a little sceptical about the repeated references to the Patriot Act because most of the recent governmental abuse has actually been due to earlier laws that were pushed to the limit or radically reinterpreted under the Bush administration.)
One especially chilling aspect of this underhanded persecution is that the letters to the banks came with a gag order, meaning that the banks were shutting off credit card access for these sites, but they weren’t allowed to tell the site owners why. They only found out what was happening when a bank employee ignored the gag order and told them what was happening.
This is why warrentless searches and so-called national security lettersare so dangerous to liberty. How can you hold the government to account when no judge has the authority to stop them? How can you fight for your rights when the violations and the violators are hidden from you? It’s almost always bad for freedom when the people who are supposed to enforce the law are allowed to operate in secret.
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