James Auchincloss (pictured, with munchkin), the 62 year-old half-brother of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, is currently under investigation for child porn in Oregon. Police found a huge stash of pictures in his home, allegedly. A little local paper broke the story, and you could just feel the Post's palpable silence—heavy, building, breathy. Turns out they've been hard at work! They got three scoops in this nasty story.

1. Jackie Kennedy didn't want Auchincloss around JFK Jr., because he "showed an unusual obsession" for him when he was seven years old.

2. Auchincloss apologized to members of his church for the child porn thing, which sounds like a confession.

3. Details about his porn stash that you could have done without:

The pictures included shots of a young Ron Howard, Ricky Schroeder, Jonathan Taylor Thomas and Dylan and Cole Sprouse of "The Suite Life of Zack & Cody." There were also multimedia slideshows — set to rousing John Philip Sousa band marches — featuring the celeb pictures along with young boys at a local Fourth of July parade.

The New York Post is the early favorite for the 2009 Pulitzer Prize for PORN PERVS.
[NYP]

Auchincloss (pictured on the right, with munchkin on left) shares a mother with Jackie O, but has a different father. He's lived a relatively quiet life in Ashland, Oregon for almost 15 years. But last October, police were tipped off that he and a friend had a stash of child porn; the investigation is ongoing (computer data mining issues are involved), but the accusations are pretty stank:

In an Oct. 17, 2008, affidavit for a search warrant, Det. Arthur LeCours with the Ashland Police Department said he found photographs in booklets and on carousel slides of naked, 7- to 16-year-old boys in sexual poses at Auchincloss' home...

In addition, two Ashland residents, Eddy McManus and Karl Iverson, told the Daily Tidings that they saw Auchincloss and Vickoren viewing child porn on a computer in Auchincloss' home, located in the 700 block of Benjamin Court, last summer.

The image associated with this post is best viewed using a browser.The cops also think Auchincloss has "taken photographs of clothed children locally," but he's not judged to be an "immediate threat," so he's free and uncharged so far as the investigation continues. He was turned in by his personal assistant. Caroline Kennedy is his half-niece. In case you were wondering. His denials do not seem particularly vociferous:

He didn't refute LeCours' statements in the affidavit concerning the child pornography found at his home, but said the situation was a matter of privacy.

"I think the point has to be, 'Is there a manner of being predators? Is there a manner of encouraging sex abuse by offering money or being in that trade?' And none of that is true," he said.

Oh well, "His willingness to talk about famous relatives has made him something of a persona non grata in Kennedy circles over the years." They must be pretty close to cutting him out of the family entirely. First it was the talking to the media, now it's the child porn. Only one more strike, James!

Camelot!
[MailTribune.com. Pic via]

The short version: Malakoff downloaded at least 150 images of child porn on the work computer issued to him by NPR. When he brought it into the tech people at work because he thought it had a "virus," they found it all and turned him in. Now Malakoff has signed a "Statement of Facts" admitting that he did it.

[The Smoking Gun]

Fox hired Bruns in 2002, three years after he left the University of Michigan after similar charges of possessing and distributing child porn online.

Note: We're redacting the prosecution's list of the two video files and three images they allegedly found on Bruns' computer because of their highly graphic descriptions of sex acts involving girls they describe in two instances as "under the age of 10," and in two others as "under the age of five."

Last November, Robert Erdely, a Pennsylvania policeman, used standard file-sharing software to find child porn available on peer-to-peer networks. He found some files on a computer later shown to belong to Bruns, and notified a joint task force run by the FBI and the District's Metropolitan Police Department, a group which included Det. Timothy Palchak.

On January 16, Palchak applied for a warrant to search Bruns's residence, an apartment in northwest Washington. The warrant was approved, and a week later, members of the task force searched Bruns's apartment at 8:15 in the morning. Bruns was there at the time.

FBI agents and police officers found computers, hard drives, and CDs. A Dell Inspiron laptop contained digital photos and movies "depicting children under the age of ten being sexually abused by adult men and women," according to Palchak's affidavit. Bruns had also taken naked pictures of himself.

Here are the documents themselves, minus descriptions of the files. They are vile beyond all belief, utterly beyond the pale.

Update: Bruns appeared in court today, and has another hearing on Thursday. FishbowlDC notes that Bruns dropped out of the University of Michigan in 1999 after being arrested for distributing child pornography. A Michigan Daily story published that year details his arrest.

[Update: Here are the documents filed by federal prosecutors.]

Here's Bruns dancing and drinking with Clinton in Puerto Rico last May:

“You can’t help but look at this material and not be disturbed,” Cuomo told the New York Times. Double negatives aside, we wouldn't argue with Cuomo — except that most of Usenet, no matter how offensive or value-lacking, does not contain child pornography. As journalist Debbie Nathan reported from The Academy of Forensic Sciences conference on child porn, even the feds are having a hard time deciding what's real and not out there. In this case, Cuomo's office is armed with software that compares this "established" child porn with possible child porn, an application that sounds a lot like the one YouTube offered up to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children earlier this year. They say their database of searchable child porn contains 11,000 images. If anyone wants to know where to find some "disturbing material", at least they know where to start.

This is apparently the first time these ISPs have agreed to censor certain web content. (AOL, whose user base is shrinking, has already blocked certain content, according to the Times.) And once that line is crossed, theoretically it could be pushed to block more and more porn. The first iteration of this filter will probably block just this universally illegal and dangerous content. But with this tool in place nationwide, another federal A.G. like Alberto Gonzales would find it much easier to enforce draconian obscenity laws. (A relevant concern: Just last week a federal jury convicted pornographer Max Hardcore of criminal obscenity for his consensual of-age extreme pornography.)

A filter doesn't stop child porn; it just moves the problem somewhere else. The distributors will just find new ways to pass the porn along, new ways to disguise it, ways to get around the cataloging system that Cuomo's office uses to search for child porn. (Since only law enforcement is allowed to view child porn so they can make sure no one else ever does, one can only speculate what leads a person to land a job on the child porn task force and how much Cuomo's description of child porn — "These are 4-year-olds, 5-year-olds, assault victims, there are animals in the pictures" — comes from direct experience.)

The decision also turns the country into Cuomo's de facto jurisdiction. If the content is coming from inside New York, why hasn't Cuomo's office shut down and prosecuted the source? If it's not from New York, how does Cuomo have authority? He argues that ISPs are responsible, and it is hard to refute the logic that no one should knowingly allow someone else to view child pornography. But isn't stopping it his job in the first place?

Photo of Andrew Cuomo by Getty

UPDATE: A Time Warner spokesperson says the Times was wrong, and the company does not plan to block any web sites, but it will access to all newsgroups.

Phillips isn't even two years older than his ex; they're both in high school. She took the photos herself, apparently under no duress, and e-mailed them to him. As awful as his behavior is (a report says that when cops warned him about possible jail time, he replied "fuck that, I am keeping them up"), it's an interaction between two minors.

After all, this case provides plenty of evidence that Phillips and his girlfriend had sex, which in their state of Wisconsin is illegal under the age of 18. So should he be strung up on statutory rape charges too? Do we just use laws in any case they technically apply regardless of the point, which is to protect children from sexual exploitation by adults?

Or are the laws even reasonable in an age when teenagers are sexually active and have access to cheap communication? Do we need new anti-defamation laws for spreading humiliating photos of anyone, regardless of age? Or is it only minors who will get protection when an ex spreads their dirty naked pics?

Sorry if I'm the only one worked up about this; some of us have a history of raunchy photo-taking and a few crazy exes.

Both sides of the debate sound valid. After all, it made it into German record stores, so in at least one country it's legal. But in America, it's illegal to capture, transmit or possess an image of a prepubescent in a sexual pose (and it could easily be argued that this girl is in a sexual pose). It's still unclear whether knowingly clicking a link to view child porn online counts as possession (after all, the image is now on the viewer's hard drive, at least in their automatically created browser cache).

The Feds are looking into it, according to World Net Daily, as well as plenty of adult pornography, since it all could be viewed by minors (Wikipedia doesn't require registration to view articles or images). So theoretically it's up to them, not the Wikipedia editors.

Jeez, I mean I'm not turned on by this photo, but it's not ludicrous to imagine that someone is supposed to be. And how does that not obviously violate U.S. child porn laws? On the other hand, it's an album cover of some historical note and artistic merit. So is it child porn? And is anyone who argues otherwise a perv?

.

The ad is surrounded on either side by links to video coverage of the child porn case. The TV station that ran the ad and Ward story, KGO/ABC7, is owned by Disney, hence the unfortunate house ad. (Incidentally, the radio host worked for a radio station with the same call letters, but it is owned by a different company.)

As Debbie Nathan writes, Ward's defense is hardly novel. His case seems nearly identical to that of DC radio personality Larry Matthews in the late 1990s. Nathan predictably also sees a parallel to her longtime subject, former Times writer Kurt Eichenwald.

Ward, a former Catholic priest, hosted both a religious show and a liberal talk show.

Great! One more reason to not want to write about this! It's just much more comfortable leave this story to Daniel Radosh and anti-Eichenwald crusader Debbie Nathan.

Did Eichenwald's editors know how much his memory had deteriorated? The New York Times' own stories on the story don't seem to indicate that anyone was too sympathetic to his "I forgot" defense before these revelations.

But yeah, now Eichenwald's credibility and reporting methods are at the heart of the cases against two child pornographers currently on trial—so we all get to take sides between a reporter who can only remember what he documents at the moment he's doing it and people who may or may not have had sex with children. Ugh.

Former 'Times' Reporter Reveals Secret [NPR]