Boylovers, NAMBLA, and Net-vigilantes, from The Netly News

[Declan McCullagh <declan@well.com>]

---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Tue, 29 Jul 1997 10:03:46 -0700 (PDT)
From: Declan McCullagh <declan@well.com>
To: fight-censorship@vorlon.mit.edu
Subject: Boylovers, NAMBLA, and Net-vigilantes, from The Netly News


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http://pathfinder.com/netly/opinion/0,1042,1222,00.html

The Netly News (http://netlynews.com/)
July 29, 1997

This Boy-Lover's Life
by Declan McCullagh (declan@well.com)
   
        Anne Cox is nothing if not determined. For months the
   Net-vigilante has been unwavering in her crusade against pedophiles,
   undaunted by insults, threats and even the "horrible things" done to
   pictures of her as a baby that she had digitized and placed online.
   She fought back with just about every possible tactic: argument,
   public humiliation and sometimes-spurious threats of legal action.
   
        Now, the war is escalating.
   
        It started in May, after Cox launched an assault on "boy-lover"
   web sites in an attempt to force them offline. But she and her allies
   ran into a serious obstacle: the sites aren't illegal. They're filled
   not with child pornography -- which is banned by federal law -- but,
   instead, photos of boys in swimsuits. "They shouldn't be doing these
   things with the children's pictures," Cox says.

[...]

        Some argue that Cox and her allies have gone too far. Besides
   boy-pix sites, this team of Net-vigilantes has attacked a group of gay
   teens organizing "to fight against" discrimination. They've tried to
   take down a consensual spanking page for gay adults, and even an
   archive of sexually-explicit stories that specifically rejects tales
   about pedophilia. Then there's the murky Children's Protection and
   Advocacy Coalition, which Cox claims to run -- yet she refuses to name
   its member organizations.

[...]