FIRE STORM ON THE COMPUTER NETS

By Philip Elmer-DeWitt

When TIME published a cover story on Internet pornography three weeks ago, a certain amount of controversy was to be expected. Computer porn, after all, is a subject that stirs strong passions. So does the question of whether free speech on the Internet should be sharply curtailed, as some Senators and Congressmen have proposed. But the "flame war" that ensued on the computer networks when the story was published soon gave way to a full-blown and highly political conflagration.

The main focus of discontent was a new study, Marketing Pornography on the Information Superhighway, purportedly by a team of researchers at Carnegie Mellon University, which will be published by the Georgetown Law Journal this week and which was a centerpiece of TIME's story. In the course of the debate, serious questions have been raised regarding the study's methodology, the ethics by which its data were gathered and even its true authorship.

The most telling assault was issued on the Internet by Donna Hoffman and Thomas Novak, associate professors of management at Vanderbilt University. When contacted by TIME prior to the cover story's publication, Hoffman made some of her concerns known. But she -- and TIME -- was constrained by exclusivity terms imposed by the Law Journal that prevented her from seeing the full study before Time's cover went to press.

Now that they have seen the study, Hoffman and Novak say that Marty Rimm, who wrote it while an undergraduate at Carnegie Mellon, grossly exaggerated the extent of pornography on the Internet by conflating findings from private adult-bulletin-board systems that require credit cards for payments (and are off limits to minors) with those from the public networks (which are not). Many of Rimm's statistics, Hoffman and Novak argue, are either misleading or meaningless; for example, the study's now frequently cited claim that 83.5% of the images stored on the Usenet newsgroups are pornographic. Hoffman and Novak maintain that a more telling statistic is that pornographic files represent less than one-half of 1% of all messages posted on the Internet. Other critics point out that it is impossible to count the number of times those files are downloaded; the network measures only how many people are presented with the opportunity to download, not how many actually do.

Rimm has developed his own credibility problems. When interviewed by TIME for the cover story, he refused to answer questions about his life on the grounds that it would shift attention away from his findings. But quite a bit of detail has emerged in the past three weeks, much of it gathered by computer users on the Internet.

It turns out that Rimm is no stranger to controversy. In 1981, as a 16-year-old junior at Atlantic City High School, he conducted a survey that purported to show that 64% of his school's students had illicitly gambled at the city's casinos. Widely publicized (and strongly criticized by the casinos as inaccurate), the survey inspired the New Jersey legislature to raise the gambling age in casinos from 18 to 21. According to the Press of Atlantic City, his classmates in 1982 voted Rimm most likely to be elected President of the U.S. The next year, perhaps presciently, they voted him most likely to overthrow the government.

More damaging to Rimm are two books that he wrote, excerpts of which have begun to circulate on the Internet. One is a salacious privately published novel, An American Playground, based on his experience with casinos. The other, also privately published, is titled The Pornographer's Handbook: How to Exploit Women, Dupe Men & Make Lots of Money. Rimm says it's a satire; others saw it offering practical advice to adult-bulletin-board operators about how to market pornographic images effectively.

Neither Carnegie Mellon nor the Georgetown Law Journal has officially backed away from the study (it was allegedly placed by a Journal editor who is an antiporn crusader; the university is also forming an investigative committee). Rimm's faculty adviser, Marvin Sirbu, a professor of engineering and public policy, continues to support him, saying the research has been deliberately mischaracterized by people with a political agenda. But Sirbu himself has been attacked by Carnegie Mellon colleagues for not properly supervising his student and for helping him secretly gather data about the pornography-viewing habits of the university's students. Meanwhile, some of the researchers listed as part of Rimm's "team" now say their involvement was minimal; at least one of them had asked Rimm to remove his name.

As a rule, computer-wise citizens of cyberspace tend to be strong civil libertarians and First Amendment absolutists. Some clearly believe that Time, by publicizing the Rimm study, was contributing to a mood of popular hysteria, sparked by the Christian Coalition and other radical-right groups, that might lead to a crackdown. It would be a shame, however, if the damaging flaws in Rimm's study obscured the larger and more important debate about hard-core porn on the Internet.

--Reported by William Dowell/New York

With reporting by WILLIAM DOWELL/NEW YORK