CWD--Porn-O'Plenty

[David Farber <farber () central cis upenn edu>]

Date: Thu, 13 Jul 1995 13:36:37 -0700
From: "Brock N. Meeks" <brock () well com>




Warning:  This article contains sexually graphic language, funded in part by
grants from Carnegie Mellon University.  No, I'm not joking.






CyberWire Dispatch // Copyright (c) 1995 ///


Jacking in from the "Mr. Toad's Wild Ride" Port:


Washington, DC --If I were drunk or stoned or Hunter Thompson or a
combination of any of those, maybe this past week would make sense.


But there is no empty Jack Daniels bottle on the floor, there is no drug
residue dusting the desktop and unless that wino on the street corner I can
see from my office window, the one harassing the hooker, is Thompson -- and
you just never know -- then I'm left all alone with a virtual Marty Rimm
staring back at me from my Mac in the form of Email, inside a folder called
"Rimm Job."


You know Marty.  He's the current media lightening rod.  Time magazine
recently ran a cover story -- "Cyberporn" -- based on work he did while an
undergraduate at Carnegie Mellon university.  Marty's taken a lot of heat
for that work... he's about to take a lot more, owing to a little
moonlighting publishing venture he had going while conducting the study.


This story should write itself, but it doesn't.  I've had phone calls,
Email and more phone calls.  Each of them adds another small piece to the
"Marty and Brock Show" to which I've been an unwitting dupe in for the past
week.  A fairly simple puzzle a week ago, it has now becomes a 10,000 piece
jigsaw of the Milky Way.


Marty calls me "friend" for some reason and asks me questions via Email
like "why do I like you, Brock?"  Well how the hell do I know?


And things just keep getting more and more bizarre.  It's like I've stepped
some kind of karmic black hole where a lot of good shit happens, but you
can't tell anyone about it.  At least not right away,  because first you're
bound to figure out "What it All Means."


But I can't.  Maybe I'll never figure it out.  Which means this is an ugly
story, which means I have to write it ugly or it doesn't get written.   So
here goes and god help us all...


The same Marty that wrote the study on which Time magazine hung its June
26th "Cyberporn" cover story is the same Marty that wrote a dicey little
paperback called the "Pornographer's Handbook:  How to Exploit Women, Dupe
Men and Make Lots of Money."


Somehow, somewhere, someone named "John Russel Davis" gets ahold of this
porn handbook and begins to upload excerpts from it to the Internet.


It's 6:27 a.m. on July 11th and the only message I get from Marty is a
one-liner:  "Who is John Russel Davis?"  I have no clue.   This is the last
I hear from Marty all day.  He has gone into hiding, suddenly retreating
from our Email tug-of-war.


The Marty has "gone dark."


Routine checks of Email reveal nothing.  At 11:26 p.m. the "RimmSat" lights
up.  The Marty is back online.


He fires off this message to me:  "Look, I'm pissed off about what carolyn
is spreading around certain Usenet newsgroups after I broke up with her.
Someone named John Russel Davis from AOL appears to be helping her. If you
don't know what newsgroups they are, I certainly am not going to be the one
to tell you, but let's just say it's where bbs sysops hangout. Maybe then
you'll know why I am so silent."


For those playing without a scorecard, "Carolyn" is "Carolyn Speranza" as
in the person listed in "Books In Print" as the illustrator for Marty's
"how to" porn marketing manual.  She also happens to be listed as an
advisor for his academic paper.


But Marty's outburst is a mystery to me.  Having been wrapped in a regular
reporting gig as Washington Bureau Chief for Interactive Week, I haven't
been trolling the Usenet.  When I tell him this, he gets insulting:
"Brock, I thought you were more clever than this. If you were a bbs sysop,
and you just got onto the Usenet for the first time... where would you go?
But I've said too much, and I don't know what is the lesser of two evils:
not to tell you (and hope it goes away), or you will eventually find out
later anyway and be pissed off and nobody looks good."


The red-flag has been waved and I call in the troops, posting a cryptic
message on the WELL asking for assistance in tracking down messages from
"John Russel Davis."  Aaron Dickey, who toils away in the stock listings
department for the Associated Press, takes up the challenge and
delivers--in spades.


Into my mailbox flow excerpts of Marty's "how to" manual.  Here is a sample
of his turgid prose, taken from the Usenet posting, from a chapter on Anal
Sex:  "When searching for the best anal sex images, you must take especial
care to always portray the woman as smiling, as deriving pleasure from
being  penetrated by a fat penis into her most tender crevice. The male,
before ejaculation, is remarkably attuned to the slightest discrepancy; he
is as much focused on her lips as on her anus. The slightest indication of
pain can make some men  limp."


The early returns on the excerpts are that they are a hoax.  People
castigate the anonymous "Davis" for having tried to foist such a laughable
scam on the Net.


But Marty knows different and when I ask if these postings are authentic,
he writes:  "The excerpts circulating around the Usenet were stolen from my
marketing book, Brock. You are the only one I am telling."


This would be the same "marketing book" that in another of these same
Usenet excerpts says:  "I spent two full years as a researcher at Carnegie
Mellon University, where I received four grants to study adult materials on
the Internet, Usenet, World Wide Web and Adult BBS from around the world.
Despite countless deprivations and temptations, I have examined this topic
with great diligence, having obtained nearly one million descriptions of
adult images which were downloaded by consumers more than eight million
times. I developed linguistic parsing software to sort these images into 63
different classifications from oral to anal, from lesbian to bondage, from
watersports to bestiality."


If that was your jaw hitting the floor, imagine what's happening at
Carnegie Mellon about now.


Marty, at first, seemed unruffled by all this.  When I asked him what kind
of "damage control" he might be formulating to respond to the news of his
little self-publishing venture, which, by the way, is listed as having the
"Carnegie" imprint and which happens to have the same address in Pittsburgh
as someone named "Martin Rimm".  Marty replied:  "What attention? I don't
see it. This is just an oddity. Do you have reason to suspect otherwise?"


But by the night of July 13th, at virtually the 11th hour, he tries to cut
a deal with me.  He notes that people monitoring the Usenet groups think
the excerpts "are a fraud."  He says the only ones that know they are real
are  me and him (forgetting, I suppose, about Carolyn and "Davis").   He
says he could essentially upload to the Net a kind of confession, "claiming
authorship and you lose your scoop."  In return for not blowing my scoop,
he wants me to send him an advance copy of this article so he can review
it.


He says I'm "close" on some things, but that I have missed "too much" of
the story.  We could work together, he promises.  We could establish a
"working relationship," something we obviously don't have now because my
earlier article on this whole wretched debacle was "pathetically
inaccurate," he claims.


If I comply with his deal, I would then know all, he says:  "You will
really understand what I did and did not do. If you want."


In case you're wondering, Marty is reading this for the first time along
with the rest of you.  He has never seen a word of it, other than his own
Email messages reproduced here.


Not eight hours after he wanted to cut a deal, to "negotiate from the
edge," as John Schwartz of the Washington Post characterizes such desperate
ploys, he sends a message July 13 (Thursday) that is frantic and elusive:
"The thing is about to blow, probably by Friday at noon. I am not happy
about this. I don't like it. I don't want it. But I consider you the lesser
of two evils. I am going away in about a half hour and will probably return
next week."


I have no idea what "the thing" is.   I have no idea what the "lesser of
two evils" is.


Hell, right now, I'm not even sure he's telling me the truth.


Indeed, throughout this investigation, he has led me back and forth,
playing games,  trickling out information like some damn chinese water
torture.


Mike Godwin, staff counsel for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, who has
made the discrediting of the Time "Cyberporn" cover story and Marty's study
something of a personal Jihad, sums up Marty like this:  "The more you
research Rimm, the more a portrait emerges of someone wily, subtle, glib,
manipulative. Even when he tells you he's being totally honest, totally
frank, you have this lurking feeling that below the surface he's
calculating the precise effect his choice of words--both his admissions and
his omissions--will have on you."


Godwin is dead bang on.


An old college classmate of Marty's, Bret Pettichord , surfaced during this
whole affair.  He and Marty went to the New College in Sarasota, Fla., in
the 1984.  They were philosophy majors.  It was a small school, Petticort
says, so "everyone knew everyone."  Marty was a loner.  But Marty had a
peculiar quirk:  He studied tapes of the Rev. Jerry Falwell.  "Not for the
message," Petticort said, "Marty didn't buy into that."  Instead, Marty was
"fascinated by how Falwell was able to sway people with his rhetoric... and
he studied that."  But as far as Petticort knows, Marty never practiced it
while in college.  They drifted apart, meeting briefly around 1986.  When
the "Marty as Media Lightening Rod" emerged, Petticort got back in touch.
Marty's response:  "I'm busy now."


Before the Great Usenet Excerpt incident, Marty was already pacing back and
forth across my computer screen.


When the listing of his porn book from "Books In Print" hit the Net, it was
like some one had lit Marty's fuse.


When I asked him to explain the book, he answered with two questions:
"[T]ell me 1) whether you actually have a copy of the Porn Handbook, and 2)
where you got it."


I answered that I had sources in "low places" and that I didn't appreciate
having to "bargain" with him for information.  His book "wasn't hard to
track down," I told him.


His secret now blown, he goes ballistic:  "It looks like that *bitch* got a
copy too," he wrote, complete with asterisks,  referring to Vanderbilt
Professor Donna Hoffman, one of his earliest critics.  "To say I'm pissed
is an understatement," he wrote in Email.  "They all agreed not to
photocopy it - I'm going to nail them for copyright violation."  The "they"
he refers to there are the adult BBS operators.


I know, throughout this story you have to keep telling yourself:  I am not
in the Twilight Zone... I am *not* in the Twilight Zone.  But I swear, I'm
not making any of this up.


How did Marty pull this off?  Adult BBS operators aren't known for their
openness and trusting attitudes, in general.  When I asked Marty how he was
able to do what had taken me years to do -- develop sources inside this
network of adult BBS operators -- he said:  "[Y]ou didn't have powerful
software which you could use to convince them that you indeed had something
to offer. What took you years I could do in anywhere from five minutes to
two months.  You'll have to figure the rest out."


That software, of course, was the same software he mentions so prominently
in his academic study, the one published by the Georgetown Law Journal, the
one that starts out telling how pornographers have started to use
"sophisticated software" to help them become better marketers.


Are you catching the trend here?  It's the ultimate media hack.  He's
working both sides of the fence.  One one hand, Marty is helping the porn
operators better market their wares, enabling them to place the stuff more
strategically online.  And then he writes a study with which he reels in an
"exclusive" Time magazine "Cyberporn" cover story decrying the fact that,
oh-my-gawd, there's an ever increasing amount of porn online, due in part,
to better marketing tactics by adult BBS operators.


I tell Marty that I think it's "brilliant" that he was able to work the
"acquisition of data" from BBS operators so that he could use it for his
"how to" porn marketing manual and also crank it into his academic study.
His reply:  "If I do say so myself."


It was so brilliant, in fact, that it almost backfired on him on day the
Time magazine story ran.  You see, the BBS operators *didn't know* Marty
was collecting their data for an academic study;  they thought it was going
to be used only by Marty, who would in turn, help them better market their
porn.


Now, Marty didn't tell me that, directly, he made a game of it, making me
ask questions and pose them to him in the form of a theory.  So, when I ran
the above theory by him, the one where he dupes the BBS operators and uses
the data for both his porn book and the study, he wrote:  "I'm somewhat
impressed that you picked this up. Yes, I got about a dozen surprised calls
this week [when the Time cover story ran] from sysops, but the academic
study and BBS marketing manual were kept entirely separate...  so they (the
porn BBS operators) took no offense."


But the academic community has... except Carnegie Mellon University.  To
CMU Marty is the new "Media Darling."


Meanwhile, charges of unethical reserach practices are being launched and
brought to the attention of the CMU administration.


Jim Thomas, a professor of sociology/criminal justice at Northern Illinois
University, wrote a blistering attack challenging the ethics underlying
Marty's study.  Thomas' writing is brutal, written in the cold measured
prose of an academic:  "The most serious and explicit ethical vioation is
the deceptive nature in which Carnegie Mellon collected the data.
Virtually every principle of informed consent was breached, because there
is sufficient evidence to conclude that the research team gathered data
deceptively, perhaps even fraudulently."


Marty's senior advisor, CMU professor Marvin Sirbu, is nowhere to be found.
 He has refused to answer questions Emailed to him about whether he knew
Marty was using university funds to gather data for a "how to" porn
marketing book at the same time he was using the data for his academic
study.


When Marty is asked whether Sirbu knew of his actions, he writes only:
"Ask him."


Apparently Marty did run his methodology past George Duncan, a professor of
statistics at the Heinz School at CMU.  Marty says Duncan is a "privacy
expert."  However, Marty doesn't list Duncan among the many so-called
advisors for his study.  "In hindsight, I guess I should have listed him,"
he told me during our only phone interview.


When Duncan is asked about Marty's methodology he says he sees nothing
wrong.  When I ask him if he knows the data Marty was collecting was being
used for the "Pornographer's Handbook" he says, "that's totally
implausible."  When I tell him that Marty has confirmed it and that I know
for sure he used the data to help write the porn book, Duncan, still says,
"well, that's just ridiculous."


What's not ridiculous is the fallout and the "collateral damage" as the
military likes say, in which they really mean "the number of innocent
civilians that are murdered by a bomb meant only for a strategic target."


First there is the reputation of Time magazine.  This can be summed up in
one word:  Toast.   They will have to scramble big tme to recover from
having been spun by  Marty "Mr. Porn Handbook" Rimm.


Then there is CMU.  Your call here is as good as mine.  The university,
even as this article is grinding to a close, still refers to Marty's study
as "the CMU study."  They'll have to dodge a few bullets on this one now.


And then there is the Net itself.  It will likely take some time to heal
the damage here, too.  Of course there is pornography on the Net, but it's
not nearly as pervasive as recent events have made it out to be.  And
what's more encouraging, is that there is "real research," ironically
enough, from Carnegie Mellon itself, that indicates that sexually oriented
material, while available on the Net, isn't really that big a drawing
point.


As CMU professor Sara Kiesler, one of the principles of a study called
"HomeNet" says:  "What's important is to look at how people use the Net and
what they are actually looking at, as opposed to looking at what is
actually on the Net itself."  Her study is finding that very few people
access sexually oriented material, even when they know its readily
available, she said.  And when they do access it, it's mostly out of
curiosity, she says, "there's not a high percentage of repeat access."


That should be the word that gets out;  not the by now well debunked "83.5%
of the Usenet is porn" figure that sadly (thank you Time magazine) is
becoming the sound bite of the Religious Right and certain dense Senators.




As for Marty?  Well, he's been accepted by MIT's Technology and Policy
Program, where he'll go for his masters.  I'm sure he'll do just fine...
after all, he does have this little publishing venture to help him cover
expenses.


Meeks out...