---------- 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 ----- 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. [...]