Not so conservative behind closed doors

According to a 1973 Supreme Court decision, one of the yardsticks used to determine if material can be considered obscene is whether said material violates “contemporary community standards”. Which is why, in his defense of an adult website operator, lawyer Lawrence Walters is using google search information from the area the trial is taking place in.

In the trial of a pornographic Web site operator, the defense plans to show that residents of Pensacola are more likely to use Google to search for terms like “orgy” than for “apple pie” or “watermelon.” The publicly accessible data is vague in that it does not specify how many people are searching for the terms, just their relative popularity over time. But the defense lawyer, Lawrence Walters, is arguing that the evidence is sufficient to demonstrate that interest in the sexual subjects exceeds that of more mainstream topics — and that by extension, the sexual material distributed by his client is not outside the norm.

| Grinding |

My main motivation for posting this is that it is wonderful. But I would also like to loop this back in to our recent discussions (here and here) about how society adjusts to a lack of privacy. It seems to me that privacy advocates are unwilling to acknowledge the disadvantages of privacy. Today's example: public policy that based on rank hypocrisy by social conservatives.

(I hope to do some more thoughtful posts about privacy soon, in which we might connect the dots between some of these instabloggy posts.)