![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() In a court filing, a lawyer for one of the men arrested after the FBI sting charged that “what the government did in this case is comparable to flooding a neighborhood with heroin in the hope of snatching an assortment of low-level drug users.” The defense lawyer, Colin Fieman, asked a federal judge to throw out child pornography charges against his client, former middle school teacher Jay Michaud. A federal judge is scheduled to hear arguments on that request Friday.įederal agents first noticed Playpen not long after it went online in August, 2014. The site was buried in what is often called the “dark web,” a part of the internet that is accessible to the public only through Tor, network software that bounces users’ internet traffic from one computer to another to make it largely untraceable.īy March of last year, the FBI said, Playpen had grown to become “the largest remaining known child pornography hidden service in the world,” the Justice Department said in a court filing. FBI agents tracked the site to computer servers in North Carolina, and in February seized the site and quietly moved it to its own facility in Newington, Va. Some of those could be downloaded directly from the government’s computers others were available through links to other hard-to-find locations on the web, Fieman said.ĭuring that time, federal prosecutors told defense lawyers that the site included more than 23,000 sexually explicit images and videos of children. One section of the site was labeled “toddlers,” according to court records. ‘Most of the bodies we see online on a daily basis aren’t even real, but rather enhanced or modified by technology to conform to a current, unsustainable trend,’ says LA-based photographer Julia SH, who is exhibiting powerful, textured portraits of bodies rarely depicted in 21st-century media, presented in museum-like frames.īut under this flawless skin is a rotten deception, one deepened by a social-media saturated society.And prosecutors said that some of the images users accessed during the time Playpen was under the government’s control included “prepubescent female” having sexual intercourse with adults.įieman said more than 100,000 Playpen registered users visited the site while it was under the FBI’s control. ‘In the US, what little nudity permitted is usually shown in a sexual context. Seeing nudes in a museum is one of the only exceptions to this. I created a series where I framed my models as sculptures and works of art in the hope that the viewer will suspend any judgments about whether they find the models sexually attractive or not, or whether their bodies are socially “acceptable”. The more body types we are exposed to, the more pragmatic our view will become.’įrench-Uruguayan photographer Bettina Pittaluga’s work in ‘Nude’ focuses on physical intimacy, which, as the artist explains, ‘can be revealed by being in someone’s personal space, or bonding through physical contact, by skinship. What interests me nudity, from a pictorial and emotional point of view, is the expression of the skin. It necessarily involves the other senses because it is impossible not to see, hear and smell people when you are close enough to touch them.’īut why does Pittaluga think it's important for contemporary photography to offer visibility to all body types? ‘I hope that one day this kind of question will no longer exist,’ she says. ‘I am focused on giving a voice and visibility to those who are not or too little represented. ![]()
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