Spam Tastes Gross: Degradation -- and illegality -- in your in-box.

It's a disgusting topic, and one that most people would rather turn away from -- which is just how the pornographers like it, of course. They would rather we just shuddered and threw up our hands. This goes for all pornography, but I am concerned for the moment with the kind that arrives by e-mail, cluttering and blighting your in-box.

How's your e-mail been lately? Mine's been pretty foul. I get between five and ten porno e-mails a day. Others get upwards of 50 -- through no fault of their own, mind you. Let me provide some choice recent samples from my in-box. This isn't "nice" porn; it isn't pretty ladies and men posing on European beaches. It's sick stuff, with a very heavy emphasis on children, incest, and bestiality.

One e-mail has on the subject line, "Family." And inside: "Incest at Its Finest. Grandparents give grandkids sex lessons. Dad & Daughter. Young girl cannot control her urges." One e-mail address is "teeniesuckathon." Another e-mail has on its subject line, "Sorry about the late Christmas gift" (this came in early January). Inside: "Girls F***ing Animals After School" and "Teen Sluts Covered in Sperm." Another e-mail informs, "We have selected a list of the 25 best pay sites in the preteen industry."

Note "preteen": In all likelihood, this is no idle boast, as anyone in the anti-child-porn field will tell you. Preteen means preteen. And that is not only abhorrent, but illegal -- a crime.

A great many people are embarrassed about being the mere recipient of these e-mails. They're apt to think they've done something wrong: that they perhaps were on a naughty site, and thus ensnared for all time. And if they squawk about the porn they're receiving, others might say, "Gee, why are you so interested? Turn you on a little, huh?" (Anti-porn activists get this frequently.) Some people are also afraid of being thought prudish or illiberal if they complain about porn: These things are part of the big, wicked world, and there's the Bill of Rights, of course.

But it bears repeating: Child porn is illegal, and so, for that matter, is "obscenity," whose definition is a lot less slippery than some people think, or than some interested parties pretend. Many people want to do more than "just hit delete" ("JHD," as Internetters put it). If the material is sufficiently bad -- particularly when it involves children -- they want to do something, not just sit there helpless. And they can.

For one thing, they can contact the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children in Washington. Four years ago, the center set up what they call the Cyber Tip Line, found at www.cybertipline.com. There a concerned citizen can make a report. He can say, "I found something fishy. Looks like it involves kids. Here it is -- please check it out." People can also go directly to a Justice Department website, www.usdoj.gov/criminal/ceos/report.htm, where further information on reporting child porn is available. No one has to sit helpless, if he doesn't want to.

At the National Center, there are not only the outfit's own staff but federal agents from the Postal Service, Customs, and the FBI. All of these scour the Internet and deal with citizen tips. According to John Rabun, chief operating officer of the center, the more tips about one site -- or one "spammed" e-mail -- the better. "It's the old squeaky- wheel thing." Law enforcement is making plenty of arrests off the tips; the center has been receiving about 900 a week. But the arrests, says Rabun, constitute just a drop in the bucket -- which is better than nothing at all, of course.

One citizen who is very definitely "on the case" is Julie Posey, a homemaker in Colorado. She's a heroine of the anti-child-exploitation movement, its archangel, or avenging angel, its Joan of Arc. When you read about her and talk with her, you think, "They should really make a movie about her." And they are: A company has just bought the rights to her story.

Julie Posey's role in life is to monitor the Internet looking for the abuse of children, sniffing out the pedophiles who lurk there. Her entire operation is detailed and resident at www.pedowatch.org. "My mission," she says on her site, "is to protect children online from the predators who abuse them. I do this by receiving tips from people on the Internet about suspicious activity that they have found and following up on the information. I then identify the suspects involved and pass the information along with all evidence to law enforcement for further investigation." Her work has led to more than 20 arrests and convictions. Nothing gives her more satisfaction than to see a pedophile hauled away. The average pedophile, she says, will rape or otherwise molest 200 children in his "career." Every time she busts someone, or leads to that bust, she thinks, "Well, that's X number of children saved from that particular pedophile." The drops in the bucket add up.

Posey herself was raped when she was an adolescent; the rapist got 90 days. He raped again, of course: and then was put away for longer. Posey is fearless in going about her work. Others, she understands, can't be so fearless. "People are afraid to contact police," she says. "They want to make anonymous tips." They're sort of paralyzed. Since her efforts have been publicized -- there was a profile recently in the Los Angeles Times -- people have flooded her website, wanting her to act on this or that offense. She can hardly keep up. She herself uses www.cybertipline.com. A better situation, of course, would be a nation of Julie Poseys, thousands of citizens who get off their duffs when they spot child porn or suspect child endangerment. Some people -- such as defense attorneys -- view Posey as a "vigilante" and "busybody." But she has earned the admiration and gratitude of law enforcement. Professional badge-wearers can't conduct this war alone.

Child porn has exploded in recent years. Never has there been so much of it; never has it been so widely disseminated. There are at least 100,000 child-porn sites -- not just pornographic sites, mind you, but sites devoted entirely to child porn. The demand for the stuff seems insatiable. As you investigate these matters, it seems bad enough that there are countless producers and purveyors of child porn -- but then it hits you that there are many more countless consumers of it. One's neighbors, presumably. The problem is far larger than the average person imagines; law enforcement and activists sometimes have to fight incredulity.

Much of the porn is circulated via "spam," which is the slang term for (the more formal) "unsolicited commercial e-mail," or UCE. Spam is a bear to combat. There are many "filter" systems, but they work imperfectly. Once you're on a list, it can be impossible to "unsubscribe"; they make you jump through hoops, and by the time you spend a couple of minutes on it, you may be no better off. It's rather futile to "block" offensive addresses too, because pornographers -- and other spammers, of course -- just switch to another address. Your porn -- and, again, spam generally -- can get so bad, you quit your account and acquire a new one. But the new one, too, can quickly get spoiled and overrun with spam. Some people -- including Julie Posey -- report that, when they start a new account, the porn spam begins arriving within 24 hours.

And porn can assault you when you're just doing some general -- and innocent -- web surfing. In fact, this is called "assaultive porn," or "ambush porn" -- it's just in your face, all of a sudden, perhaps on a "pop-up screen." All the experts say that this will not go away, or diminish, until the pornographers are made to pay; until it gets too difficult, too risky, too bothersome for them.

And that means law enforcement -- not necessarily the enactment of new laws, but the enforcement of ones already written. The Clinton administration, by consensus -- and not just conservative, partisan consensus -- fell down on this job. At first it seemed that the Ashcroft Justice Department, taking over from the Reno Justice Department, was ushering in a new day. Things were getting worse for the pornographers. They learned that someone was paying attention, and enforcing, and backed off. But then came 9/11, and anti-porn harassment and prosecution sort of stopped. One federal insider says that "Justice Department and FBI guys were pulled off porn and put on al-Qaeda. And it's doubtful, frankly, they'll ever come back. When buildings full of people are being blown up, you have other things to worry about."

But still another federal insider presses, "If you want to make an impact, you've got to play hardball. The cost of entering and exiting the [porn] market is very, very low. It's not like the old days. You can now get in and get out very quickly. So we need to take advantage of trespass and nuisance laws. And look: You can't traffic in child porn or obscene material. It's against the law. It's even against the law to publish information about where this material can be purchased. What we have to do is get serious and enforce. Then the problem wouldn't be so huge -- significant, sure. It's a constant battle. But reduced."

And everyone stresses that, in the final analysis, you need a cooperative and caring citizenry -- citizens who don't think of themselves as snitches, who aren't embarrassed, but who are self- confident and bold. Says the second insider, "It's up to the user community. They have to mature. You have many people who don't really feel they can bring this to anyone's attention, and they have to," especially when the well-being of children is on the line.

Then there's the question of spam at large: Ban it? Try to ban certain types of it? Many states have anti-spam laws, but these tend to be ineffective, and anti-spam activists claim that a strong, clear federal law is needed -- similar to the one, now ten years old, that prohibits "spam" by fax. There have been many bills proposed in Congress, coming from both liberal Democrats and conservative Republicans, and from those in between. None has so far come to fruition. One of the bills, the project of Sen. Conrad Burns of Montana, is called "The Can Spam Act."

Of the anti-spam groups, perhaps the biggest and best organized is the Coalition Against Unsolicited Commercial Email (found at www.cauce.org). They have branches in several countries, and sport the slogan, "Take back your mailbox!" Many libertarians, of course, are opposed to legislation against spam. The Cato Institute's Clyde Wayne Crews Jr., in a white paper, summarizes, "At bottom, spam legislation kicks open the door to further regulation of business communications." It would "create incentives for enforcers to go on 'spam hunts,' looking for evil embedded in every e-mail." And it "would have significant implications for anonymous speech -- a cornerstone of our Republic."

Yet others counter that spam ought to be banned on precisely free- market principles, including property rights. Matthew Mitchell, an Internet investigator and anti-spammer in Philadelphia, says, "Spamming is theft of services, just as if someone came into your office and insisted on using your copier to print his advertisements." Though spammers "like to invoke the mantra of private enterprise and small businesses," he continues, "spam hurts many businesses," costing them time, money, and aggravation (the same things it costs an individual). In Mitchell's view, any anti-spam legislation should be "content- neutral," banning it altogether, pornography or no pornography. Otherwise, First Amendment issues may come into play. This, he says, is what makes the law against fax ads formidable.

A Hooters restaurant in Augusta, Ga., knows this well. We at National Review, editorially, cited the Hooters case as an especially egregious example of American litigiousness. A man got together a class-action suit against the restaurant after receiving some faxes offering discounts off food. A jury awarded a $12 million judgment against the restaurant -- which promptly filed for bankruptcy. Junk faxes are verboten. Send me a coupon for buffalo wings, and you could find yourself out millions. Yet you can apparently stuff my e-mail in-box to bursting with impunity.

And that in-box, like so many others, is, indeed, bursting -- most depressingly with porn, and with sick porn, and most alarmingly with enticements to child porn. Inertia, confusion, and embarrassment, as always, are the pornographer's friends. It's encouraging to know that some brave and generous-hearted people -- like Julie Posey and the staff of the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children -- are on the case. But they could use some help.