I am, I suspect, one of the few people in America who had a license to access pornography. Our rarity comes from the fact that most people in practice don’t need such a license: In theory, accessing obscene material on the Web, even from your own home, might subject you to criminal liability (that’s an open question), but in practice no-one is going to prosecute you for that. (The main exception is if you’re trying to access child pornography — but there, licenses to access child porn are scarce because the government isn’t interesting in handing any out, though of course some enforcement officials must be authorized to access such material in the course of their enforcement duties.) In any event, I like to think that the scarcity makes my license extra super-duper cool.
In Fall 2001, I was visiting at the George Mason University law school, which is a Virginia state public institution; and Virginia at the time had a law saying that state employees can’t use state-owned computers to access porn (not just constitutionally unprotected obscenity or child pornography, but also otherwise protected sexually explicit material) unless their agency head certified that they needed to do so for work reasons.
As it happened, I was working on some material related to cyberspace, pornography, and the First Amendment, and actually did have to access some such sites for work reasons (for instance, to confirm examples of misleading domain names such as whitehouse.com, as well as examples of “mousetrapping” sites that made it hard for you to effectively close the window in which they were opened). The dean, a very reasonable and pleasant fellow (and a friend of mine), promptly gave me such a letter — I just ran across the letter in unpacking from an office move, which is prompting this message. I now cherish it as the rare document that it is.
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