ABSTRACT
Obscenity has been suppressed and prosecuted throughout history, always somehow managing to survive even when it was forced to go underground, and it has actually thrived during some eras. Obscenity cases such as police raids on adult bookstores and indecency cases like Barnes generally attract considerable media attention. The Court upheld the constitutionality of the federal Racketeering Influenced and Corrupt Organizations statute in obscenity prosecutions. In 1990, the FCC issued rules that defined telephone indecency as descriptions of "sexual or excretory activities or organs in a patently offensive manner as measured by contemporary community standards for the telephone medium." Digital photography and the Internet have facilitated the wide distribution of nonconsensual "revenge pornography." A concern related to child pornography has been how to keep sexually oriented materials out of the hands of minors. During the mid-1970s, several states and the US Congress responded to public outrage over the perceived proliferation of child pornography as detailed in various media reports.
