'It's getting harder for pedophiles to function on the Internet,' said Julie Posey, the director of Pedowatch. Groups such as Cyberangels and Pedowatch have picked up the slack by enlisting thousands of volunteers across the globe to scan the Internet for lurid images of children. The number of cases opened by the agency's Innocent Images National Initiative jumped 1,264 percent between 19, according to the FBI's website. The FBI, which declined to be interviewed for this story, is having a hard time keeping tabs on all the could-be child porn that is distributed over the Internet. 'The girls model for each other, do each other's hair. Consider Tiffany Teen Model, where for $75, customers can purchase a this video of the 13-year-old and a friend cavorting in thong underwear. Some of the Webe Web images certainly push the arousal envelope, Aftab said. 'Whatever any of these websites original intent might have been, it is pretty clear that they have been (put) up for an audience with pedophilic leanings,' Sturges wrote. Sturges, reached by e-mail at a photo shoot in France, looked over the Webe Web sites and concluded that their purpose was less than innocent. Meanwhile, controversial photographer Jock Sturges continues to sell photographs of nude children despite an FBI raid, pickets by angry mobs and a grand jury investigation. It was the first such conviction dealing with this issue in which the genitals were not exposed. In a landmark 1995 case, a Pennsylvania man was sentenced to jail for possessing videotapes of young girls posing provocatively in skimpy clothing.

While the law explicitly prohibits images of minors engaged in real or simulated sex, it also forbids depictions of children designed to elicit sexual arousal. 'This is utterly and absolutely distasteful, and I think it would invoke child abuse, but it's probably not illegal,' said Aftab. The images on sites such as Lil' Amber fall into a murky legal area, said Parry Aftab, a lawyer and the director of Cyberangels, an Internet safety and education group.

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