WASHINGTON — The general counsel for anti-porn lobby NCOSE (formerly Morality in Media) admitted to NBC news that the organization is behind the state-by-state campaign to force all electronics manufacturers to install and activate “porn filters” on their devices.
Benjamin Bull, the general counsel for the National Center on Sexual Exploitation, revealed to NBC News’ Ben Goggin that he crafted the language of the original model bill.
As XBIZ reported, War on Porn activists have been pushing copycat “porn filter” bills in several red states, since Governor Spencer J. Cox signed the initial Utah bill into law in March 2021.
That bill only passed after it was amended with the odd mandate that it “will not go into effect until five additional states have adopted similar language. It gives a 10-year period for that to occur,” the Salt Lake City Fox affiliate reported at the time.
The Utah provision, NBC News reported, was deliberately included “to prevent Big Tech companies from isolating the state after passing the law. This year, Florida, South Carolina, Maryland, Tennessee, Iowa, Idaho, Texas and Montana lawmakers are all considering versions of the bill, with Montana and Idaho’s versions being furthest along in the process.”
Bull admitted to Goggin in an article published this week that the model bill “was designed to narrowly address the issue of child access to internet pornography in a way that avoided potential court challenges.”
Bull also bragged that NCOSE shopped the model bill “to various interested parties across the country, and that it eventually found a home in Utah.”
According to the NCOSE lawyer, “We gave it to some constituents in Utah who took it to their legislators, and legislators liked it.”
Bull also claimed that since the bill’s passage in Utah, NCOSE has heard “almost on a daily basis, from constituents, from legislators. ‘What can we do? We’re desperate. Do you have a model bill? Can you help us?’ And we said, ‘as a matter of fact, we do.”
The NBC News report, however, misidentifies NCOSE as an “advocacy organization focused on child safety.” The religiously inspired group was founded in 1961 and has maintained its original pro-censorship mission to “eradicate all pornography,” according to their expansive definition.