Legislators, law enforcement officers, and victims and the families of victims of abuse, including Elizabeth Smart and her parents, looked on at the signing ceremony Wednesday afternoon in the White House Rose Garden. Connecticut Gov. John Rowland also attended because of the state was one of the first to adopt the AMBER alert system to help find missing children.

The bill was hailed as the most comprehensive piece of legislation passed in the effort to protect children from sexual predators. However, some of its provisions are raising questions among free speech and civil liberties activists.

It includes a provision sponsored by Connecticut Rep. Nancy L. Johnson to give federal agents broader power to tap the phones of suspected child predators.

The act is a compilation of several pieces of legislation. It includes provisions to crack down on child pornography, to enhance and coordinate the AMBER Alert systems developed in many states to publicize searches for missing children, to give federal agents broader authority to investigate child abuse and abductions, to enhance the war on drugs and to toughen penalties for convicted sex offenders.

The provision against child pornography is a somewhat retooled version of the Child Pornography Prevention Act of 1996, a statute that was struck down by the Supreme Court last year because it violated the First Amendment.

The 1996 law made it illegal to make, possess, advertise, or distribute images that “appear to be” of children engaged in sexually explicit conduct – a provision that, it was argued could be applied to works with legitimate social, artistic or scientific value; examples often given include the feature films Lolita and Romeo and Juliet.

The Supreme Court ruled the law unconstitutional relying on a previous ruling in a 1982 case that said laws banning pornographic images of actual children are only constitutional because the making of the images themselves constituted child abuse.

The Supreme Court also criticized the 1996 law, saying it came dangerously close to placing the burden of proof on the defendant, which is prohibited by the Constitution.

Bill Lyon, executive director of the Free Speech Coalition, the group that brought the successful case against the 1996 child pornography protection act, said that the new law is nearly unchanged from the 1996 version. The pertinent difference substitutes the phrase “virtually indistinguishable from” for “appears to be” regarding images of children engaged in sexually explicit conduct.

“It still appears that people who are accused. . . are presumed guilty until proven innocent,” he said.

According to Marv Johnson of the American Civil Liberties Union, federal prosecutions of child pornographers have been highly successful even without the law on the books because trying to say that an image is “only virtual child pornography” is not believable in court.

Of course, to prosecute pornographers and sexual predators, the government has to catch them first. Also included in the law were provisions created by Connecticut Rep. Nancy L. Johnson to give federal agents broader power to tap the phones of suspected child predators.

Johnson has been fighting for this bill for nearly four years, ever since she learned about the growing practice among child molesters of using Internet sites and chat rooms to start relationships with their victims. The wiretapping authority is vital, she said after Wednesday’s bill signing, because while contact between abuser and victim frequently begins on the Internet, the final steps, like arranging meetings, are often conducted by phone.

The use of wiretaps may allow more abusers to be prosecuted without requiring abused children to take the stand in open court, said a spokesman for Johnson’s office.

Bush congratulated Gov. Rowland for his work on the AMBER alert program. Connecticut was one of the first states to adopt the AMBER alert program after it was pioneered in Texas, Rowland said. Forty-one states currently have AMBER alert programs.

Wayne Mulligan, general manager of Buckley Radio, which owns WWCO in Waterbury, has worked on the Connecticut program and also was in Washington for the bill signing. He said the state’s AMBER alert system represents a unusual co-operation of private- and public-sector efforts to find abducted children. In addition to sending word out over radio, highway signs and the Internet,
Connecticut state police can send AMBER alerts to the phone company SBC, which can then send word to its network of trucks and repair crews, adding hundreds more eyes to the search.

The Child Abduction Prevention Act also includes language taken from the RAVE act sponsored by Sen. Joseph Biden, D-Del., which would extend federal crack-house statues to allow prosecution of promoters who run outdoor or short term-events like dances or concerts at which drugs are found.

The bill says that promoters can only be prosecuted if they sponsor such an event “knowingly” and “for the purpose of” enabling drug sales, but opponents of the measure fear it could be broadly interpreted to punish the sponsors of inherently innocuous events at which patrons take or deal drugs.