WASHINGTON — The general counsel for anti-porn lobby NCOSE admitted to NBC news earlier this week 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 himself had crafted the language of the original model bill.
As XBIZ reported, anti-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 an unusual provision stating that it will not go into effect unless five additional states adopt similar legislation within 10 years of its passage.
That 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 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,” and that NCOSE shopped the model bill “to various interested parties across the country, and that it eventually found a home in Utah.”
“We gave it to some constituents in Utah who took it to their legislators, and legislators liked it,” said the NCOSE lawyer.
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 misidentifies NCOSE as an advocacy organization “focused on child safety.” However, since its founding in 1961, the religiously inspired group — formerly known as Morality in Media — has consistently pursued a pro-censorship mission to eradicate pornography.
