The New York Times, September 15, 1995, p. A16. Company Says Electronic Mail Was Opened to Find Pornography By Peter H. Lewis Responding to court orders related to a nationwide crackdown on the electronic transmission of child pornography, the America Online information service gave law enforcement agents access to the private electronic mailboxes of an unknown number of its subscribers, company officials confirmed yesterday. By reading and tracing electronic mail messages as they coursed through the America Online system, agents of the Federal Bureau of Investigation were able to identify several thousand users of the service who viewed digitized images of children in sexual poses. They were also able to follow the electronic trail of messages beyond America Online identifying many more computer users nationwide who stored and traded pedophilic material, people familiar with the investigation said. America Online, which is based in Vienna, Va., is the nation's largest on-line information service, with 3.5 million subscribers. At least a dozen people suspected of being among the most active traders of child pornography on the computer network were arrested on Wednesday as part of the investigation, and the inquiry is continuing. The Justice Department indicated Wednesday that many more arrests were planned, but it released no new information yesterday. At least some of the arrests resulted from undercover operations conducted on America Online in the past year by law enforcement agents pretending to be boys and girls, court records say. In one case, an adult investigator posing as a teen-age girl on an America Online public forum invited a Las Vegas, Nev., man to cross state lines to have sex. He was arrested when he arrived at a motel suggested by the "girl." In other cases, an America Online spokeswoman said yesterday, concerned subscribers got in touch with either the F.B.I. or network administrators to complain about lewd pictures arriving unsolicited in their electronic mailboxes. Copies of the objectionable images were then provided to the F.B.I. by America Online, and the agency obtained court orders to search the mailboxes of the senders, said the spokeswoman, Pam McGraw. Depending on the volume of mail a person receives, electronic mail messages can remain in an electronic mailbox for days or weeks, until they are deleted or displaced by newer messages. Because electronic mail has a life of days or weeks, can be traced and can be easily copied without alerting the owner, reading the mailboxes was particularly effective. Ms. McGraw strongly denied yesterday thal digital images of child pornography exlsted in any public areas of the service. It was unclear yesterday how much information about America Online subscribers is kept as a routine part of operating the electronic network and how much private information was provided to law enforcement officials. On many computer networks, administrators are able to automatically keep track of all actions undertaken by individual users, from the moment they log on to the system to moment they sign off. Such records reveal much more personal information than the records a telephone company routinely keeps on each customer's phone calls. Ms. McGraw said America Online kept records of only the basic information needed to bill the subscriber, including the user's name, address, credit card information and time spent on line in each session. The company also keeps aggregate data of the total time spent by all users each day in specific areas of the service. In the F.B.I.'s announcement of a series of raids and arrests on Wednesday, it said it had concentrated its four-year investigation on America Online because of complaints of child pornography circulating there. Representatives of Compuserve Inc. and the Prodigy Services Company, the second- and third-largest on-line services, respectively, said they had not heard from the F.B.I. or any other other law enforcement agency about any investigation of child pornographers and pedophiles. While applauding the arrests, representatives of the other on-line services said they feared that the crackdown could have a negative impact on the on-line services industry, which serves more than eight million Americans. "There are a whole lot of hysterical stories going around that leave potential online customers with the impression there is nothing but pornography out there," said a Compuserve spokesman, R. Pierce Reid. The arrests are occurring just as Congress is preparing to debate several legislative proposals to place restrictions on the Internet and commercial on-line services in an attempt to stanch the flow of child pornography. Jerry Berman, executive director of the Center for Democracy and Technology, a public policy lobbying group, said, "We think this investigation establishes what we've been saying all along: that the existing laws work, that the industry will cooperate with law enforcement, and there is no need for flawed legislation that violates Constitutional rights."