Talk:Jacobson v. United States

Good Article nomination notes
I believe this article to be complete and comprehensive enough for GA status. There is only issue I can imagine someone having: the absence of images, which is not unusual in articles about court cases. I have some ideas which I will try to implement whenever I feel this article is ready for an FA nom, but for GA I think it can pass without images. (There are also some other law review articles about the decision's impact that I will be trying to get).

If there are any concerns, let me know. Daniel Case 17:45, 8 June 2007 (UTC)

Successful good article nomination
I am glad to say that this article which was nominated for good article status has succeeded. This is how the article, as of June 13, 2007, compares against the six good article criteria:


 * 1. Well written?: Yep, easy to read and does a good job of using prose to explain fairly complex legal issues.
 * 2. Factually accurate?: very attentively cited
 * 3. Broad in coverage?: very thorough. Some sections could possibly even be shortened
 * 4. Neutral point of view?: does a good job of presenting both sides
 * 5. Article stability? yep
 * 6. Images?: a lack of images does not disqualify an article from GA status

If you feel that this review is in error, feel free to take it to a GA review. Thank you to all of the editors who worked hard to bring it to this status. — JayHenry 02:24, 13 June 2007 (UTC)

GA review &mdash; kept
This article has been reviewed as part of WikiProject Good articles/Project quality task force. I believe the article currently meets the criteria and should remain listed as a Good article. The article history has been updated to reflect this review. Regards,Ruslik 07:43, 20 September 2007 (UTC)

The government itself was the biggest producer?
When it says "The government itself was the biggest producer, in the form of materials it created to tempt buyers." in the end of section 1.1, what does this mean? Surely the government was not producing child porn by photographing or filming children performing sexual acts or poses? I would imagine it was more along the lines of repackaging child porn that had been previously created by others and that had been confiscated by law enforcement. I think it could be made clearer how the material the government was uses to temp buyers was actually created. --Cab88 12:19, 23 September 2007 (UTC)


 * That's sort of semi-quoted from one of the sources. No, the government was not producing its own kiddy porn. But it was producing all the catalogs and brochures it mailed out to people it was trying to tempt to buy it, often (as I would imagine such catalogs would), providing a tantalizing tease of what the actual materials would be, and in the process likely using more innocuous images from its own stock of confiscated kiddy porn (knowing that savvy buyers would not expect catalogs from real companies to show such images since they were already against the law, and sending a catalog with such explicit images would be a violation itself). Daniel Case 02:48, 24 September 2007 (UTC)


 * According to Kincaid, J. R. (1998), Erotic Innocence: The Culture of Child Molesting, Duke University Press Books, p. 173, and O'Donnell; Milner (2012), Child Pornography: Crime, Computers and Society, Routledge, p. 20, Californian law officials around 1990 proudly boasted in police seminars that the only child pornography still being produced by active child molestation was produced by government agents for the express purpose of sting operations, where the agents were protected from persecution under molestation charges because they acted on government orders.


 * According to Schuijer, Rossen (1992), The Trade in Child Pornography, Issues in Child Abuse Accusations 4, a source quoted at length by the aforementioned two sources, the mass-scale production of new CP (instead of simply "re-packaged CP") in the United States since the early 1980s was actively driven by the US justice system via drastically rising legal demand for priorly non-existent masses of material to use in large-scale sting and, much moreso, especially planting operations (a deliberate political strategy of tension as also described, among other sources, by Levine, Judith (2002), Harmful to Minors, and Pat Califia (2002), Public Sex: The Culture of Radical Sex, Cleis Press, which consisted of mass-planting CP upon unsuspecting innocents, in order to scare parliaments and populations into submission for an ever-increasing law-and-order legislation, by means of drastically increasing arrestment and incarcaration figures as well as sensationalist press reports, while also tying in with the contemporary general anti-pornography propaganda as presented by the Meese commission). Also remember all this started at the same time as when the War on Drugs turned into alleged domestic CIA drug trafficking (also see CIA involvement in Contra cocaine trafficking), a rather similar government scheme of government agents mass-distributing and mass-planting illegal materials.


 * Schuijer and Rossen themselves are not openly saying that the material was being produced, involving active molestation, on US government orders, but they note the causal relation between a rising legal demand for such material in the US and the still globally solitary rise in US production involving active molestation as well as the increasing severity of the crimes recorded in said US material (as the more severe the material demanded, if not outright commissioned, by US government agencies, the easier it could be used for their political agenda), although Schuijer and Rossen dwell on this fact mainly to refute the claim often made in the US at the time that the material that was actually being produced in the United States would supposedly originate and be exported to the US from the Netherlands. --2003:EF:1700:B416:1153:F899:1326:C148 (talk) 08:20, 18 January 2021 (UTC)

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Who is Comfort ?
The article says "Neither Jacobson nor Comfort made any more explicit reference to pornographic materials and Jacobson stopped writing back after two letters." That is the first reference to Comfort. Comfort is not introduced in the article. The article then reference him (or her) three other times.

Who is Comfort?

Jeffrey Walton (talk) 04:57, 24 September 2020 (UTC)
 * See the "investigation and arrest of Keith Jacobson" subsection for the first reference: "But some time later, Calvin Comfort, a 'prohibited mailing specialist' for the region, found Jacobson's name in another file" Daniel Case (talk) 14:55, 24 September 2020 (UTC)

GA concerns
After quickly skimming the article, I am concerned that it no longer meets the good article criteria. Some of my concerns are listed below:


 * There are lots of uncited passages, including entire paragraphs.
 * Can any of the sources listed in "Further reading" be used as inline citations, or can they be removed?

Is anyone interested in fixing up this article? If not, should it be nominated for WP:GAR? Z1720 (talk) 20:36, 26 June 2024 (UTC)


 * As the creator and primary contributor, yeah, probably. It was promoted to GA ages ago, when standards were a lot lower (to the extent they existed). I have thought myself, if this article were nominated today it wouldn't make it. Daniel Case (talk) 20:43, 26 June 2024 (UTC)