The reasons why governments also spy on the pornographers

But there are other trends indicated by pornographic content that are useful to spies. Movies produced for the sexual gratification of consumers reveal cultural norms of restriction, transgression, and otherness. In fact, porn is so specifically tuned to the tastes of consumers that shifts can indicate changes in a society almost immediately.

Interestingly, many purveyors of pornography initially thought that better quality video would make their product more desirable. However, it seems that high production values were actually less popular. So a "casual" production style was adopted, similar to the design of worn and ripped jeans. Part of the raw appeal of pornography, it seems, is that the product itself be raw, and conspicuously illicit.

But local tastes nonetheless vary widely. Japanese porn features schoolgirls, often bound. Egyptian porn before Nasser featured local beauties and voyeurism, but now focuses on fair-haired and pale-skinned women, sometimes with forced sex as a theme. Egyptian-born Sheik Hilaly, in Sydney, may have been verbalizing a latent sense of otherness and mistaking it for insight.

This means that tinkering with the content of porn could be in the national interest, under certain circumstances. Anyone privy to details of such activities cannot comment on them, but one story circulating in the research community involved attempts to introduce condoms into African porn as part of an anti-AIDS effort.

Then, of course, there is the biggest market of all -- the US, where it is estimated that annual revenue for pornography in 2004 exceeded the combined revenue of the ABC, CBS, and NBC television networks by many billions of dollars. We should not be surprised if someone eventually tries to tweak the content of pornography to exploit Americans' cultural proclivities on behalf of other products, causes, or even political candidates.

H.T. Goranson is the lead scientist of Sirius-Beta Corp and was a senior scientist with the US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency.

Copyright: Project Syndicate