U.S. cracking down on porn

"Bruce has vast experience, both at the federal and state level, prosecuting those kinds of cases," Sierra said. "It is all part of our overall effort to kick-start obscenity prosecutions after a long absence." Sierra said Taylor was unavailable for comment.

The department has made other moves recently to shore up its anti-porn effort, including assigning for the first time in years a team of FBI agents to focus exclusively on adult-obscenity cases. In his fiscal 2005 budget proposal released this month, President Bush sought increased spending to fight obscenity; it was one of the few spending increases — besides for anti-terrorist efforts — in the otherwise austere proposal.

Porn industry representatives said all the activity had the look of an administration trying hard to appease an important constituency during an election cycle.

"This is a crude, crass political effort," said Jeffrey Douglas, executive director of the Free Speech Coalition, a trade association for the adult-entertainment industry.

He questioned whether the public at large was as interested in cracking down on adult fare as the Justice Department and said the hiring of Taylor was "a very dangerous, disturbing step" toward infringement on free speech.

But conservative activists said the moves were long overdue. They have been unhappy because, with funds limited for purposes other than the war on terrorism, the department has been targeting only purveyors of the worst forms of sexually explicit material—such as that involving simulated violence.

Anti-porn groups have argued that this tack misses the largest distributors and the bulk of the problem, including the growth of pornography over the Internet. They are looking to Taylor to launch a tough enforcement era.

"He believes in taking on big cases that will have a major impact," said Patrick Trueman, an adviser to the Family Research Council who headed the Justice Department's anti-pornography unit in the 1980s and was once Taylor's boss. "They are bringing him in for the same reason I did: They want to win, and he is the most experienced guy."

In the 1980s, Taylor was the lawyer for an anti-porn group run by Charles Keating, known as the Center for Decency Through Law, until Keating became embroiled in the savings-and-loan scandals and went to jail.

Over the years, Taylor has advised scores of attorneys around the country on the niceties of obscenity law, and two years ago was invited by the Justice Department to participate in a training symposium for new prosecutors. He maintains a collection of legal papers from pornography cases that covers "every brief in every case," according to Trueman.

Most recently, he has been the president and chief counsel of the National Law Center for Children and Families, a Fairfax, Va., group active in writing federal legislation outlawing indecent material on the Internet, especially that involving child exploitation.