((The following comments have been edited from a series of posts by
Mike Godwin on The Well in mid-June, '97 -- jt))
---------------- 
Sun Jun 15 '97 (23:19) 
 Some background:
 CMU announced in the wake of the Rimm/Time scandal (summer and fall of 1995)
 that it would investigate the Rimm "study" and determine whether any
 disciplinary or other institutional responses were warranted, both for Rimm
 and for his nominal faculty advisers, Marvin Sirbu and David Banks.
 Yet even though the original committee of inquiry report concluded that
 several aspects of Rimm's, Sirbu's, and Banks's behavior should be
 questioned, nothing came of their recommendations -- procedurally speaking,
 the whole investigation essentially disappeared.
 And it would likely have stayed invisible had not the untenured statistician
 David Banks, fearful that he was being set up as the scapegoat at a time when
 he was looking for a new faculty appointment elsewhere, begun to pressure
 CMU for a formal conclusion to the investigation it had announced, and for a
 formal clearing of his name. As Banks put it at one point (I paraphrase):
 "I'm going to be peer-reviewed by Donna Hoffman for the rest of my career,
 so it's important that it be formally established that I did nothing wrong."
 Banks has released much of the pre-scandal correspondence and most of the
 documents related to the post-scandal investigation to the CMU student radio
 station, which in turn sent them to me and to several others who were
 involved in uncovering the fraud that suckered Time magazine into promoting
 the Great Cyberporn Panic of 1995.
 The material is interesting to anyone who ever followed the Cyberporn Panic
 and Rimm's various roles in it. It includes evidence that explains why
 Rimm's material emphasized pedophilic content even though it did not purport
 to have found actual child-porn images. It explains why Rimm singled out Bob
 Thomas of Amateur Action BBS and asserted (in statements that Time's Philip
 Elmer-DeWitt never questioned) that Thomas was the "market leader" and the
 "Marquis de Cyberspace." It shows who Rimm's earliest contacts at the
 Department of Justice were, and it strongly suggests that Rimm and Sirbu
 were engaged in a high-level plot to defraud the Department of Justice out
 of research money.
 Among the materials we now have are the original CMU Committee of Inquiry
 report and several lengthy verbatim transcripts of a subsequent committee's
 interrogation of David Banks. We also have the original Banks-Rimm-Sirbu
 grant application to the Department of Justice, which CMU later reclassified
 as a "pre-application" so that Sirbu would not stand in violation of
 university regulatiosn regarding grant applications.
 I'm having all of the new material scanned or typed in, and will post it in
 this topic, as well as respond to questions about the materials.
 Before I post the new stuff, let me remind you of two major facts that
 will have some bearing in interpreting the materials. First, the only
 Usenet-usage material Rimm ever had came from CMU students' private files.
 Second, the only porn descriptions Rimm ever collected came from a single
 bulletin-board system in Milpitas, California, and this is apparent to
 anyone who reads the Georgetown Law Journal article that Rimm published.
.....................
Mon Jun 16 '97 (19:07) 
 Please note also that, of the charges raised by this report regarding Rimm
 and/or Sirbu, not one seems to have led to any real-world consequences.
 Given what some of the charges are, this in itself is quite remarkable.
 My comments, plus anything I post in this topic, may be reproduced by anyone
 who wishes to republish them elsewhere and in any medium. Copying of other
 documents is, in my opinion, not problematic under copyright law, given the
 newsworthiness of the material and the unlikelihood of any financial harm to
 anyone who claims to be a copyright holder and wishes to allege a claim of
 infringement.
 The above is not worded that well, but you get the idea.
.......................
Tue Jun 17 '97 (10:18)  
 The Pequena Panacha BBS case, in which Flores was a principal government
 player, is referenced in the now-famous Footnote 9 of the Rimm article:
 ---------
    [9] As a result of federal legal action against a few well known
    "adult" BBS operators, including Robert and Carleen Thomas (Amateur
    Action) and Robert Copella (Pequena Panacha), some systems have
    removed their paraphilic, pedophilic, and hebephilic imagery from
    public display. This has created a thriving underground market for
   "private collections" and anonymous ftp sites on the Internet, which
    cannot be studied systematically. Thus, it may be difficult for
    researchers to repeat this study, as much valuable data is no longer
    publicly available. See infra notes 89-95 and accompanying text.
 (One of the things that makes Footnote 9 so remarkable, apart from its
 blatant attempt to inoculate the Rimm claims against falsification, is
 that Philip Elmer-DeWitt accepted it unquestioningly.)
 But then David Banks comes along and decides to spill his guts -- and what's
 a fellow to do? The stuff is interesting (for me at least) -- especially
 the stuff to come.
.........................