I

nternet comments lambasting and poking fun at lawmaker Arifinto and his Prosperous Justice Party (PKS) increased over the weekend.

The publication of more photographs and the testimony of the photographer proved that Arifinto watched porn stored on his tablet computer, not from an email link as he claimed.

“Photographs cannot lie. The pictures, taken by me, show that the video was not from an Internet link,” Mohammad Irfan, a photographer for Media Indonesia daily, said Saturday.

“I was surprised when I noticed through my camera’s viewfinder that there was a picture of a naked woman on [Arifinto’s] tablet screen,” he added.

The embarrassing faux pas occurred Friday during a House of Representatives’ plenary session, which the Indonesian Democratic Party of Struggle (PDI-P) and the Great Indonesia Movement Party (Gerindra) lawmakers walked out of in protest at the controversial plan to build a new House building.

In the photographs taken by Irfan, Arifinto watched a porn clip on his tablet, which he held slightly under his table while other legislators were involved in heated debate over the new building plan.

The photos showed there were at least six folders, each with a thumbnail, with pornographic content stored on the tablet, shortly before Arifinto picked one to watch.

Irfan said he snapped about 60 frames of Arifinto playing around with his tablet computer.

Data stored on Irfan’s photographs showed that two-and-a-half minutes elapsed between the first and final photograph. Arifinto claimed he had “opened the video through a link sent via email and deleted it only seconds after noticing it was porn”.

A wave of responses — mostly criticism and jokes — has flooded social networking sites since the incident became public.

Arifinto’s Facebook page has been hit by hundreds of sarcastic comments. “Tsk, tsk, tsk. Aren’t you ashamed? Watch the video in private, not in a public space,” one comment read.

Another user posted, “Hello Uncle, please email me the video.”

Twitter users also commented on the incident, particularly after Norwegian porn star Vicky Vette posted on Sunday, “I am super happy that Mr. Arifinto got my email. I sent him my best pictures”. That particular post triggered hundreds of responses and replies, making it one of the top topics on the site this weekend.

Vette also commented on Twitter when Communications and Information Technology Minister Tifatul Sembiring, also from the PKS, earlier this year issued a regulation to block all pornographic content on the Internet.

The PKS aggressively supported the highly controversial 2008 Anti-pornography Law. Earlier that
year, the House also endorsed the much-decried Internet bill under which those creating and distributing material deemed to be pornographic can be imprisoned or face billions in fines.

Tifatul, however, defended Arifinto, saying he could not be charged under the Internet law as the legislator had “unintentionally” downloaded the porn video.

“Those transmitting and distributing porn contents are subject to the law, those downloading are not,” Tifatul said in a statement.

He did not respond to Irfan’s statement that Arifinto played a video he had already saved on his tablet computer.

However, in the unlikely event that Arifinto was telling the truth that the video was from an email link, his decision to download the clip would also be a criminal offense under the anti-pornography law, which his party championed.

Article 5 of the law stipulates that those lending or downloading pornographic content face a maximum sentence of four years in prison and Rp 2 billion (US$232,000) in fines.

National Police spokesman Sr. Comr. Boy Rafli Amar, however, said police were still reviewing the Arifinto incident pending an internal probe by the House Honorary Council.

“The act was clearly an ethical violation. We must investigate it and not necessarily wait for an official report,” council deputy chairman Nurdiman Munir said.