"Torture is foreplay, rape is romance, snuff is climax," reads the preface of a sexual fantasy posted on the newsgroup `alt.sex.stories' by Jake Baker, a sophomore at the University of Michigan.

The 20-year-old Iinguistics major, currently in jail facing charges of interstate transmission of a threat to kidnap or injure, has singlehandedly ignited a new round of questions on the applicability of federal laws to the realm of cyberspace.

Baker's real name is Abraham Jacob Alkhabaz. In December and early January, he posted several pornographic stories he had written on the newsgroup `alt.sex.stories.' This newsgroup is available all over the world through the Internet--a global data communications network.

The newsgroup is known on the Internet for its explicit and graphic descriptions of sex acts, such as incest, rape and torture. But Baker's stories were extreme even for the newsgroup, according to readers who discussed the case in about 300 posts on that newsgroup alone.

Baker posted a number of stories, including "A Day at Work," "Gone Fishing" and "Pamela's Ordeal." These stories are fantasies of abduction, torture, sodomy, rape and murder of young women.

The story "Pamela's Ordeal" involved two men who broke into the apartment of a young woman, whom they tied, gagged, mutilated and sodomized, before burning her alive.

As awful as the story was, Baker was well within his rights to publish it on the newsgroup, according to legal experts such as Frankfurter Professor of Law Alan M. Dershowitz.

"My own view is that pornography should never be censored, but that certain kinds of explicit threats should be," he said Thursday. "This, however, was not explicit enough. It seemed more like fantasy."

According to United States Attorney Saul A.Green, Baker is being prosecuted solely becausethe name he used for his fictional victim was thatof a fellow Michigan classmate, and the districtattorney's office asserts that by posting thestory Baker threatened his classmate.

A federal statute prohibits the interstatetransmission of a threat to injure.

Baker said he had not spoken to the girl,according to an article in this week's Timemagazine, but that she had been in his Japaneseclass during the fall semester.

According to reports in the Michigan Daily, thestudent newspaper of the University of Michigan, a16-year-old girl in Moscow read the story and toldher father, who told a friend of his, a Michiganalumnus working as a lawyer.

On January 19, the alumnus called schoolofficials, who proceeded to give Baker apsychological evaluation and had him escorted offcampus. Administrators feared that he posed adanger to the girl, identified in court papersonly as "Jane Doe," according to the MichiganDaily.

The University of Michigan Department of PublicSafety contacted Baker the next day regarding hispostings. Baker waived his Miranda rights andadmitted that he had posted the stories to thenewsgroup, according to FBI Agent Greg Stejskal inan affidavit.

Baker gave officials permission to read hise-mail messages. The officials found numerousmessages between Baker and Arthur Gronda, aresident of Ontario, Canada, in which theydiscussed collaborating to commit the acts Bakerhad described.

One of Baker's messages to Gronda read: "Justthinking about it anymore doesn't do the trick. Ineed to Do it," according to U.S. Attorney KenChadwell in court papers.