Lords of Death Forums Lords of Death Forums LoD General Discussion The Internet may not be such a dangerous place...

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The Internet may not be such a dangerous place for children after all.

A high-profile task force created by 49 state attorneys general to look into the problem of sexual solicitation of children online has concluded that there really is not a significant problem.

www.nytimes.com/2009/01/14/technology/in...1&ref=technology

The Internet Safety Technical Task Force was charged with examining the extent of the threats children face on social networks like MySpace and Facebook, amid widespread fears that older adults were using these popular Web sites to deceive and prey on children.

But the report cited research calling such fears a ?moral panic,? and concluded that the problem of child-on-child bullying, both online and offline, poses a far more serious challenge than the sexual solicitation of minors by adults.

?This shows that social networks are not these horribly bad neighborhoods on the Internet,? said John Cardillo, chief executive of Sentinel Tech Holding, which maintains a sex offender database and was a member of the task force. ?Social networks are very much like real-world communities that are comprised mostly of good people who are there for the right reasons.?

The report will be released Wednesday, but The New York Times obtained a draft copy. The 39-page document was the result of a year of meetings between dozens of academics, childhood safety experts and executives of 30 companies, including Yahoo, AOL, MySpace, Facebook, Verizon and AT&T.

The task force, led by the Harvard University?s Berkman Center for Internet and Society, looked at scientific data on online sexual predators and found that children and teenagers are very unlikely to be propositioned by adults online. In the cases that do exist, the report said, teenagers are typically willing participants and are at risk in other ways ? because of poor home environments or substance abuse, for example.

Not everyone was happy with these conclusions. Richard Blumenthal, the attorney general of Connecticut, who has agressively pursued the issue and helped to create the task force, said he disagreed with the report. He said it ?downplayed the predator threat,? relied on outdated research and failed to provide a specific plan for improving the safety of social networking.

?Children are solicited every day online. Some fall prey, and the results are tragic,? Mr. Blumenthal said. ?That harsh reality defies the statistical academic research underlying the report.?

Mr. Blumenthal noted that 50,000 convicted sex offenders were found to be using MySpace before the company started filtering its membership rolls against sex offender databases. ?Anybody who tells me sexual predation is a flyspeck on the wall of Internet safety ignores that staggering number,? he said.

The task force?s report criticized previous findings that as many as one in five children are sexually propositioned online, saying that in a strong majority of those situations, a child?s peers are responsible for the proposition, which is typically an act of harassment or teasing.

In what social networks may view as something of an exoneration after years of pressure from law enforcement, the report said that sites like MySpace and Facebook ?do not appear to have increased the overall risk of solicitation.?

That is somewhat surprising, considering the circumstances surrounding the creation of the task force. Attorneys general like Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut and Roy Cooper of North Carolina publicly accused the social networks of facilitating the activities of pedophiles and pushed them to adopt measures to protect their youngest users.

The attorneys general ?saw only one part of the full set of issues, when some kid was molested or something bad happened and they prosecuted someone,? said an Internet executive who did not want to be named because he was speaking before the report?s release. ?The task force did its job filling in the whole picture.?

The attorneys general did pressure the social networks to adopt safety measures like scanning their membership databases for known sex offenders. In creating the task force, they also charged it in part with evaluating technologies that might be able to play a role in enhancing safety for children online.

A special technology advisory board, comprised of academic computer scientists and forensics experts, was created within the task force to look at these technologies. It asked various companies in the industry to submit their child-protection systems.

Among the systems it looked at, the board evaluated so-called age-verification technologies that attempt to authenticate the identities and ages of children and prevent adults from contacting them. But the technology advisory board concluded that such systems ?do not appear to offer substantial help in protecting minors from sexual solicitation.?

One problem is that it is difficult to verify the ages and identities of children since they do not have driver?s licenses or insurance. One popular idea, to rely on schools to assist with the age verification, would place too much of a burden on the educational system, the report said. And it noted that none of these solutions address the larger problem of cyberbullying.

The age verification approach has so many holes that ?you simply can?t use it effectively as a means to protect children,? said Nancy Willard, a childhood safety advocate who submitted written testimony to the task force.

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AHHHH so this is why Skunk came out of hiding.

"What are you doing here Rainman? Take a seat...Take a seat"

-Chris Hansen

So it's totally cool to hit on 13 year old girls on myspace now?
I mean, someone's gotta kick it up a notch to live up to the hype.
I'll take one for the team.