Comprehensive Package Stems from Attorney General Milgram’s Initiatives  Would Enhance Penalties and Laws to Protect Children on the Internet
 
(TRENTON) – Assemblywoman Linda Greenstein and 13 other Assembly Democratic lawmakers today announced they’ve introduced a sweeping 10-bill package that would give law enforcement enhanced abilities to crackdown on child Internet crimes.

The 10-bill package, among other things, would upgrade penalties and crimes for offenders who communicate in a harassing, sexually offensive or abusive manner with minors on Web sites and through electronic communication.

The bills are part of Attorney General Anne Milgram’s Internet safety initiatives.

“This 10-bill package would give law enforcement the tools they need to better protect children who use the Internet for education and recreation,” said Greenstein (D-Middlesex/Mercer), who is sponsoring each bill. “No longer will Web sites be the playgrounds of criminals looking to prey on vulnerable children.”

“My office combats Internet threats by employing an aggressive, multi-pronged approach ranging from criminal and civil investigations to cooperative efforts with networking sites and service providers to education initiatives aimed at teachers, school administrators, parents and students,” Milgram said. “But as we pursued our initiatives, it became clear that it was essential that our criminal and civil enforcement statutes address evolving threats posed by bad actors online. This comprehensive Internet safety legislative package addresses those issues."

Also sponsoring the legislation are Assembly members Wayne P. DeAngelo, Nelson T. Albano, Gary S. Schaer, Matthew W. Milam, Frederick Scalera, John J. Burzichelli, Peter J. Barnes III, Elease Evans, Valerie Vainieri Huttle, Patrick J. Diegnan Jr., Pamela R. Lampitt, Gordon M. Johnson and Douglas H. Fisher.

“It’s a parent’s worst nightmare to realize their child’s safety has been jeopardized simply by using a computer,” said DeAngelo (D-Mercer/Middlesex).  “It’s time New Jersey upgrades its crimes and penalties to assist law enforcement in preventing, investigating and cracking down on cyberspace crimes and abuses that threaten the welfare of our children.”

The 10-bill package is comprised of legislation that would:

• Amend the state’s luring and enticing and endangering the welfare of minors laws to, among other things, expand the definition of “electronic means” to include not only the Internet but also any electronic communication device. (A-3754 – Greenstein/Milam/Barnes/DeAngelo)
• Make it a crime to communicate or transmit sexually suggestive communications to a minor. (A-3755 – Milam/Greenstein/Schaer/DeAngelo)
• Upgrade certain sex crimes against minors. (A-3756 –Greenstein/Albano/DeAngelo/Vainieri Huttle)
• Provide penalties for sexually offensive or abusive communication through social networking Web sites. (A-3757 – Albano/Vainieri Huttle/DeAngelo/Greenstein)
• Require persons subject to Megan’s Law registration to provide law enforcement with any Internet user names. (A-3758 – Greenstein/Diegnan/Barnes/Schaer)
• Upgrade offense of harassment involving the Internet and minors. (A-3759 – Evans/Lampitt/Scalera/Greenstein)
• Authorize wiretap orders for the investigation of luring or enticing a child, identity theft, stalking and harassment under certain circumstances. (A-3760 – Schaer/Johnson/Albano/Greenstein)
• Authorize the interception of wire or electronic communications of a suspected computer trespasser under certain circumstances. (A-3761 – Scalera/Fisher/Milam/Greenstein)
• Require information technology professionals who find child pornography on computers to report the finding to law enforcement. (A-3762 –DeAngelo/Burzichelli/Schaer/Greenstein)
• Create a “Computer Crime Prevention Fund” by imposing a penalty for certain crimes and offenders. (A-3763 –Barnes/Albano/Evans/Greenstein).

“Law enforcement needs the tools to keep pace with today’s ever-changing technology and ward off predators who lurk behind a computer screen in hopes of preying on children,” said Albano (D-Atlantic/Cape May/Cumberland). “This is a common-sense step forward to help give parents peace of mind that we’re doing all we can to protect their children in this technological age.”

“Every parent worries when their child logs onto a computer and enters that new world that has evolved on the Internet,” said Milam (D-Atlantic/Cape May/Cumberland). “It can be a wonderful tool for education and keeping in touch with friends and loved ones, but it can also be a dangerous place. These bills aim to give authorities what they need to keep pace with the criminals.”

Other sponsors released the following statements:

Assemblyman Gary Schaer (D- Passaic/Bergen/Essex):
“Law enforcement needs every available tool at its disposal to ensure the safety of our children when they venture online. This comprehensive package will provide police with the ability to go after online predators before they even have a chance to victimize a child.”

Assemblyman Fred Scalera (D-Essex/Bergen/Passaic): 
“Online stalkers who target children cannot be treated lightly. We need to be able to go after these individuals swiftly and bring the full force of the law to bear.”

Assemblyman John J. Burzichelli (D-Gloucester/Cumberland/Salem):
“Many times we owe prosecutions to average citizens who come across wrongdoing and do the right thing, so we know many people, including information technology professionals, are already willing to help. The proposal to require information technology professionals to report inappropriate child images – or suspicion about such an image – to the proper authorities is just a step toward ensuring everyone does the right thing.”

Assemblyman Peter J. Barnes III (D-Middlesex):
“Fining offenders and using the money to establish a Computer Crime Prevention Fund is a smart way to boost funding and ease the taxpayer burden that comes with investigating and prosecuting computer-related crime and publicizing programs to enhance public awareness of computer-related crime.  Penalizing the people who force us to investigate these nightmarish crimes is sensible public policy that puts the burden on offenders, not taxpayers.”

Assemblywoman Elease Evans (D-Passaic):
“Times and technology have changed and so must our harassment laws. Using the Internet or e-mail to subject another person to hatred, contempt or ridicule is just as much harassment as it would be to do it openly to someone on the street. We cannot tolerate it in either form, but the Internet and its accessibility and ability to quickly spread harassing information makes this bill vital.”

Assemblywoman Valerie Vainieri Huttle (D-Bergen):
“Pedophiles who target children through their computers need to know that when they are caught – and they will be – that they are going to face stiff penalties and jail time.”

Assembly Patrick Diegnan (D-Middlesex): 
“In this day and age anyone can go on the Internet and disguise themselves behind an anonymous user name. That includes sex offenders who would otherwise be subject to community notification laws. Such offenders shouldn’t be able to hide their identify and escape notice simply because they’re logged onto the Internet. They’re no less a threat just because they’re sitting at a keyboard.”

Assemblywoman Pamela Lampitt (D-Camden): 
“Just because someone is using the Internet or e-mail to harass someone doesn’t make it any less of a concern. Our laws need to match the times, and that’s what this legislation will do.”

Assemblyman Gordon Johnson (D-Bergen):
“The efforts of police to get suspected cyber-criminals off-line cannot be stymied by bureaucracy. This legislative package will ensure that law enforcement has the ability to act quickly at the first sign of trouble.”

Assemblyman Douglas H. Fisher (D-Cumberland/Gloucester/Salem):
“Children are the most vulnerable members of our society.  As children embark into a whole new world through the Internet we must ensure that they are thoroughly protected.  We wouldn’t send our kids outside unsupervised or unprotected so we cannot allow them to jump on the information highway without adequate protection from potential harm.”

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Technorati Tags: General, online child safety

By MELISSA HEALY, Los Angeles Times
Since emerging from the primordial ooze, parents have wrung their evolving appendages over ways to shield their offspring from hungry predators, lurking maniacs and strangers from without.

Again and again, they’ve learned, the threat to their children lies uncomfortably closer to home: Lion fathers would sooner eat their unprotected young than hunt wilier quarry; children pictured on milk cartons were more likely to have been snatched from home by a parent than by a stranger.
It was a lesson brought home again in a recent report, when parents learned that the roughly 6 in 10 adolescents who socialize on the Internet have relatively little to fear from potential perverts lurking in the anonymity of cyberspace.

A Harvard University-led task force on Internet safety, ordered by the nation’s attorneys general and meant to expose the full extent of the danger, found instead that kids trading gossip, photos and plans on social networking sites such as MySpace are relatively safe from adults cruising online for sex with minors.
The report, released Jan. 13, counters political calls to protective action with a generally upbeat look at the effectiveness of measures developed by Internet companies to protect kids. It douses parental fretting with research showing that few kids have been subject to such unwanted advances when socializing on sites aimed at the youth market.

Those findings come on the heels of several studies showing that online social networking appears to be a perfectly benign practice for the vast majority of kids, even for those most consumed by the pastime. After a steady diet of warnings that their children’s growing Internet use is a likely cause of academic failure, attention disorders and obesity, a parent could be forgiven for welcoming the news with an audible sigh of relief.
Those parents might want to read to the report’s end, however. The perpetrators of psychological wounds and the stalkers who would steal their kids’ innocence are probably not strangers, the study reported; more likely, they are the spiteful, sulking or silly friends the kids hang out with. Their own offspring might play a significant role in the misbehavior, too.

Bullying and harassment, most often by peers, “are the most frequent threats that minors face,” the report says. Although kids concede that minors routinely proposition other minors for sex on these sites, such incidents “are understudied, underreported to law enforcement, and are not part of most conversations about online safety,” it adds.

“It’s an important message for parents,” says Katherine C. Cowan, communications director for the National Association of School Psychologists and, with four kids ages 17 to 24, a “grizzled veteran” of parenting teens. “Sure, there are crazy sexual predators out there. But the most common problem is kids being mean to each other, and 13-year-old girls posting naked pictures of themselves.”

The highly publicized suicide of a Missouri teenager after a campaign of cyber-bullying has helped solidify parents’ perceptions that malicious adults, not their own children, are the Internet’s main threat.

The message that kids might be their own worst enemies on the Internet resonates with Anthony E. Wolf, a practicing clinical psychologist in Massachusetts and author of “Get Out of My Life, But First Could You Drive Cheryl and Me to the Mall?”

“What are the big problems in cyberspace?” he asks. “One definitely is the stuff that kids do to and with each other. Yes, there’s cyber-bullying, but a pretty surprisingly high percentage of kids on the Internet are talking about drugs, sex and drinking in ways that are semi-innocent and not so innocent at all.”

A survey conducted by the Center for the Digital Future at the University of Southern California’s Annenberg School found that in 2006, 63 percent of parents surveyed believed there were “quite a few” sexual predators on MySpace.

The new attorneys general task force report, “Enhancing Child Safety & Online Technologies,” (viewable at http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/pubrelease/isttf) found that most reports of online sexual predation predate the rise of social networking sites such as MySpace, Facebook and Friendster. It found that most sexual fishing expeditions take place outside these networking sites, in chat rooms and online forums intended for adults.

Moreover, the task force report suggested that parents’ worries may be largely misplaced: In most of the off-line encounters that began on the Internet, it found, “the minor knows the adult is older (usually in his or her twenties), knows that sex is desired and believes that she or he can consent to a sexual encounter.” And although parents appear to believe that most sexual advances are made by older adults, the task force found that almost half of sexual solicitations to kids over the Internet are made by other minors, and most of the rest come from young adults 18 to 25 years old.

Such facts confront many parents with a litany of uncomfortable but age-old conflicts: The kids who are trolling for sex may be our own; the peers with whom these kids are exploring their emerging sexuality have edged out parents as an influence; and these young people are taking risks that parents cannot easily control.

In short, Wolf says, the kids are growing up. Only now their teenage angst is being played out in a medium that “does make certain kinds of naughtiness” — including the posting of suggestive photos — “more possible.” It’s a medium, as well, in which parents feel outrun, outmaneuvered and just plain shut out by the digital pioneers they spawned.

“Kids have left their parents way in the dust in terms of computer savvy and knowledge,” says psychologist Richard A. Lieberman, who coordinates the Los Angeles Unified School District’s Suicide Prevention Unit. “I see parents further behind than ever before” and overwhelmed by the effort to monitor their kids’ electronic and real-life socializing and keep up with their own obligations, Lieberman says.

In a 2007 survey by the Kaiser Family Foundation’s Media and Health project, parents expressed growing confidence that they were cracking into their children’s electronic world. Nearly 3 in 4 surveyed said they knew “a lot” about what their kids were doing online. And among parents of kids who socialized electronically, 82 percent said they reviewed their children’s social networking profiles, 87 percent said they checked their children’s instant-messaging “buddy lists” and 76 percent said they went online to check what Web sites their kids had visited.

Lieberman says that these parents probably are kidding themselves — or that many may be so busy reading over their kids’ shoulders that they fail to get a good reading of the kids themselves.

“I’ve had a parent say, ‘What do you mean my daughter’s depressed and isolated? She has 900 friends on MySpace!’” Lieberman says.

Technorati Tags: General, online child safety

When it comes to determining if you should let your child post personal pictures and videos of themselves online, you, as the parent, should have the final say.  With that said, it is first important to examine the pros and cons of letting your child post these items online.  Pictures and videos are common on social networking websites, like MySpace and Facebook.

In all honesty, the only true pro or plus side to letting your child post videos or pictures of themselves online is because it is what your child wants to do.  Letting them post their pictures and videos online will likely make your child happy.  They can easily share videos and pictures with friends, as opposed to actually bringing them to school. 

As much as your child or teenager may want to post personal pictures or videos of themselves online, it is also important to know that there are many cons or downsides to doing so.  One of those is the wrong impression.  Say you have a teenager daughter who posts a picture of herself wearing a low-cut shirt online.  Even though no cleavage is showing, the picture can create the wrong impression.  Sexual online predators may think she is welcoming attention, and so forth.  You and your child need to know that not everyone interprets things the same way.

Speaking of the wrong impression, it is important to know that pictures and videos can easily fall into the wrong hands online.  If your child is using a social networking website, like MySpace, is their profile set to private?  If not, anyone with their own account can view their private and personal pictures and videos.  Your child may be interested posting pictures and videos to share with their friends, but that doesn’t meant that others can’t see them.  Unfortunately, those others can have impure intentions.
   
Another con or downside to letting your child post personal pictures and videos of themselves online is that they are easy to copy.  Yes, a picture or a video can be taken down, but did you know that it may already be too late?  People can easily copy and repost or copy and save videos and pictures that are posted online for whatever reason, including their own personal pleasure.

As you can see, there are a number of pros and cons to letting your child post pictures and videos of themselves online, namely on social networking websites.  As the parent, the decision is yours to make, but be sure to use your best judgment.  When it doubt, the best answer may be no.

If you do decide to let your child or teenager post personal pictures and videos of themselves online or if you already think that they do, be sure to check them.  Ask to see the photos yourself.  Make sure that your child is well covered in any photographs that they post.  As for videos, make sure they aren’t doing anything illegal, like stealing, or showing anything suggestive, even if it is simply meant as an inside joke among friends.

Technorati Tags: General, online child safety