Week of August 7th, 2005
The Internet has given rise to some creative, unprecedented police work that is now going on all over the world on behalf of online kids.
By "unprecedented," I mean grown police officers posing online as teenage girls. By talking with teenagers in the community and reading magazines like Seventeen and Teen People, they learn how to "talk" like young teens in online chat, where pedophiles frequently try to contact them (see this Associated Press article
This week, a successful case in Texas, as described by the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children and the Texas Attorney General's office:
According to the latter, "the case came to light after a distraught 12-year-old girl in Missouri reported to her mother that she thought a man who had sent her more than 200 sexually explicit emails had attempted to commit suicide. The child's mother reported the incident to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, which in turn alerted the Beaumont Police Department and Attorney General Abbott's Cyber Crimes Unit. The ensuing investigation revealed evidence that [Muhammad] Qadeer [a citizen of Pakistan living and working in Texas] had sexually solicited the girl."
The mother called the CyberTipline (1-800-843-5678 or CyberTipline.com) after her daughter told her she'd been communicating with this man for almost two months. "During their email communications, the suspect told the child that he loved her and that he was going to kill himself if they could not meet. The child ultimately received an email stating that the suspect was in the hospital, possibly for trying to commit suicide," according to the National Center's press release.
The Tipline immediately contacted the local police. The man was arrested in February, indicted in May, and the following month pleaded guilty to criminal solicitation of a minor, a second-degree felony. He was fined $1,000 and sentenced to three years in prison, and he may be deported after serving that term.
For more on this:
- "Net-related crimes against children: Reality check" about the latest research from the University of New Hampshire's Crimes Against Children Research Center, at NetFamilyNews
- "Pedophiles better at using Internet to prey on kids" from the Associated Press
- "I was groomed online" at the BBC
- "Posing as kids - for their own good" at NetFamilyNews, linking to in-depth coverage at the New York Times (behind a screen requiring payment)
Special note to parents: Having followed online-safety news for eight years, I've seen many reports of successful convictions because of this creative police work, and parents may want to note that very rarely do these cases involve children over 14 (see the UNH research referred to in the first bullet). Very young teens seem to be most susceptible to the overtures of these criminals, and parents need to be engaged in children's chatroom experiences, if chat is even allowed.
In Other News
- Get the patches! If your family computer is a Windows one, be sure to get the new patches Microsoft has just released (if you haven't turned on automatic updates here). Microsoft says three of them are critical to your PC's security. They include a patch bundle for the Internet Explorer browser, and you need it even if you've switched to Firefox, Washington Post security expert Brian Krebs points out.
- New IM worm. Parents of instant-messagers need to be aware that IM and file-sharing are definitely vulnerable points for the family PC. "In June, technicians at the [Akonix] IM security [firm] registered a 400% increase in threats targeting instant messaging and P2P networks," Internet News reports. Last month was better, they said, but there's a new IM worm circulating. Called Chode-D, the spyware-installing worm was deemed "medium risk" by Akonix. It "runs continuously in the background of computers," allowing a "remote intruder" to, among other things, send emails, download software, participate in denial-of-service attacks, steal passwords, and disable anti-virus products.
- Digital music-scene primer. There are so many ins and outs to digital music - the costs, pluses, and minuses of playing, renting, and owning - that few kids, much less parents, can keep up with it all. So the New York Times's David Pogue has provided quite a service in walking us through a bunch of them. For example, if you rent/subscribe and want to move tunes to your MP3 player, note that you need to connect it to "the mother ship" service once a month so those songs don't self-destruct; Yahoo Music lets subscribers swap tunes via Instant Messenger; Wal-Mart has a limited library, but it will press a custom CD for you; and you can only listen (not burn) Rhapsody's free 25 songs a month, but they'll give you a good feel for what's happening on the pop scene. Check it out, and you may be able to help music fans at your house stretch their music budgets.
- A teachable blog. Instead of a teachable moment, how about classroom blogs as ongoing instructional opportunities? Some smart teachers have established blogs (easy-to-update Web sites) to do a number of things: keep parents up on classroom activities, develop students' summarizing and writing skills, and teach kids safe, constructive blogging. An example is the class blog of 5th-grade teacher Mr. Roemer in the St. Petersburg, Fla., area, "among a smattering nationwide," the St. Petersburg Times reports.
- GameSpot's new subscription service. For gamers, it's sort of like an ever-available, create-your-own LAN party or one of those strip-mall game centers in your own home, and it's an interesting development for gamers' parents to know about. GameSpot, a Web site owned by CNET that's visited by some 20 million gamers a month, has started a $9.99-a-month subscription service that allows them to play "at the highest speed connections in online games such as Electronic Arts's Battlefield 2," the San Jose Mercury News reports (Battlefield 2 is rated 13+ for ). Parents may want to be aware that the service also offers discussion groups, voice chat services, and tournaments," which means communicating with strangers, but the service is more for teenagers and experienced gamers focused on the game, so probably less risky than Web-based chat in general.
