More Aftermath of Recently Issued Report on Internet Safety
Not much need for exposition here. I found these three articles that came out after the Internet Safety Technical Task Force’s Internet Safety report. As you know, it caused a lot of commotion. What happened was really a matter of the report saying one thing, and then some in the media picking out one phrase and running with it, and then, consequently, others saying the media twisted the findings. Ugh.
Bottom line: yes there are predators, but your child is more likely to face issues with cyberbullying and threats from peers – just as they would in real life. In addition, parents need to buck up and keep the internet safe in their house and not rely on developed web technologies, since most are proven ineffective.
So what can parents do? Monitor. It’s simple. Just monitor – KNOW – where your kids go online, who they talk to and how they represent themselves. If you KNOW that, then you will have no problem… and how can you obtain that information and “knowledge”? Easy… PC Pandora computer monitoring software (duh).
Anyway, here are the three articles. Note the three state AGs that are highlighted as having problems with the report, including the Connecticut AG who wants to see sex offender data from MySpace as a result of this report that downplays the threat.
January 16, 2009
Study Finds Few Sexual Predators on Internet
By Brad Stone, Sci-TechToday.comThe task force, led by the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University, looked at scientific data on online sexual predators and found that children and teenagers are unlikely to be propositioned by adults online. In the cases that do exist, the report said, teenagers are typically willing participants.
The Internet may not be such a dangerous place for children after all.
A task force created by 49 U.S. state attorneys general to look into the problem of sexual solicitation of children online has concluded that there really is not a significant problem. The findings run counter to popular perceptions of online dangers as reinforced by depictions in the media.
The task force was charged with examining the extent of the threats children face on social networks like MySpace and Facebook, amid widespread fears that adults were using these popular Web sites to deceive and prey on children.
The report cited research calling such fears a “moral panic” and concluded that the problem of bullying among children, 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 39-page document, a draft of which was obtained before its formal release Wednesday, was the result of a year of meetings between dozens of academics, childhood safety experts and executives of 30 companies, including Yahoo, AOL, MySpace and Facebook.
The task force, led by the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University, looked at scientific data on online sexual predators and found that children and teenagers are unlikely to be propositioned by adults online. In the cases that do exist, the report said, teenagers are typically willing participants and are already at risk because of poor home environments, substance abuse or other problems.
Not everyone was happy with the conclusions.
Richard Blumenthal, the Connecticut attorney general, who has aggressively 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,” Blumenthal said. “Some fall prey, and the results are tragic. That harsh reality defies the statistical academic research underlying the report.”
In what social networks may view as something of an exoneration after years of pressure from law enforcement, the report, by the Internet Safety Technical Task Force, said that sites like MySpace and Facebook “do not appear to have increased the overall risk of solicitation.”
Attorneys general like Blumenthal and Roy Cooper of North Carolina have publicly accused the social networks of facilitating the activities of pedophiles and have pushed them to adopt measures to protect their youngest users. For example, they pressured the networks to scan their membership databases for known sex offenders.
The attorneys general also charged the task force with evaluating technologies that might play a role in enhancing safety for children online. An advisory board of academic computer scientists and forensics experts was created within the task force to look at technologies and ask companies in the industry to submit their child-protection systems.
January 18, 2009
Corbett Calls Internet Safety Task Force Report MisleadingHARRISBURG – Attorney General Tom Corbett today called a recently issued report on Internet safety a setback in developing safety guidelines for children using the Internet.
The Internet Safety Technical Task Force report was issued by the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University. MySpace, at the request of the attorneys general, agreed to create and lead the task force to identify and explore age verification and technologies to improve social networking safety. Although the attorneys general requested the creation of the task force, they did not serve as members.
“I believe this report is incredibly misleading and significantly lessens the progress we have made in implementing safety techniques for children using the Internet,” Corbett said. “Giving parents a false sense of security about their children’s safety online is dangerous, especially when thousands of predators are still trolling the Internet seeking victims.”
“The threat is real,” Corbett said. “In the last four years, my office has arrested 183 predators, all of whom have used the Internet for the purpose of contacting minors to engage in sexual activity.”
Corbett noted that among the predators arrested in child sex stings was a 50-year old male who used chat rooms to solicit young boys to engage in illegal deviant sex acts. Upon further investigation, agents discovered that he was HIV positive and had already had sexual contact with a 14-year old boy.
Corbett said that it is not uncommon for Internet predators to show up at arranged meetings with duct tape, condoms, rope, lubricant, and even presents.
Discussing the report further, Corbett was encouraged that the task force identified 40 technologies and tools to improve social networking site safety. However, he noted that this positive aspect was not the focus of the report. Instead, the task force went to great lengths to deny the existence of a problem, casting blame on the adolescent victims instead of working toward a productive solution.
“Outdated statistics and academic projections are of little comfort to the minors who have been sexually victimized by online predators,” Corbett said. “The mere fact that tens of thousands of registered sex offenders have been removed from MySpace should be sufficient to cause any parent concern.”
Corbett will continue to call upon social networking sites to implement technology to provide greater protection to minors. He will also continue to educate Pennsylvania’s communities and families about safely navigating the Internet and will continue his efforts to protect Pennsylvania’s minors by arresting those who seek to do them harm.
January 23, 2009
Conn. AG to MySpace: Turn over sex offender data
Posted by Elinor Mills, cNet NewsThe Connecticut attorney general’s office on Friday served MySpace a subpoena demanding that MySpace hand over the identities of registered sex offenders it claims the social-networking site discovered and subsequently removed from its roster of members.
Connecticut Attorney General Richard Blumenthal also told CNET News that his office is reviewing independent research about registered sex offenders said to still populate the site. Blumenthal declined to comment on whether he plans to take further action.
Hemanshu Nigam, MySpace’s chief security officer, said in a statement provided via e-mail that MySpace was using “state of the art technology to aggressively identify and remove registered sex offenders from our site.” He added that MySpace was cooperating with Blumenthal and other state attorneys general requesting information.
Law enforcement officials and parents are concerned that sex offenders can easily find victims on social networks. From deleted profile information, officials can see whether sex offenders have violated parole by joining a social network and whether they have been communicating with minors on the site.
Friction between MySpace and the states around this issue is not new. Some attorneys general have criticized the company for failing to do more to keep sexual predators off its site. A couple of years ago, MySpace initially rebuffed efforts to share sex offender data, but the service finally agreed to provide officials with the requested information. It then reportedly removed 29,000 sex offenders from the membership rolls. A year ago, when MySpace reached an agreement with the attorneys general, it said it would cooperate with law enforcement officials and develop technology for age and identity verification.
As social networks have grown in popularity (MySpace had 125 million unique visitors in December), law enforcement agencies have warned about the potential danger to minors posed by sex offenders trolling through cyberspace. Politicians, who have picked up that battle cry, have urged social networks to put in place tougher measures to protect minors.
Politics aside, the threat is not just theoretical. Steve Rambam, who is the director of private investigative firm Pallorium, said he found 100 registered sex offenders with MySpace profiles. One man used his mug shot as his main photo, while another, who was convicted of using the Internet to solicit a minor for sex, lists a 15-year-old girl as a friend on his MySpace page.
In carrying out his research, Rambam said he ran a list of 40,000 registered sex offenders against more than 2 million MySpace member pages. He came up with nearly 12,500 likely matches. After comparing the MySpace member photos with mug shots on a registered offender database, Rambam found 100 confirmed matches and said he would have found more if he had continued the research.
Among those matches, CNET News confirmed that at least half a dozen included registered sex offenders. One member’s MySpace profile headline read, “Daddy, Oh My Goodness,” while another featured a photo caption that reads, “Never accept a ride from a stranger, unless they give you candy first.” A third member, who was convicted of sexual assault, uses violent, misogynistic language on his profile page.
“Based on the number of hits we’re getting as a percentage of genuine MySpace users we believe that there are anywhere from 3,000 to 39,000 sex offenders on MySpace,” Rambam said on Friday.
MySpace is using technology from a company called Sentinel Tech to help find and remove registered sex offenders from the site. According to MySpace, the company takes information members provide when they sign up and information they put on their profile and runs it against Sentinel servers that contain information about registered sex offenders, and follows up with manual checks of suspicious members.
John Cardillo, chief executive of Sentinel, questioned Rambam’s methodology.
“We audit our database against all the sites out there, against the states’ registries and the federal government registries… It could just be an issue of an individual maybe entering false information and we’ll catch them down the road. Without seeing (the research), I can’t really comment on it,” Cardillo said. “MySpace deploys the most robust and impressive scrubbing apparatus in the business.”
Rambam said he stands by his research. “We have a high degree of confidence that the first 100 matches we’ve compiled match on first and last name, city and state, exact age, and the photos clearly show the same person,” he said. “Because of certain information and certain technology we have available to us, we were able to de-anonymize a lot of data and then do a second scrubbing run.”
The matches all came directly from state sex offender registries and from the Megan’s Law sex offender database, all publicly accessible data, Rambam said.
Rambam did the MySpace research on behalf of California lawyer Gary Kurtz, who is representing a company called Blue China Group in defending itself against a spam lawsuit filed by MySpace. “As part of that defense we are investigating a number of aspects about MySpace, and this pedophile issue popped up as something astounding,” Kurtz said.
“These sex offenders and the efforts to find them are a small portion of a year-long investigation we conducted into MySpace,” Rambam said.
“MySpace filed a complaint against Blue China Group in federal court in Los Angeles alleging that BCG repeatedly phished and spammed millions of MySpace users,” MySpace Chief Security Officer Nigam said in his statement. “Unfortunately, while that lawsuit continues, BCG has apparently decided to raise this unrelated issue without providing any data to support its assertions.”
Rambam said two state attorneys general offices have been in contact with him regarding his research. He found hundreds of potential matches from one of the states on MySpace and is preparing a report to give to that agency next week, he said, declining to name the states.
“This ongoing evidence completely refutes claims that child predators are an overblown threat,” said Blumenthal, who is on a panel of 11 state attorneys general who have been investigating MySpace and other social-networking sites. “This is the tip of the iceberg.”
A report issued last week by the Internet Safety Technical Task Force concludes that minors are less vulnerable to sexual predation than previously believed.
