Category Archive for : ‘INTERNET SAFETY’

The Supreme Court agreed yesterday to hear a case brought by civil liberties groups that challenges a new law aimed at curbing children’s access to online pornography.  One bid by Congress to shield kids from Internet pornography has already been struck down by the court.  In 1997, the court said, in addition to protecting kids, that law would have prevented adults from viewing the material.  Congress rejigged the law a year later, and passed it again with fewer restrictions.  Even so, civil liberties groups challenged it on the same First

Canada’s government introduced a bill to make it a crime to surf for child pornography on the Internet.  Accessing child pornography would carry a penalty of up to five years in prison.  The bill is not meant to catch people who inadvertently open e-mail attachments or Web pages that have child pornography but those who knowingly cause child pornography to be viewed.  According to the New York Post, the legislation would create new criminal offenses of transmitting child porn, for example by e-mail; of providing child-porn Web addresses; and of

Eric Wahl, a 42-year-old millionaire Manhattan advertising executive, thought he made a date for sex with a 13 year old girl he met on the Internet but his alleged date turned out to be a girlish-looking undercover female detective.  He told the girl to wear her school clothes for their rendezvous.  When they met in Greenwich Village last October and he took her to a nearby hotel room, paying in cash under an alias, he ended up getting handcuffed, fingerprinted and arrested on charges of disseminating indecent material to minors,

On Friday, Republican presidential candidate John McCain told a town meeting at the Greenville Public Library that libraries and schools that offer unlimited Internet access to children should not receive federal money.  He suggests libraries use web filtering devices to limit access to sexually explicit material.  When a mother or father drops their child off at the library they are entrusting the welfare of their child with the librarian, he said.  McCain disagreed with the American Library Association assertion that unlimited Internet access was free speech.

(Greenville, South Carolina)

NEW YORK  

About 35 computer security experts and high-tech professionals in Australia have formed a virtual neighborhood watch, policing the World Wide Web for sites peddling child pornography and in some cases they hack into the site and take them down.  They claim to have taken down

115 web sites already, 85 to 90 of them in the United States.  Members of Condemned.org say they are not vigilantes.  Their activities could make prosecution of these offending web sites more difficult some lawyers and even some crusaders against pornography suggest.

NEW YORK

A computer in a child’s room can be a doorway to an electronic fantasyland that can lead to abduction, rape and even murder.  Sexual predators in New York City sit down at their computers, every night and search for girls and boys ages 11 to 14.  Some of these predators may actually unknowingly be talking to a female in her 30s, who is armed with a semiautomatic and carrying an FBI badge.  An undercover operation, called Innocent Images, that the FBI has been building for the last two