McLaughlin: Online policing is getting results

Myspace, Myspace, and more Myspace is all you see in the news lately. Other popular, so called social networking sites, such as Hi5.com, espinthebottle.com, and tagged.com don’t receive as much attention, but offer the same frills and dangers as Myspace.

Lets begin by saying that social networking sites do provide a wonderful platform which can be used by young adults and adolescents to stay in touch with friends, who may well be scattered across our country given how mobile our society is, not to mention other benefits such as connecting to others with like-interests and to voice opinions in numerous forums.

But this is tempered with not only the usual threats the Internet harbors, but new risks given the different search capabilities and ever present peer pressure issues, which results in some teens opening up an online account on these sites simply because everyone else has one.

But blaming Myspace for problems associated with teens publishing too much personal information, meeting strangers as a result of online communications or posting graphic photographs of themselves, is akin to blaming the telephone company after receiving an obscene telephone call. Myspace is simply a platform; individuals still ultimately have to accept responsibility for their actions.

Myspace describes itself as, “…an online community that lets you meet your friends’ friends”. And further, as a place where you can, “…share photos, journals and interests with your growing network of mutual friends!” Well it is all of that, but it also allows searching through email address, screen names, schools, locations (zip codes) and interests. This is an ideal situation for those with good intentions and those with deviant goals.

This system can also be used by those teens who have a private part of themselves they don’t want their parents, or possibly their peers, to know about.

Given developmental milestones for adolescents such as forming identity, including sexual identity, rejecting parental supervision and forming strong relationships with peers, one can start to understand the behavior of teens on sites such as Myspace. This is an especially vulnerable time for teens to branch out and join a real-life community, let alone a cyber community.

Someone once described the Internet as a place where it is Halloween 365 days a year, because everyone wears a mask. Further complicating keeping adolescents safe on the Internet is their willingness to engage in sexual behavior as a result of being manipulated by an older exploitive adult.

Kenneth V. Lanning (FBI, ret.) describes this behavior of a victim willing to follow the suggestions of an offender as “victim compliance.” The typical prevention program attempts to educate people so they can be safe by adjusting their conduct. However, many teens, not all, want to not only engage in the behavior, but also want to keep its existence secret. This makes our traditional prevention approaches useless and our need to speak directly to adolescents about their being responsible for what they decide to do while online.

During the last six months I have coordinated the arrest of about 40 offenders using Myspace and Hi5. It just makes sense that where the kids are, the offenders who target them can be found. About half of the offenders initially purport to be the age of the child they are interested in, only to revel their true age once the online relationship has matured. Offenders are now getting access to children they would never have had before the Internet was available.

The majority of those children who offenders contact online do reject their approaches, but given the large number of kids they have access to makes up for this rate of rejection, and as a result they can be successful. Further, the Internet allows these offenders to travel to areas where they are not known, thus avoiding detection and where they can move around with a feeling of anonymity.

Remember, few teen victims come forward as a result of these contacts because they believe they will be punished for their part and they perceive themselves as being complicit in what has occurred. For those engaging in homosexual behavior, they are apt to remain quiet because they aren’t ready for their parents or peers to know of their orientation.

Technology has made all sorts of things easier and faster than ever before. This is especially true about photography. Due to the efforts of numerous federal agencies trading in child pornography became difficult before the Internet arrived. Years ago the manufacture of child pornography involved a lot of risks, which as a result of recent technology no longer exist.

Law enforcement pursued those who manufactured child pornography because they were traditionally the main source of contraband. Now a large source of child pornography is the very children in the photographs, who have photographed themselves and published these on Myspace, or send these image files concurrent with real-time chat or over email.

Other children use a Webcam to broadcast, in real-time, as they strip for the camera and engage in sexual acts, either for nothing in return or to get paid through online pay services, which allows them to accept all major credit cards. The deviant and bizarre opportunities the Internet creates for today’s children, pale with what was available years ago. Law enforcement needs to recognize these new threats and temptations and respond accordingly. Although we in law enforcement are still in our infancy when it comes to fighting online crime, some results can be seen exemplified by this offender I recently chatted with:

boiWant2b: no, there’s cops all over that now no one is who they say they are, can never trust it.

Law enforcement cannot arrest its way out of a social problem. A partnership between the police, educators, child protection workers, parents and children needs to take place to minimize the risk children face when they online.