Kid Safe

I am sitting in my hotel room after an exhausting and inspiring day at the Las Vegas CES.  There is so much for me to write about in the coming weeks.  Technology is really catching up with the trends and habits of parents and children.

Parents are going to have some great new resources available to provide safe, educational, fun environments for their children.  Kids are going to love the emerging technology.

There is a Cell Phone for kids that works off of the "include list" technology that Children's Educational Network uses in our Kid Safe Software.  The Cell phone only allows calls to be made or received from pre-approved phone numbers by their parents; this includes text messaging.   I am very excited about writing more about this product in the very near future.

I also saw some great new educational toys and games for children.  It seems the Consumer Electronics Industry has focused some of their attention on very young children.  There are fun and educational places on the internet for kids as young as three years old.

Internet safety continues to be a hot topic, there are some spectacular new technologies that take safety and protection to a new level.  I can't wait to go through the pile of information and present all this to you.  Keep an eye out on this page over the coming weeks for product and technology reviews.

CHILD ONLINE PROTCTION ACT OVERTURNED!
By RYAN SINGEL
July 23, 2008

A federal appeals court struck down as unconstitutional a Clinton-era law that would have forced websites with adult material to verify visitors' ages, dealing another blow to the government in a 10-year court battle over net censorship.

The 3rd U.S. Circurt Court of Appeals upheld on Tuesday a 2007 lower-court decision that the Child Online Protection Act violated the First Amendment since it was not the most effective way to keep children from visiting adult websites.

Both courts also found that the standards for material that had to be hidden from open browsing were so loosely defined that any content not suitable for a four-year-old would have been hidden behind a age-verification firewall.

"Unlike COPA, filters permit adults to determine if and when they want to use them and do not subject speakers to criminal or civil penalties," the court wrote.

The Justice Department has been defending COPA since its passage in 1998, when the ACLU and others filed suit against the censorship law and won an immediate injunction. Since then, the court battle has made its way twice to the Supreme Court, though the government has never won any clear battles in the dispute.

COPA makes it a crime to knowingly post material that is "harmful to minors" on the web for "commercial purposes" without having some method -- such as a credit card -- to verify a visitor's age.

Critics assailed the law for infantilizing the internet and requiring website operators -- including news sites -- to live in fear of prosecution if even a small part of their website contained adult material.

COPA was intended to be a narrower version of the 1996 Communications Decency Act, which would have catastrophically extended the rules of television 'decency' to the internet had the Supreme Court not emphatically rejected it in 1997.

In its ruling, however, the appeals court did not see much of a difference between the two laws.

"It is apparent that COPA, like the Communications Decency Act before it, 'effectively suppresses a large amount of speech that adults have a constitutional right to receive and to address to one another,' Reno, 521 U.S. at 874, 117 S.Ct. at 2346, and thus is overbroad. For this reason, COPA violates the First Amendment," the judges wrote. "These burdens would chill protected speech."

The ACLU's Chris Hansen, a First Amendment lawyer for the rights group, applauded the decision.

"For years the government has been trying to thwart freedom of speech on the Internet, and for years the courts have been finding the attempts unconstitutional," Hansen wrote in a statement. "The government has no more right to censor the internet than it does books and magazines."

The Justice Department is not pleased with the decision and is reviewing its options, according to spokesman Charles Miller.

"We are disappointed that the Third Circuit Court of Appeals struck down a Congressional statute designed to protect our children from exposure to sexually explicit material on the internet," Miller said.

The ACLU, suing on behalf of Salon magazine sexualhealth.com and the owner of the Urban Dictionary website, successfully argued that the law criminalizes constitutionally protected speech, would drive pornography sites to non-U.S. servers, and prevent the spread of health information due to people's unwillingness to register to read sensitive information.

They also argued the law would apply to anyone who wrote about mature subjects who also happened to have Google or Yahoo ads on their personal blog.

For its part, the government says the law was intended to apply to pornographic websites, not news sites. It also argues COPA's age restrictions would work with content filters.

The government is likely to appeal Tuesday's decision for a full hearing at the appeals court or to the Supreme Court.

CHILD ONLINE PROTECTION ACT OVERTURNED! 

By RYAN SINGEL
July 23, 2008

A federal appeals court struck down as unconstitutional a Clinton-era law that would have forced websites with adult material to verify visitors' ages, dealing another blow to the government in a 10-year court battle over net censorship.

The 3rd U.S. Circurt Court of Appeals upheld on Tuesday a 2007 lower-court decision that the Child Online Protection Act violated the First Amendment since it was not the most effective way to keep children from visiting adult websites.

Both courts also found that the standards for material that had to be hidden from open browsing were so loosely defined that any content not suitable for a four-year-old would have been hidden behind a age-verification firewall.

"Unlike COPA, filters permit adults to determine if and when they want to use them and do not subject speakers to criminal or civil penalties," the court wrote.

The Justice Department has been defending COPA since its passage in 1998, when the ACLU and others filed suit against the censorship law and won an immediate injunction. Since then, the court battle has made its way twice to the Supreme Court, though the government has never won any clear battles in the dispute.

COPA makes it a crime to knowingly post material that is "harmful to minors" on the web for "commercial purposes" without having some method -- such as a credit card -- to verify a visitor's age.

Critics assailed the law for infantilizing the internet and requiring website operators -- including news sites -- to live in fear of prosecution if even a small part of their website contained adult material.

COPA was intended to be a narrower version of the 1996 Communications Decency Act, which would have catastrophically extended the rules of television 'decency' to the internet had the Supreme Court not emphatically rejected it in 1997.

In its ruling, however, the appeals court did not see much of a difference between the two laws.

"It is apparent that COPA, like the Communications Decency Act before it, 'effectively suppresses a large amount of speech that adults have a constitutional right to receive and to address to one another,' Reno, 521 U.S. at 874, 117 S.Ct. at 2346, and thus is overbroad. For this reason, COPA violates the First Amendment," the judges wrote. "These burdens would chill protected speech."

The ACLU's Chris Hansen, a First Amendment lawyer for the rights group, applauded the decision.

"For years the government has been trying to thwart freedom of speech on the Internet, and for years the courts have been finding the attempts unconstitutional," Hansen wrote in a statement. "The government has no more right to censor the internet than it does books and magazines."

The Justice Department is not pleased with the decision and is reviewing its options, according to spokesman Charles Miller.

"We are disappointed that the Third Circuit Court of Appeals struck down a Congressional statute designed to protect our children from exposure to sexually explicit material on the internet," Miller said.

The ACLU, suing on behalf of Salon magazine sexualhealth.com and the owner of the Urban Dictionary website, successfully argued that the law criminalizes constitutionally protected speech, would drive pornography sites to non-U.S. servers, and prevent the spread of health information due to people's unwillingness to register to read sensitive information.

They also argued the law would apply to anyone who wrote about mature subjects who also happened to have Google or Yahoo ads on their personal blog.

For its part, the government says the law was intended to apply to pornographic websites, not news sites. It also argues COPA's age restrictions would work with content filters.

The government is likely to appeal Tuesday's decision for a full hearing at the appeals court or to the Supreme Court.

Duck Story ...
Something really amazing happened in Downtown Spokane. Joel is a loan officer at Sterling Bank. He works downtown in a second story office building, overlooking busy Riverside Avenue. Several weeks ago he watched a mother duck choose the cement awning outside his window as the uncanny place to build a nest above the sidewalk.

The mallard laid ten eggs in a nest in the corner of the planter that is perched over 10 feet in the air. She dutifully kept the eggs warm for weeks and Monday afternoon all of her ten ducklings hatched.
 

Joel worried all night how the momma duck was going to get those babies safely off their perch in a busy, downtown, urban environment to take to water, which typically happens in the first 48 hours of a duck hatching. Tuesday morning, Joel came to work and watched the mother duck encourage her babies to the edge of the perch with the intent to show them how to jump off!
 

The mother flew down below and started quacking to her babies above. In his disbelief Joel watched as the first fuzzy newborn toddled to the edge and astonishingly leapt into thin air, crashing onto the cement below.

My brother couldn't watch how this might play out. He dashed out of his office and ran down the stairs the sidewalk where the first obedient duckling was stuporing near its mother from the near fatal fall.
 

Joel looked up. The second duckling was getting ready to jump! He quickly dodged under the awning while the mother duck quacked at him and the babies above. As the second one took the plunge, Joel jumped forward
and caught it with his bare hands before it hit the cement. Safe and sound, he set it by the momma and the other stunned sibling, still recovering from its painful leap.
 

One by one the babies continued to jump to join their anxious family below. Each time Joel hid under the awning just to reach out in the nick of time as the duckling made its free fall. The downtown sidewalk came
to a standstill. Time after time, Joel was able to catch the remaining 8 and set them by their approving mother.
 

At this point Joel realized the duck family had only made part of its dangerous journey. They had 2 full blocks to walk across traffic, crosswalks, curbs, and pedestrians to get to the closest open water, the Spokane River .
The onlooking office secretaries then joined in, and hurriedly brought an empty copy paper box to collect the babies. They carefully corralled them, with the mother's approval, and loaded them up into the white cardboard
container. Joel held the box low enough for the mom to see her brood. He then slowly navigated through the downtown streets toward the Spokane River, as the mother waddled behind and kept her babies in sight.
 
 
As they reached the river, the mother took over and passed him, jumping into the river and quacking loudly.
At the water's edge, the Sterling Bank office staff then tipped the box and helped shepherd the babies toward the water and to their mother after their adventurous ride.
 

All ten darling ducklings safely made it into the water and paddled up snugly to momma duck. Joel said the mom swam in circles, looking back toward the beaming bank workers, and proudly quacking as if to say, "See? We did it! Thanks for all the help"
 
 
 
Celebrating the Downtown Duck Hero!

The internet has become the predator’s preferred playground.  It’s anonymous and provides these sexual deviants with more protection and more children than they could ever target in a park or schoolyard.  The key is they need to find a willing, or an accommodating, naïve, child/target.  Unfortunately, their internet playground is full of children poised to be targets! 

Pre-teens and teens frequently post information and/or photos of themselves online with either no knowledge of what a dangerous and potentially fatal activity in which they are engaging is, or they are adventurous and trust that they will meet someone who will fulfill their needs. Again, not realizing their lives could either end as a result, or, be ruined forever.

It is important to note that there are approximately one-and-a-half million American children illegally trafficked each year, according to director, Carol Smolenski, of ECPAT (End Child Prostitution and Trafficking).  While the Internet is not responsible for all of these, it certainly is a factor.  Child pornography and exploitation is a billion dollar business, and there is no end in sight.  Everyday, somewhere, there is a child being victimized online.

It doesn’t have to be this way.  It is up to us and our children to know how predators work, what their motives are, and what to do in order to remain safe while enjoying activities on the net.

The first thing to know is that sexual predators continually troll the internet looking for child targets.  They browse personal profiles that children, typically 12-15 year olds, post of themselves on social networking sites, such as MySpace.com, or instant message services.  They also anonymously lurk in the background of chat rooms.  Sometimes they’ll collect information on a particular child before trying to contact them. Other times, if the child’s remarks seem inviting, provocative, or, if the child seems lonely and looking for friends, they’ll make an immediate contact.  The easiest targets are those kids who can be conned into keeping secrets.  Secrecy is key.  You should always educate your children that if anyone whom they have met online asks them to keep a secret, they should report it to you.  Ensure them that they will never get in trouble with you.  This is not a time for punishment, but rather a time for being an understanding parent.  They have fallen prey to a manipulative pedophile.

Sexual predators search for kids who post personal online profiles and are particularly drawn to those kids who post photographs of themselves, give their physical description and include their name, age, sex, and location.  They look for kids who have regular and private access to a computer and are consistently online for long periods of time each day.  They like kids who have few activities or a strong network of friends.  They seek out kids who are vulnerable and willing to keep talking to them.  Vulnerability comes in many forms:  a kid who is sheltered, insecure, unhappy, lonely, or adventurous.  Predators particularly like kids who come from single parent families, are having trouble in school, with friends, or with the law and/or are experimenting with drugs, alcohol, or sex. 

They also like kids who have their own instant message accounts, which today is not uncommon.  Although some predators use email, they prefer to use instant messages because once the instant message window is closed the message seems to disappear; whereas with email, the message has to be manually deleted thus, posing a risk to the predator of getting caught.  Law enforcement estimates that the typical online sexual predator has victimized anywhere from 30 to 150 kids prior to getting caught.

Predators often pose as children or teenagers.  They are experts in what pre-teens and teens have as interests, and they know exactly how they talk.  Their goal is to create a “trust bridge” relationship that becomes more important to the child than the relationship that child has with family and/or friends.  The predator uses the relationship to initiate sexual discussion and activity.  One of the main activities is using a webcam or digital camera to take and email provocative or lewd photos of themselves.  Sometimes these photos are copied and sold to child pornographers or end up on pedophile websites.

Predators need children who will be open to sexual discussions and not terminate the relationship at the first suggestion of sexual activity.  They will expose the child/target to sexual images in an effort to break down their barriers and portray the viewing of sexual photos and deviant sexual activities as “normal”.  If the predator has groomed the child/target well, he/she will put up with this uncomfortable conversation and the viewing of sexual images so as not to lose their new friend.  There is the flip side however, on occasion there will be the child who gets scared or wants to end the relationship.  The predator may threaten the child/victim with exposing them to parents or friends, or depending upon the situation may threaten to harm them or their family, if they fail to “go along”.  Typically however, the predator doesn’t want to alienate the child/target but rather ensure their loyalty and confidence. After all, the final goal is to lure the child into a secret, face-to-face meeting – sometimes including a plan to run away from home or, from the predator’s objective, a plan to kidnap or abduct, or engage in sexual slavery. 
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You may contact Suzanne Stanford, My Internet safety Coach, at:  suzanne@kidsafe.com