[Senate Hearing 110-1103]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office]
S. Hrg. 110-1103
PROTECTING CHILDREN ON THE INTERNET
=======================================================================
HEARING
before the
COMMITTEE ON COMMERCE,
SCIENCE, AND TRANSPORTATION
UNITED STATES SENATE
ONE HUNDRED TENTH CONGRESS
FIRST SESSION
__________
JULY 24, 2007
__________
Printed for the use of the Committee on Commerce, Science, and
Transportation
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SENATE COMMITTEE ON COMMERCE, SCIENCE, AND TRANSPORTATION
ONE HUNDRED TENTH CONGRESS
FIRST SESSION
DANIEL K. INOUYE, Hawaii, Chairman
JOHN D. ROCKEFELLER IV, West TED STEVENS, Alaska, Vice Chairman
Virginia JOHN McCAIN, Arizona
JOHN F. KERRY, Massachusetts TRENT LOTT, Mississippi
BYRON L. DORGAN, North Dakota KAY BAILEY HUTCHISON, Texas
BARBARA BOXER, California OLYMPIA J. SNOWE, Maine
BILL NELSON, Florida GORDON H. SMITH, Oregon
MARIA CANTWELL, Washington JOHN ENSIGN, Nevada
FRANK R. LAUTENBERG, New Jersey JOHN E. SUNUNU, New Hampshire
MARK PRYOR, Arkansas JIM DeMINT, South Carolina
THOMAS R. CARPER, Delaware DAVID VITTER, Louisiana
CLAIRE McCASKILL, Missouri JOHN THUNE, South Dakota
AMY KLOBUCHAR, Minnesota
Margaret L. Cummisky, Democratic Staff Director and Chief Counsel
Lila Harper Helms, Democratic Deputy Staff Director and Policy Director
Christine D. Kurth, Republican Staff Director and General Counsel
Kenneth R. Nahigian, Republican Deputy Staff Director and Chief Counsel
C O N T E N T S
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Page
Hearing held on July 24, 2007.................................... 1
Statement of Senator Cantwell.................................... 39
Statement of Senator Inouye...................................... 1
Prepared statement........................................... 1
Statement of Senator Klobuchar................................... 33
Statement of Senator Nelson...................................... 2
Statement of Senator Pryor....................................... 36
Statement of Senator Rockefeller................................. 3
Statement of Senator Stevens..................................... 7
Prepared statement........................................... 7
Witnesses
Allen, Ernie, President and CEO, The National Center for Missing
& Exploited Children........................................... 12
Prepared statement........................................... 14
Finkelhor, Dr. David, Director, Crimes against Children Research
Center, University of New Hampshire............................ 7
Prepared statement........................................... 10
Jones, Christine N., General Counsel and Corporate Secretary, The
Go Daddy Group, Inc............................................ 21
Prepared statement........................................... 23
Nelson, Lauren, Miss America 2007................................ 4
Prepared statement........................................... 5
Neugent, Lan W., Assistant Superintendent, Technology and Human
Resources, Virginia Department of Education.................... 17
Prepared statement........................................... 19
PROTECTING CHILDREN ON THE INTERNET
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TUESDAY, JULY 24, 2007
U.S. Senate,
Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation,
Washington, DC.
The Committee met, pursuant to notice, at 10:06 a.m. in
room SR-253, Russell Senate Office Building, Hon. Daniel K.
Inouye, Chairman of the Committee, presiding.
OPENING STATEMENT OF HON. DANIEL K. INOUYE,
U.S. SENATOR FROM HAWAII
The Chairman. Without question, the Internet provides
extraordinary benefits to our Nation's children. In our
schools, teachers use the Internet and computer technology to
enhance instruction and enrich student learning. At home,
children can use the Internet to exchange e-mail or share
pictures with friends and family, and to get information on
virtually any subject imaginable.
But the power of the Internet is also a source of its
peril. The New Yorker once humorously poked fun at the
anonymity of the Internet, commenting that, ``On the Internet,
nobody knows you're a dog.'' However, there is nothing funny
when that same anonymity can be used to the advantage of online
predators and others who would seek to harm children.
In addition to protecting their children from online
predators, parents also struggle with the challenges of
shielding their children from the significant amounts of
material on the Internet that aren't suitable for children.
While filtering and monitoring technologies help parents to
screen out offensive content and to monitor their children's
online activities, the use of these technologies is far from
universal and may not be foolproof in keeping kids away from
adult material. In that context, we must evaluate our current
efforts to combat child pornography and consider what further
measures may be needed to stop the spread of such illegal
material over high-speed broadband connections.
These are all difficult, yet critically important, issues
that parents and children face in an information age. If we
search for a ``silver bullet,'' we will not find it.
And I will have the rest of my statement made part of the
record.
[The prepared statement of Senator Inouye follows:]
Prepared Statement of Hon. Daniel K. Inouye, U.S. Senator from Hawaii
Without question, the Internet provides extraordinary benefits to
our Nation's children. In our schools, teachers use the Internet and
computer technology to enhance instruction and enrich student learning.
At home, children can use the Internet to exchange email or share
pictures with friends and family, and to get information on virtually
any subject imaginable.
But the power of the Internet is also a source of its peril. The
New Yorker once humorously poked fun at the anonymity of the Internet,
commenting that, ``On the Internet, nobody knows you're a dog.''
However, there is nothing funny when that same anonymity can be used to
the advantage of online predators and others who would seek to harm
children.
In addition to protecting their children from online predators,
parents also struggle with the challenges of shielding their children
from the significant amounts of material on the Internet that are
unsuitable for children.
While filtering and monitoring technologies help parents to screen
out offensive content and to monitor their child's online activities,
the use of these technologies is far from universal and may not be
fool-proof in keeping kids away from adult material.
In that context, we must evaluate our current efforts to combat
child pornography and consider what further measures may be needed to
stop the spread of such illegal material over high-speed broadband
connections.
These are all difficult, yet critically important issues that
parents and children face in an information age. If we search for a
``silver bullet'' solution, we will not find it.
Rather, our efforts must rely on a multi-layered strategy--one that
teaches our children about safe and responsible online behavior; one
that encourages industry action to develop tools that will aid parents
in their efforts to restrict inappropriate material from their
children's access; and one that relies on swift and certain action by
law enforcement officials in finding and punishing those who would use
the Internet to harm children.
We have a very distinguished panel of witnesses today to aid our
review of this subject. I look forward to their testimony.
The Chairman. May I now recognize the distinguished Senator
from Florida, Senator Nelson.
STATEMENT OF HON. BILL NELSON,
U.S. SENATOR FROM FLORIDA
Senator Nelson. Thank you, to my distinguished Chairman.
One of the most insidious, evil things that is happening in
America today is how we are hooking kids through the Internet
to explicit material and Internet pornography. It is a plague
upon this country. And if we don't take some overt steps to
change the legality of this activity, we are going to poison
and infect the minds of our children that will have results
that will last for generations to come.
Over the past couple of years, we've passed a number of
laws, such as the PROTECT Act and the Adam Walsh Act, and made
it harder for online predators to go after the kids online. But
the predators are always a step ahead of us.
We've seen, for example, the activities start to change
from Internet chat rooms to social networking sites, and, on
those sites, sexual predators are often able to mask their
identity and pose as children, themselves, in order to solicit
the children to reveal personal information and to provide
pictures and so forth.
As we work to address these threats, we've got work to do,
but we also need to look at undertaking a comprehensive effort
to educate children about the dangers that lurk on the
Internet. A few states, Mr. Chairman, like Virginia, have
already created comprehensive lesson plans and curricula to
teach Internet safety in their schools. And so, I'm working
with others on this committee to formulate legislation that
would create a pilot program to provide school districts with
grants specifically for Internet safety education.
We teach our kids about school bus safety. We teach them
about fire safety. We teach them about storm safety. Maybe--one
of the most insidious diseases--we ought to teach them about
Internet safety.
Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
The Chairman. I thank you, Senator Nelson.
Now may I recognize the gentleman from West Virginia,
Senator Rockefeller.
STATEMENT OF HON. JOHN D. ROCKEFELLER IV,
U.S. SENATOR FROM WEST VIRGINIA
Senator Rockefeller. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
I like the fact that we're having these hearings, and we're
having quite a lot of these hearings. And it was very
interesting to me, in a hearing we had several weeks ago on a
subject, I think, in which you and I agreed on, that not many
members of the Commerce Committee agree on. And so, it came
down to this--the idea of indecency was not simply--it was not
repellent enough to them, or violence was not repellent enough
to them, or vulgarity was not repellent enough to them, so that
they were unwilling to overlook, at least in some form, the
First Amendment. And it's a little bit like if you're attacked,
as a country, and you decide that you're in a peaceful mood, so
you're not going to raise an army, you're not going to fight
back. I don't think that's the American way. And this meeting
this morning is very much along the lines of trying to alert
people to the fact that, you know, child pornography sites on
the Internet are exploding. They have increased 1,500 percent,
according to the National Children's Home Report, since 1988,
which is quite a long time ago, but that's also a pretty big
increase.
Everybody's always talking about responsible parents, and I
think parents want to be responsible, and parents try to be
responsible, where they can. There are many places where they
can't be, simply because of the situation of their work or
their day. Nobody seems to want to talk about the
responsibility of those who produce all of this, those who pay
for the ads that allow all of this to go onto either the air,
if we're talking about television, movies, or onto the
Internet. In one of the previous hearings, I deliberately
showed some very vulgar stuff that came right off of
children's-hour television, and they said, ``How can you
possibly allow that to go out to children at 10:30 in the
morning?'' Well, of course, it was on C-SPAN, but that didn't
make any difference to them. The point was, you couldn't talk
about anything which would in any way compromise the right of
children to have their minds polluted, and polluted, in fact,
in such a way that many of them will be affected by it for the
rest of their lives.
So, I think this is a very serious subject. I think it has
a lot to do with the future of America. I like what I heard
from the good Senator from Florida, Senator Nelson, what he was
saying. And I think it's a very unfunny subject that's going to
require some rather drastic action which is going to be
displeasing to many. I'm quite prepared to displease the cable
industry, the movie industry, the networks, and all the rest of
them, and the Internet industry. You know, I don't think that's
what's at stake here. I think what's at stake is the health and
the safety and the disposition of our children as they grow
older and what it is they carry in their minds, and what habits
they develop.
Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
The Chairman. I thank you very much.
Before we proceed, I should advise you that I've just
received a note from the leadership that votes will commence at
10:30. So, I may have to call a recess at some later time.
This morning, we have a very distinguished and lovely
panel. We have the lovely Lauren Nelson, Miss America of 2007;
Mr. David Finkelhor, Director of Crimes Against Children
Research Center of the University of New Hampshire; Mr. Ernie
Allen, President and Chief Executive Officer, National Center
for Missing & Exploited Children; Mr. Lan W. Neugent, Assistant
Superintendent for Technology and Human Resources, Virginia
Department of Education; and Ms. Christine N. Jones, General
Counsel and Corporate Secretary, The Go Daddy Group,
Incorporated.
And it's my privilege and pleasure to call upon the lovely
Miss America of 2007, Miss Nelson.
STATEMENT OF LAUREN NELSON, MISS AMERICA 2007
Ms. Nelson. Thank you very much, Senator.
As Miss America, I have the opportunity to travel around
and champion a cause that is very, very important to me. I
travel about 20,000 miles a month, speaking on the issue of
Internet safety, because I had a personal incident with the
issue of Internet Safety.
As a 13-year-old girl, I was having a sleepover with two of
my girlfriends, and we decided that we would get into a chat
room. We were talking with people that we did know and people
that we didn't know, which was our first mistake. And the
conversations continued. We were approached by a man who was
older than us, and he asked us the question, ``ASL,'' which
means, ``Age, Sex, Location.'' And we gave him the information,
willingly, not knowing any better. So, within an instant, he
knew that we were girls, he knew were females, and he knew
where we were in Oklahoma, which is ultimately enough
information for him to track us down. Luckily, that did not
happen, but, about a week later, he sent inappropriate pictures
of himself, and then we alerted our parents, and they alerted
the proper authorities.
These stories happen all the time, and most kids are not as
lucky as I was and as my friends were. Seventeen million
children between the ages of 13 and 17 are online, and one in
five of those children are approached every day by an online
predator. As you said, social networking sites and chat rooms
and instant messaging are huge on the Internet, and it's huge
for our kids. Seventy-one percent of kids have a social
networking site; 64 percent of those kids actually post
pictures and videos of themselves on those sites; and over half
of them leave information on the Internet about where they're
located and where they live. And this is part of the problem.
As I said, through my travels I've had the opportunities to
meet with Ernie Allen, at the National Center for Missing &
Exploited Children, and I've also been introduced to John
Walsh, who is also a huge champion of this issue. After my
introduction to John Walsh, I had the opportunity to work with
the America's Most Wanted television show and do a sting
operation. And, as my participation in the sting operation, I
ultimately was the 14-year-old decoy at the sting house. I
chatted online with these men, I talked on the phone with them
and was the 14-year-old girl that met them at the door that
they followed into the house. So, I've gotten to see, from all
points of view, how this issue affects kids and how it affects
these people that are involved with it.
Through my participation with that operation, I learned a
little bit more about how predators behave. They prey on the
most vulnerable of our children, the kids that are having
problems at home. Maybe they don't have friends at school. But
these kids divulge this information, and these predators know
that, and they use emotional tactics to get in there and to
make sure that they lay the groundwork to make them comfortable
with themselves so that they can get more information with them
and ultimately meet them in person.
I've also had the opportunity to work with Cox
Communications, and, just last month, had the opportunity to be
at the Teen Summit, where we had 14 kids from 14 different
States across the U.S. come and tell us a little bit about
their Internet habits, what they were worried about, and what
they wanted us to do, as adults. And one of the neatest things
that we found that day was that the kids actually want parents
to be involved with what they're doing on the Internet, they
want their parents to ask questions, but they want their
parents to know how to ask the questions, and not to make it an
interrogation.
We also learned that cyber-bullying is a huge problem. Not
only do we have to worry about, now, predators, but we also
have to worry about kids and how they're using the Internet.
There was a story that I recently read, that a child was being
cyber-bullied, and he actually committed suicide because of it,
and his parents had no idea what was going on. Cyber-bullying
is a rampant problem on the Internet.
So, I'm here today to urge you to implement mandatory
education for our children about Internet safety. I know that
computer classes are in high schools, are in even middle
schools, and they're learning ways to use the computer. Why not
implement some Internet education so that they know the
dangers, also the opportunities, of the Internet, but also
learn how to be courteous cyber citizens. We don't allow our
children to cross the street without knowing how to do it. We
don't allow our children to drive a car without giving them
proper education. We shouldn't allow them to go on the Internet
without knowing the dangers and the opportunities at the same
time.
I feel that it's the responsibility of kids, of parents, of
schools, and of government officials to make a change in this
problem.
So, thank you for having me here.
[The prepared statement of Ms. Nelson follows:]
Prepared Statement of Lauren Nelson, Miss America 2007
My name is Lauren Nelson and as Miss America 2007, I am proud to be
here today to discuss the issue of Protecting Children on the Internet.
This is a subject that has personally touched my life. When I was 13
years old, my friends and I were approached on the Internet through a
chat room. We were young and did not know of the dangers of the
internet, so we provided this person with our names, ages, gender, and
our home addresses. A few days later, the individual sent us
inappropriate photos. We were shocked and disgusted. We then told our
parents, who immediately addressed this incident and reported it to the
proper authorities, and luckily we were able to avoid a potentially
dangerous situation.
Not all children are as lucky as my friends and I were.
As Miss America 2007, I have made this issue my personal platform
and I am here today to champion this cause. During my year of service,
I am visiting cities across the country, speaking to parents, children
and the media about the dangers of the Internet and the ways we can
incorporate Internet Safety into our children's lives.
Back in the April, I had the opportunity to meet with the National
Center for Missing and Exploited Children who shared with me their
knowledge of Internet crimes against children. They introduced me to
John Walsh and the television producers for Americas Most Wanted. After
meeting with the producers of AMW, my commitment grew even stronger to
do something that would bring national attention to this issue and get
people talking about ways to stop these horrible crimes against
children.
When I heard about the Sting Operation being conducted by the
Suffolk County Police Department and America's Most Wanted, I
immediately wanted to get involved. My role in the Sting Operation was
to pose as a 14-year-old girl. I would visit chat rooms and wait to be
approached. It was shocking to me how quickly a benign conversation
would turn sexual. The suggestions these men were making coupled with
the fact that they thought they were chatting with a 14-year old, turns
my stomach to this day. It was incredibly disturbing to me how young
teens can so easily be approached on the Internet and ultimately, meet
face to face with very dangerous individuals who disguise themselves
through the veil of the computer. Eleven predators showed up in person
during our Sting Operation . . . and this can not be tolerated in our
society.
Upon my last visit to D.C., I had the opportunity to be a part of
the Teen Summit on Internet Safety with John Walsh and we were amazed
at the teens' responses to the questions regarding their Internet
habits. Can you believe that one out of fourteen teens gives out their
personal information on the Internet without knowing who they are
chatting with?
It is clear that our teens are not adequately educated on the
dangers that the Internet can pose or the consequences they may face by
sharing personal information with strangers. That is the reason I am
here today.
I believe it is time to government to get involved and provide
mandatory education for all of our children. We need to begin educating
children as early as possible. We have all heard someone say ``My kids/
grandkids are quicker on the computer then I am.'' It's so true. Kids
today are growing up using computers from a very early age and using
them on a daily basis. We don't allow our children to ride their bikes
without first teaching them about proper safety and we shouldn't let
them use the computer and access the Internet without taking the same
precautions.
I am here today to ask you to please implement mandatory education
on Internet Safety for all of our children. There should be a mandatory
class on Internet safety that teaches children about how to use the
internet, the potential dangers of the internet, and how to avoid these
dangers.
As students become more proficient on the computer, they should be
taught about the various networking sites and chat rooms, and the
problems that can occur when they mis-use these sites.
Lastly, they should also learn about being responsible cyber
citizens. The issue of cyber-bullying is a growing problem in our
schools today and it must be addressed now. The bullies have moved from
the playgrounds to the internet, and this new form of harassment cannot
be tolerated.
Through proper education, awareness and a national effort supported
by our legislators, we can all begin to make a difference. I sincerely
hope that by using my voice as Miss America to bring awareness to this
subject, that the message of the importance of Internet Safety
education for our children will be heard. Thank you.
The Chairman. Ms. Nelson, I've been in the Government for
many years, and, during that period, I've heard over 1,000
witnesses, and, without question, your testimony is one of the
most informative and articulate. I thank you very much.
Ms. Nelson. Thank you.
The Chairman. Our next witness is Dr. David Finkelhor.
STATEMENT OF HON. TED STEVENS,
U.S. SENATOR FROM ALASKA
Senator Stevens. Mr. Chairman, would you allow me to put my
statement in the record, just----
The Chairman. Without objection.
Senator Stevens.--as though read? Thank you.
[The prepared statement of Senator Stevens follows:]
Prepared Statement of Hon. Ted Stevens, U.S. Senator from Alaska
The Internet is a dynamic space where Americans turn to get
information, do research, and exchange ideas.
Given the increasingly important role of the Internet in education
and commerce, it differs from other media like TV and cable because
parents cannot prevent their children from using the Internet
altogether. The headlines continue to tell us of children who are
victimized online. While the issues are difficult, I believe Congress
has an important role to play to ensure that the protections available
in other parts of our society find their way to the Internet. Since
introducing the Protecting Children Online in the 21st Century Act, my
staff and I have worked with a wide variety of advocacy groups on this
topic. In response to the feedback we have received, my staff are
currently circulating a new draft with four primary goals.
The new measure would:
direct the Federal Communications Commission to identify
industry practices that can limit the transmission of child
pornography;
require schools that receive E-Rate funds to provide age-
appropriate education to their students regarding online
behavior, social networking and cyber-bullying;
require the Federal Trade Commission to form a working group
to identify blocking and filtering technologies in use and
identify, what, if anything could be done to improve the
process and better enable parents to proactively protect their
children online; and
add the selling or purchasing of children's personal
information in connection with a criminal offense in the
criminal code as an indictable offense.
I hope the panelists can give us more insight on what we can do
within the First Amendment to empower parents and whether this bill
heads in the right direction.
The Chairman. Please proceed. Dr. Finkelhor?
STATEMENT OF DR. DAVID FINKELHOR, DIRECTOR, CRIMES AGAINST
CHILDREN RESEARCH CENTER, HORTON SOCIAL SCIENCES CENTER,
UNIVERSITY OF NEW HAMPSHIRE
Dr. Finkelhor. Yes, thank you very much. Appreciate the
invitation to be here and your interest in this very important
issue.
I'm the director of the Crimes Against Children Research
Center at the University of New Hampshire.
Whenever new threats appear on the scene, like SARS or
school-shooters, it's really crucial to characterize them
accurately and as soon as possible, because first impressions
are lasting impressions, and it's often hard to change these
impressions later on. We need accurate and early
characterizations to get people focused on the right thing to
prevent the spread of these dangers.
Now, in the case of Internet safety, though, I'm afraid
that we may be off to a poor start on some issues. I think the
public impression of this crime is really not in sync yet with
the reality, based on what we know from the research. And it's
this reality that I think needs to guide our public education
as we get around to doing it.
The public image of this crime is that we have Internet
pedophiles, who have moved from the playgrounds into your
living room through your Internet service, who are targeting
young children by pretending to be other children, who are
lying about their ages, identities, and motives, who are
tricking kids into providing personal information like their
names and their addresses, or who harvest these things from
MySpace, and then, armed with this information, these criminals
stalk children, abduct them, rape them, or worse.
But, actually, the research suggests a somewhat different
reality. And here's what we've found now, based on hundreds of
cases that we've reviewed from national surveys of law
enforcement agencies and two large national studies of youth
Internet users themselves. Incidentally, all this research is
available in prominent medical and scientific journals. I can
make them available to you, if you'd like.
First we found that the predominant online sex crime
victims are not young children, they are teenagers. And the
predominant crime scenario does not involve violent stranger
molesters posing online as other children in order to set up an
abduction or an assault. It turns out only about 5 percent of
the online sex crimes against children involve violence when
meetings occur, and only 3 percent entail an abduction. And,
interestingly, deception is not a major factor, either. Only 5
percent of the offenders truly concealed the fact that they
were adults from their victims, and 80 percent, by contrast,
were quite explicit about their sexual intentions toward the
kids in their interactions with them somewhere along the line.
So, these are not primarily violent sex crimes, but,
rather, I would characterize them as criminal seductions that
take advantage of common teenage vulnerabilities. The offenders
lure teens to meet them for sexual encounters after weeks of,
very often, quite explicit online conversations that play on
the teen's desire for romance, adventure, sexual information,
and understanding. And, as Lauren said, these are often
troubled youth with histories of family turmoil and physical
and sexual abuse, as well.
So, to take a representative case, Jenna, a 13-year-old
girl from a divorced family, she frequently went to sex-
oriented chat rooms, under the screen name ``evil--girl.''
There, she meets a 45-year-old guy, Dave. He flatters her,
gives her gifts, talks to her about intimate things, and then
drives across several State lines to meet her for sex; on
several occasions, in motel rooms. Dave is arrested with her in
one of these rooms. Jenna resists cooperating with the police.
And many of the Internet sex crimes have commonalities with
this case. In 73 percent of the crimes, the youth go to meet
the offender on multiple occasions, for multiple sexual
encounters. Half the victims were described by the police
investigators as ``being in love'' or ``feeling close
friendship'' with the offender. In a quarter of the cases, the
victims actually ran away from home to be with the offender.
And I think these are aspects of Internet crimes against
youth that haven't been fully incorporated into our thinking
yet, and they have lots of implications for prevention. So, for
one thing, we think it means that we have to make sure our
messages are directed at teens, teens themselves, in language,
in format, and from sources that they relate to. We've directed
a lot of our information, up until now, at parents; but, many
of these teens are under limited parental influence.
We also have to get beyond blanket warnings about not
giving out personal information. Our research, in fact, has
suggested that giving out personal information is not what puts
kids at risk, neither does having a blog or a personal website
or a MySpace social networking site. What puts kids in danger
for these crimes is being willing to talk online about sex,
with strangers, having multiple risky activities on the Web,
like going to these chat rooms or sex sites, or interacting
with a lot of people online whom they don't know. It's the kids
who move toward, rather than away from, the first signs of
danger that I think we need to be thinking about.
So, in order to prevent these crimes, we have to broach
more awkward and complicated topics that start with an
acceptance of the fact that some teens are curious about sex.
They are looking for romance and adventure online. We need to
talk with them frankly about some of the risky things that they
may be contemplating; why hooking up with a 32-year-old guy has
major drawbacks, like jail or bad publicity or public
embarrassment; why they should be discouraging, not
patronizing, sites and people who are doing offensive and weird
things online, fascinating as these things might seem to them.
We also need to do things like making it easier for teens
to report the come-ons and the sexual picture requests. We need
to empower bystanders to take action. There are often friends
or online observers in chat rooms who may see what's happening,
but who today aren't doing anything to stop it.
We could also do things like task some of our Federal
agencies, like the CDC, OJJDP, organizations like the NCMEC, to
help design scientifically grounded prevention programs that
address these issues and that can be disseminated to educate
youth based on proven effectiveness. And this is important. I
don't think we should be just telling people to do prevention
without providing solid guidelines about what really works.
And, unfortunately, I'm not sure that we know, yet, exactly
what works.
We also need law enforcement training, so that they know
how to handle these cases, and how to deal with the fact that
the kids in these cases are often reluctant, as witnesses, and
make prosecution difficult. They need to know how to work with
them to bring them along.
We need training for school officials, mental health
professionals. These are the kind of people who have contact
with some of these at-risk youth before they get into trouble.
And then, we need ongoing research just to keep tabs on
what kids are experiencing and also what law enforcement is
encountering, because one of the things about the Internet
environment is that it is a very rapidly changing one, and the
threats and dangers can morph very quickly, and we have to stay
on top of these changes. We don't want to be responding to
yesterday's problems. We don't, also, want to be
overgeneralizing from a single high-profile incident.
For example, I think we could use an annual assessment of
threats to kids in the Internet environment, something like the
annual Monitoring the Future, national survey about drug usage,
that gives us clues about new trends in drug usage that may be
plaguing the youth population.
But the prevention challenges here aren't easy. Like
discouraging kids from smoking or drinking, simple scare
tactics really don't work. The challenge requires some really
very deft maneuvering within the teen psychology, which is
often obscure, to figure out what will stick there. And, in the
meantime, we have to be cautious about promoting messages that
may simply turn teens off or that betray a completely
unrealistic take on the Internet, and that may make them less
receptive to the authoritative sources that we really want them
ultimately to trust on this issue. I don't think we should
allow a sense of crisis to mobilize us into misguided crusades.
So, I'm saying we have to do our homework, we have to do
our research. So much happens online that's hidden. But if we
want to stop these Internet crimes, we have to understand the
details of what's going on. It's as simple and as complicated
as that.
Thank you.
[The prepared statement of Dr. Finkelhor follows:]
Prepared Statement of Dr. David Finkelhor, Director, Crimes against
Children Research Center, University of New Hampshire
Whenever any new threats appear on the scene, from SARS to school
shooters, it is so crucial to characterize them accurately and as soon
as possible, because first impressions are lasting impressions, and it
is hard to change them later. We need such accurate and early
characterizations to get people to be focused on the right things to do
to prevent the spread of the danger.
Now in the case of Internet sex crimes against children, I'm afraid
we may already be off to a poor start. The public impression of this
crime is not in sync with the reality of this crime based on what we
now know from the research, the reality that I think needs to guide our
public education.
The public impression about this crime is that we have ``Internet
pedophiles", who have moved from the playgrounds into your living room
through your Internet service, who target young children by pretending
to be other children, who lie about their ages, identities and motives,
who trick the children into providing personal information like their
names and addresses, or who harvest it from MySpace; and then armed
with this information, these criminals stalk the children, abduct them,
rape them or worse.
But our research suggests a different reality. Here's what we have
found based on hundreds of cases retrieved from national surveys of law
enforcement agencies, and two large national interview studies of youth
Internet users themselves, all this research is available now in
articles in prominent medical and scientific journals.
First, we have found that the predominant online sex crime victims
are not young children, but rather teenagers. And the predominant crime
scenario does not involve violent stranger molesters posing online as
other children in order to set up an abduction and an assault. Only 5
percent of the online sex crimes against children involved violence
when meetings occurred, only 3 percent entailed an abduction.
Nor is deception a major factor. Only 5 percent of offenders truly
concealed the fact that they were adults from their victims and 80
percent by contrast were quite explicit about their sexual intentions
toward these kids in their interactions with them.
These are not mostly violent sex crimes but rather criminal
seductions that take advantage of common teenage vulnerabilities. The
offenders lure teens to meet them for sexual encounters after weeks of
very often quite explicit online conversations that play on the teen's
desires for romance and adventure and sexual information and
understanding. These teens are often troubled youth with histories of
family turmoil and physical and sexual abuse as well.
Jenna was a computer-savvy 13 year old, from a divorced family who
frequented sex-oriented chat rooms under the screen name ``evil--
girl.'' There she meets a 45 year old, Dave. He flatters her, gives her
gifts, jewelry, talks about intimate things and drives across several
states to meet her for sex on several occasions in motel rooms. When
Dave is arrested with her, Jenna resists cooperating with police.
Many of the Internet sex crimes have commonalities with this case.
In 73 percent of these crimes, the youth go to meet the offender on
multiple occasions, for multiple sexual encounters. Half the victims
were described by police investigators as being in love with or feeling
close friendship with the offender. In a quarter of the cases the
victim actually ran away from home to be with the offender. These are
aspects of Internet crimes against youth that haven't been fully
incorporated into our thinking.
They have lots of implications for prevention. For one thing, we
think it means that we need to make sure our messages are directed at
teens, in language and format and from sources they relate to. Teens
themselves, not primarily parents. Many of these teens may be under
limited parental influence.
We also have to go beyond blanket warnings about not giving out
personal information. Our research with youth suggests that giving out
personal information is not what puts kids at risk. Nor does having a
blog or a personal website or frequenting My Space. What puts kids in
danger for these crimes is being willing to talk about sex online with
strangers, and having a pattern of multiple risky activities on the
web--like going to sex sites and chat rooms, and interacting with lots
of people there. It's kids who move toward rather than away from the
first signs of danger.
So to prevent these crimes, we have to take on more awkward and
complicated topics and start with an acceptance of the fact that some
teens are curious about sex and looking for romance and adventure
online: We need to talk to them frankly about the risky things they
might be contemplating--about why hooking up with a 32 year old has
major drawbacks, you know, like jail, bad press, public embarrassment ;
and why they should be discouraging, not patronizing, sites and people
who are doing offensive things online, fascinating as they may seem.
We also need to make it easier for teens to report the come-ons and
the sexual picture requests, and we need to empower by-standers to take
action--that is, the friends and the online observers in chat rooms,
who may see this happening but today do little to stop it.
We need to task agencies that know about prevention, like CDC and
OJJDP and NCMEC, to help design scientifically grounded prevention
programs that address these issues and that can then be disseminated to
educate youth based on their proven effectiveness. We shouldn't just
tell people to do prevention without providing solid guidelines about
what really works. And unfortunately, I am not sure we that we know yet
what really works.
We need training for law enforcement, so they know how to handle
these cases and the often reluctant kids whom they need as witnesses to
prosecute the offenders.
We also need training for school officials and mental health
professionals, so they, too, can help some of these at risk kids before
they get into trouble.
And then we need ongoing research to keep tabs on what kids are
experiencing and what law enforcement is encountering, because in this
rapidly changing technological environment the threats and dangers can
morph so very quickly. We have to stay on top of them. We don't want to
be responding to yesterday's problem. We don't want to be over-
generalizing from one single, high profile incident. So for example, I
think we need an annual assessment of threats to kids in the Internet
environment, something like the annual Monitoring the Future national
survey about drug usage.
The prevention challenges here are not easy. Like discouraging kids
from smoking or drinking, the simple scare tactics often don't work.
This challenge too may require very deft maneuvering within the teenage
psychology to get the message to stick. And in the meantime, we need to
be cautious about promoting messages that turn teens off or that betray
a completely unrealistic take on the Internet and which may only make
them less receptive to the authoritative sources that we want them
ultimately to trust on these issues. We shouldn't allow a sense of
crisis to mobilize us into misguided crusades.
So we have to do our homework. We have to do our research. So much
of what happens online is so hidden. But if we want to stop these
Internet crimes, we have to understand the details of what is going on.
It is as simple and as complicated as that.
The Chairman. I thank you very much.
May I now call upon Mr. Ernie Allen.
STATEMENT OF ERNIE ALLEN, PRESIDENT AND CEO, NATIONAL CENTER
FOR MISSING & EXPLOITED CHILDREN
Mr. Allen. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
Mr. Chairman, let me first express my gratitude to this
Committee, which I know has examined this issue and discussed
this issue for some time. I was honored to appear before this
Committee last fall in a similar hearing that resulted in a
number of initiatives, including Senator McCain and Senator
Schumer's SAFE Act legislation, which we think provides a major
step forward. So, we're delighted to be here with you again.
What I would like to do is talk briefly about what we have
learned, at the National Center for Missing & Exploited
Children, about this problem.
Since 1998, with the mandate of Congress, we have operated
the CyberTipline, the 911 for the Internet, handling reports
from the public and from Internet service providers regarding
child sexual exploitation online. Two weeks ago, we handled our
500,000th report. And what we have learned is that this is a
huge and evolving challenge for law enforcement, for the
public, and for communities.
The challenges include technology challenges. For example,
last year, working with six major Internet companies, we
created a technology coalition in an effort to develop new
technology to identify illegal images online, and interdict
them, including creating a database of known images so that we
can prevent their reaching consumers.
Another challenge is the growth of digital photography, Web
cams and the ease of creating images. Dr. Finkelhor talked
about the fact--and, in his research, demonstrates--that,
increasingly, many of these images are self-created. Kids are
taking photos and distributing themselves, having either been
seduced or at least insufficiently sensitive to the risks which
they're posing.
In 1982, the Supreme Court of the United States said that
child pornography is not protected speech; it's child abuse.
And, as a result, through law enforcement efforts, it largely
disappeared from the shelves of adult bookstores and through
the mail. What we now know is that it went underground, and,
when it went underground, with the advent of the Internet, it
exploded. I talk frequently about one case, generated from a
lead we received at the CyberTipline, that led us to husband-
and-wife entrepreneurs who decided to go into the child
pornography business. When the site was shut down and they were
arrested, these people had 70,000 customers, paying $29.95 a
month and using their credit cards to access graphic images of
small children being raped and sexually assaulted.
New technology has enabled child pornographers to stay a
step ahead of law enforcement. For example, many distributors
of child pornography are now using peer-to-peer file-sharing
networks, which do not use a central server, depriving law
enforcement of an identifiable Internet Protocol, or IP,
address.
Wireless technology, with the increase in connectivity
enabling people to access the Internet through wireless
devices, has increased the size of this problem.
In 1998, this Congress mandated electronic service
providers to report child pornography on their systems to law
enforcement via the National Center for Missing & Exploited
Children. The good news is that today 327 electronic service
providers are regularly reporting. The bad new is, thousands
more aren't. We have worked with the U.S. Internet Service
Providers Association, developing best practices regarding
guidelines to address this problem. The major ISPs are
reporting, but our concern is that safe havens are being
created in nonparticipating ISPs, and we need to do more about
it.
The U.S. Department of Justice has indicated that the
underlying statute is flawed, and this is one of the issues we
discussed with this Committee last year. We need to fix that
statute so that every ISP is required to report.
There is another missing link. Currently, the statute
constrains the National Center, in that we are only able to
forward those leads to U.S. law enforcement. One major ISP
tells us, for example, that much of its system is used in
Brazil. That provider wants to send us information about child
pornography they find on their customers' accounts to Brazilian
law enforcement. We're precluded from doing that.
There is another missing link that we've discussed in the
past. Once our CyberTipline analysts, who look at these images,
triage them, use search tools and techniques to try to identify
who the sender, who the distributor is, and then provide them
to the appropriate law enforcement agency--once they've done
that, there can be no prosecution until the date and time of
that online activity is connected to an actual person. And
there is currently no requirement for providers to retain
connectivity logs for their customers on an ongoing basis. Some
have policies on retention, many of them excellent. But they
vary, are not implemented consistently, and are far too short a
time to have meaningful prosecutorial value.
We've taken some new initiatives. In the area of commercial
child pornography, through the leadership of Senator Shelby,
who was then the chairman of the Senate Banking Committee, in
the Banking Committee, we've created a financial coalition
against child pornography that includes 29 major companies,
including MasterCard, Visa, American Express, Bank of America,
Citibank, Google, Yahoo!, AOL, Microsoft. The goal is to follow
the money. These are illegal transactions and an illegal use of
the payment system. Law enforcement gets first crack, but law
enforcement can't possibly arrest and prosecute everybody, so
we're trying to use existing law, existing banking law, to stop
the payments, shut down the accounts, and put these people out
of business. The goal is to increase the risk and eliminate the
profitability.
Mr. Chairman, I don't come before you today with a quick,
easy solution to the problem, but I can state unequivocally
that the advent of the Internet has provided predators with
means to entice children into sexual acts, and sustain--and
create--a new lucrative illegal commercial enterprise based on
victimizing children. Federal, State, and local law enforcement
are more aggressive in this effort than ever before. There is a
new Justice Department initiative, called Project Safe
Childhood, which is attacking this problem. But they face
significant barriers. I hope that you, in this Committee, can
help us remove some of those barriers and help us identify and
prosecute more of the individuals who are preying upon children
online.
[The prepared statement of Mr. Allen follows:]
Prepared Statement of Ernie Allen, President and CEO,
The National Center for Missing & Exploited Children
Mr. Chairman and distinguished Members of the Committee, as
President of the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children
(NCMEC), I welcome this opportunity to appear before you to discuss
crimes against children on the Internet. NCMEC joins you in your
concern for the safety of the most vulnerable members of our society
and thanks you for bringing attention to this serious problem facing
America's communities.
Let me first provide you with some background information. NCMEC is
a not-for-profit corporation, mandated by Congress and working in
partnership with the U.S. Department of Justice as the national
resource center and clearinghouse on missing and exploited children.
NCMEC is a true public-private partnership, funded in part by Congress
and in part by the private sector. Our Federal funding supports
specific operational functions mandated by Congress, including a
national 24-hour toll-free hotline; a distribution system for missing-
child photos; a system of case management and technical assistance to
law enforcement and families; training programs for Federal, state and
local law enforcement; and programs designed to help stop the sexual
exploitation of children.
These programs include the CyberTipline, the ``9-1-1 for the
Internet,'' which serves as the national clearinghouse for
investigative leads and tips regarding crimes against children on the
Internet. The Internet has become a primary tool to victimize children
today, due to its widespread use and the relative anonymity that it
offers child predators. Our CyberTipline is operated in partnership
with the Federal Bureau of Investigation (``FBI''), the Department of
Homeland Security's Bureau of Immigration and Customs Enforcement
(``ICE''), the U.S. Postal Inspection Service, the U.S. Secret Service,
the U.S. Department of Justice's Child Exploitation and Obscenity
Section and the Internet Crimes Against Children Task Forces, as well
as state and local law enforcement. Leads are received in seven
categories of crimes:
possession, manufacture and distribution of child
pornography;
online enticement of children for sexual acts;
child prostitution;
child-sex tourism;
child sexual molestation (not in the family);
unsolicited obscene material sent to a child; and
misleading domain names.
These leads are reviewed by NCMEC analysts, who visit the reported
sites, examine and evaluate the content, use search tools to try to
identify perpetrators, and provide all lead information to the
appropriate law enforcement agency. The FBI, ICE and Postal Inspection
Service have ``real time'' access to the leads, and all three agencies
assign agents and analysts to work directly out of NCMEC and review the
reports. The results: in the 9 years since the CyberTipline began
operation, NCMEC has received and processed more than 500,000 leads,
resulting in hundreds of arrests and successful prosecutions.
However, despite this progress the use of the Internet to victimize
children continues to present challenges that require constant
reassessment of our tools and methods. As technology evolves, so does
the creativity of the predator. New innovations such as webcams and
social networking sites are increasing the vulnerability of our
children when they use the Internet. New technology to access the
Internet is used by those who profit from the predominantly online
market in child pornography and seek to evade detection by law
enforcement.
Today, NCMEC is working with leaders in many industries involved
with the Internet in order to explore improvements, new approaches and
better ways to attack the problems. We are also bringing together key
business, law enforcement, child advocacy, governmental and other
interests and leaders to explore ways to more effectively address these
new issues and challenges.
Last year, six Internet industry leaders, AOL, Yahoo, Google,
Microsoft, Earthlink and United Online, initiated a Technology
Coalition to work with us to develop and deploy technology solutions
that disrupt the ability of predators to use the Internet to exploit
children or traffic in child pornography. The Technology Coalition has
four principal objectives:
1. Developing and implementing technology solutions;
2. Improving knowledge sharing among industry;
3. Improving law enforcement tools; and
4. Researching perpetrators' technologies to enhance industry
efforts.
Bringing together the collective experience, knowledge and
expertise of the members of this Coalition, and applying it to the
problem of child sexual exploitation, is a significant step toward a
safer world for our children.
In June 2006, NCMEC hosted a Dialogue on Social Networking Sites
here in Washington, D.C. We did this to respond to the increased
attention to these hugely popular sites that permit users to create
online profiles containing detailed and highly personal information,
which can be used by child predators to forge a ``cyber-relationship''
that can lead to a child being victimized. This vigorous and
informative discussion brought together leaders from the technology
industry, policymakers, law enforcement, academia and children's
advocacy groups. We learned a lot about why children are drawn to these
sites, the technological capabilities and limitations of the site
operators who are concerned about the safety of their users, and how
law enforcement sees these sites as both a danger to kids and a useful
source of information in investigating cases. NCMEC is continuing to
work with several social networking sites on ways to make children less
vulnerable.
Another challenge is the widespread use of the webcam, which offers
the exciting ability to see the person you're communicating with over
the Internet. While this has many benefits, such as allowing divorced
parents to have ``online visitation'' with their children in distant
states, it, too, can be used to exploit children. The reports to our
CyberTipline include incidents involving children and webcams. Many
children are victimized inadvertently, by appearing on their webcams
without clothes as a joke, or on a dare from friends, unaware that
these images may end up in a global commercial child pornography
enterprise. Other children are victims of blackmail, threatened with
disclosure to friends and family if his or her `performance' before the
webcam doesn't become more sexually explicit. Too much technology and
too much privacy, at a sexually curious age, can lead to disastrous
consequences.
But the most under-recognized aspect of the Internet is how it is
used to distribute child pornography. It is not an exaggeration to
state that this is a crisis of global proportions.
Following the Supreme Court's 1982 decision in Ferber v. New York,
holding that child pornography was not protected speech, child
pornography disappeared from the shelves of adult bookstores. The U.S.
Customs Service launched an aggressive effort to intercept it as it
entered the country and the U.S. Postal Inspection Service cracked down
on its distribution through the mails. However, child pornography did
not disappear, it went underground.
That lasted until the advent of the Internet, when those for whom
child pornography was a way of life suddenly had a vehicle for
networking, trading and communicating with like-minded individuals with
virtual anonymity and little concern about apprehension. They could
trade images and even abuse children ``live,'' while others watched via
the Internet.
Then law enforcement began to catch up, and enforcement action came
to the Internet. The FBI created its Innocent Images Task Force. The
Customs Service expanded its activities through its Cyber Crimes
Center. The Postal Inspection Service continued and enhanced its strong
attack on child pornography. Congress created and funded the Internet
Crimes Against Children (ICAC) Task Forces at the state and local
levels across the country. There are currently forty-six ICAC Task
Forces and the Adam Walsh Act, enacted 1 year ago, will create ten
more. Child pornography prosecutions and convictions have increased.
But we should have no illusions about the impact of these
initiatives on what has become a financially lucrative industry.
The Internet has revolutionized the commercial markets for
virtually every type of goods and services that can be sold.
Unfortunately, this also includes goods and services that subsist on
the victimization of children. In a recent case investigators
identified 70,000 customers paying $29.95 per month by credit card for
Internet access to graphic images of small children being sexually
assaulted. In our experience, most of the consumers are here in the
U.S., and we have found that of the 820 identified victims in NCMEC's
Child Victim Identification Program, a startling number of these
children are also here in the U.S.
A recent report by McKinsey Worldwide estimated that today
commercial child pornography is a multi-billion-dollar industry
worldwide, fueled by the Internet. There is also strong evidence of
increasing involvement by organized crime and extremist groups. Its
victims are becoming younger. According to NCMEC data, 19 percent of
identified offenders had images of children younger than 3 years old;
39 percent had images of children younger than 6 years old; and 83
percent had images of children younger than 12 years old. Reports to
the CyberTipline include images of brutal sexual assaults of toddlers
and even infants. These are images that no one here could previously
even imagine. But they have become all-too-common in the new world of
child pornography and child sexual exploitation. Children have become,
simply put, a commodity in this insidious commercial enterprise.
New technology has allowed this industry to stay one or two steps
ahead of law enforcement. Many distributors of child pornography are
using peer-to-peer file-sharing networks, which does not use a central
server, thereby depriving law enforcement of an identifiable Internet
Protocol (IP) address, which is key evidence in investigating and
prosecuting these cases. When we receive these reports to the
CyberTipline, it is almost impossible to identify the perpetrators
responsible for trading the illegal files. The anonymity of recent
peer-to-peer technology has allowed individuals who exploit children to
trade images and movies featuring the sexual assault of children with
very little fear of detection.
Wireless access to the Internet permits predators to ``piggyback''
on others' wireless signals, trade images, and remain undetected by law
enforcement because of the difficulty in locating the piggybacking
activity, compounded by the increasing use of wireless access cards
manufactured overseas which use radio channels not authorized by the
Federal Communications Commission. Wireless technology has also enabled
the trading of these images via cell phone--making the operation of
this enterprise not only mobile, but also able to fit inside a pocket
and easily discarded to avoid detection.
Another obstacle to overcome is the reporting of child pornography
found on customers' accounts by electronic service providers (ESPs) to
NCMEC. Though apparently mandated by Federal statute, 42 U.S.C.
Sec. 13032, not all ESPs are reporting and those that do report are not
sending uniform types of information, rendering some reports useless.
Some ESPs take the position that the statute is not a clear mandate and
that it exposes them to possible criminal prosecution for distributing
child pornography themselves. In addition, because there are no
guidelines for the contents of these reports, some ESPs do not send
customer information that would allow NCMEC to identify a law
enforcement jurisdiction. As a result, potentially valuable
investigative leads are left to sit in the CyberTipline database with
no action taken. Together with the U.S. Internet Service Providers
Association (USISPA) we developed `best practices' reporting guidelines
to address this problem. The major ESPs are following these
guidelines--for example, AOL, Microsoft, and Yahoo. However, these are
voluntary rather than mandatory, so there is no enforcement mechanism
for those who choose not to follow them.
This reporting statute also constrains NCMEC in that it permits us
to forward the CyberTipline leads only to U.S. law enforcement. This is
a real problem, considering the global nature of the Internet. As an
example, there is a portion of one major ESP system based in the U.S.
that is used primarily in Brazil. This ESP wants us to send information
about child pornography they find on their customers' accounts to
Brazilian law enforcement. But we are prohibited from doing so.
There is also another necessary yet missing link in the chain from
detection of child pornography to conviction of the distributor. Once
the CyberTipline analysts give law enforcement all the information they
need about specific images traded on the Internet, there can be no
prosecution until the date and time of that online activity is
connected to an actual person. There is currently no requirement for
ESPs to retain connectivity logs for their customers on an ongoing
basis. Some have policies on retention but these vary, are not
implemented consistently, and are for too short a time to have
meaningful prosecutorial value. One example: law enforcement discovered
a movie depicting the rape of a toddler that was traded online. In
hopes that they could find the child by finding the producer of the
movie, they moved quickly to identify the ESP and subpoenaed the name
and address of the customer who had used that particular IP address at
the specific date and time. The ESP was not able to provide the
connectivity information. To this day, we have no idea who or where
that child is--but we suspect she is still living with her abuser.
We think this is just not acceptable.
One of our new initiatives treats this industry like the business
that it is. Our goal: to eradicate commercial child pornography. Our
mission: to follow the money. This new initiative is the Financial
Coalition Against Child Pornography.
First, we will aggressively seek to identify illegal child
pornography sites with method of payment information attached. Then we
will work with the credit card industry to identify the merchant bank.
Then we will stop the flow of funds to these sites. The Coalition is
made up of major financial and Internet companies, including
MasterCard, Visa, American Express, Bank of America, Citibank,
Microsoft, America Online, Yahoo and many others. We are working to
bring new members into the Coalition every day, especially
international financial institutions.
The first priority in this initiative is criminal prosecution,
through referrals to Federal, state, local or international law
enforcement in each case. However, our fundamental premise is that it
is impossible to arrest and prosecute everybody. Thus, our goal is
twofold:
1. To increase the risk of running a child pornography
enterprise; and
2. To eliminate the profitability.
NCMEC is working hand-in-hand with both law enforcement and
industry leaders to explore the best techniques for detection and
eradication, and serves as the global clearinghouse for this effort,
sharing information in a truly collaborative way.
Mr. Chairman, I don't come before you today with a quick, easy
solution to the problem of child sexual exploitation, but I can state
unequivocally that the advent of the Internet has provided predators
with the means to both entice children into sexual acts and sustain a
lucrative commercial enterprise that demands the heinous victimization
of children. We suspect that the problem of child pornography will
continue to increase as distributors search for lower risk avenues with
a lower possibility of being detected. Federal, state and local law
enforcement are more aggressive than ever before, but they must
overcome significant barriers. I hope that you can help us remove some
of those barriers and help us identify and prosecute those who are
misusing the Internet for insidious, criminal purposes. Too many child
pornographers feel that they have found a sanctuary, a place where
there is virtually no risk of identification or apprehension.
NCMEC urges lawmakers, law enforcement and the public to take a
serious look at the dangers threatening our children today, and to move
decisively to minimize the risks posed by those who exploit new
technology and target our children.
Now is the time to act.
Thank you.
The Chairman. I thank you very much, Mr. Allen. And we'll
try our best to do that.
Mr. Allen. Thank you, Sir.
The Chairman. Our next witness, Mr. Lan Neugent, Assistant
Superintendent for Technology and Human Resources.
STATEMENT OF LAN W. NEUGENT,
ASSISTANT SUPERINTENDENT, TECHNOLOGY AND HUMAN RESOURCES,
VIRGINIA DEPARTMENT OF EDUCATION
Mr. Neugent. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
Mr. Chairman and Members of the Committee, my name is Lan
Neugent, and I am the Assistant Superintendent for Technology
and Human Resources at the Virginia Department of Education,
and past Chairman of the State Educational Technology Directors
Association, SETDA. I am very pleased to be here today to share
Virginia's perspective on education's role in protecting
children on the Internet.
House Bill 58, introduced by Delegate William H. Fralin,
Jr., and passed by the 2006 Virginia General Assembly, was
signed into law by Governor Timothy M. Kaine on March 7, 2006.
This new law made Virginia the first State in the Nation to
require Internet safety to be integrated into all instructional
programs statewide. The law expanded the existing statute,
which was adopted in 1999. The existing statute defined
acceptable use policies and practices; the new law added the
requirement that the Superintendent of Public Instruction issue
Internet safety guidelines to school divisions. I do have a
copy of this, and I do believe that it's in your packet.
Dr. Tammy McGraw, Director of the Department of Education's
Office of Educational Technology, and her staff were charged
with developing these guidance documents for local school
divisions. The overall approach was to be one of balance,
recognizing the need to address the rights and the risk and the
highlights and the benefits of the use of the Internet in
schools. We wanted this guidance to reflect our belief that the
Internet offers unprecedented access to resources that can
enhance learning, research, communication, exploration of new
ideas, and expressions of creativity. At the same time, we
wanted educators and students to understand that the dangers
associated with the Internet are real, significant, and
constantly changing.
To develop the guidelines, agency staff consulted with
students, parents, educators, researchers, law enforcement
officials, local and State and Federal representatives, and
independent nonprofit organizations. These consultations, and
an extensive review of research and resource materials, led to
the following essential conditions regarding an effective
Internet safety program:
First, Internet safety must be a shared responsibility.
Children and the many adults in their lives all play important
parts in ensuring safe and responsible Internet use. In
developing the guidelines for schools, we identified key issues
that each role in every group, from students to board members,
should know.
Second thing, Internet safety must be integrated into the
curriculum and be part of teachers' daily practice. Our work
showed that Internet safety cannot be covered in a single
lesson or a unit by use of a single program or resource. The
Internet is pervasive in children's lives. Strategies for
ensuring safe and responsible use must reflect the many ways in
which children experience the Internet. We developed a guide to
provide teachers with strategies for addressing Internet safety
in the context of Virginia's standards of learning.
There are many high-quality resources available to schools
free of charge; however, schools and family need to be aware
that they exist. We have reviewed many excellent resources that
address various aspects of Internet safety for schools and
families. Our greatest challenges are helping schools identify
the most appropriate resources and assuring that they have the
ability to use these resources effectively to cover the full
spectrum of issues.
Unlike books and other traditional resources, Internet
content changes every second of every day. As a result, we
routinely apprise school divisions of new developments related
to Internet safety. Our information briefs provide summaries of
the most current research. This is a continued process, due to
the ever-changing risk of the Internet.
Technical assistance and professional development must be
available to school divisions as they design locally
appropriate programs for their students. Each community is
unique, and Internet safety issues tend to vary greatly from
one part of the Commonwealth to another. We provide technical
assistance as divisions move forward with designing their
comprehensive Internet safety programs. Divisions request
assistance from the State Department of Education on a wide
range of Internet-related issues; most notably, they struggle
with the need to balance safety and security with instructional
innovation. Social networking sites and blogs have been
particularly challenging for school divisions.
Virginia is fortunate to have approximately 1500
instructional technology resource teachers. These are folks who
work directly with schools to help integrate technology into
instruction. These highly skilled educators receive extensive
professional development and support from our agency. They, in
turn, provide training and support for the teachers in their
schools. Library media specialists and school administrators
also receive development through conferences and regional
events. These educators are essential to our Internet safety
program implementation. Program implementation must be
monitored to assure quality and effectiveness.
To assist division superintendents, we have developed a set
of rubrics--that's also in your packet--that measure the degree
to which each division has adapted its acceptable-use policy
and implemented an Internet safety program. These tools enable
divisions to track their progress and determine technical
assistance needs.
Also, public-private cooperation is essential. Protecting
children on the Internet is a daunting task, as you heard from
many of the speakers, that requires the commitment of everyone.
We have been particularly successful in working with other
organizations, both private and public, to advance Internet
safety in Virginia. Attorney General Bob McDonnell launched
an--Youth Internet Safety Task Force, comprised of leaders from
prominent Internet companies, educators, parents, elected
officials, and law enforcement, to identify solutions for the
growing problem of sexual offenders and other criminals who use
the Internet to target children and teenagers in the
Commonwealth. This group's work has formed the basis for
significant legislation and programs to advance Internet safety
in Virginia.
We have also worked closely with Bedford County Sheriff
Michael J. Brown on the Operation Blue Ridge Thunder Internet
Crimes Against Children Task Force, as well as Jane Madison's
University Institute for Infrastructure and Information
Assistance, the National Cyber Security Alliance, and other
organizations devoted to Internet safety and security.
Furthermore, we have engaged in direct dialogues with companies
to help shape their products and their services to address
Internet safety concerns.
All of these efforts are converging toward one principal
objective: maximizing the potential of the Internet, while
ensuring the safety of each student. Safe and responsible
Internet use is at the forefront of our efforts, even as we
develop cutting-edge Internet applications that range from
online testing to studying astronomy in the daytime through a
remotely controlled telescope in Australia.
Thank you.
[The prepared statement of Mr. Neugent follows:]
Prepared Statement of Lan W. Neugent, Assistant Superintendent,
Technology and Human Resources, Virginia Department of Education
Mr. Chairman and Members of the Committee, my name is Lan Neugent
and I am the Assistant Superintendent for Technology and Human
Resources at the Virginia Department of Education and past Chairman of
the State Educational Technology Directors Association. I am pleased to
be here today to share Virginia's perspective on education's role in
protecting children on the Internet.
House Bill 58, introduced by Delegate William H. Fralin, Jr., and
passed by the 2006 Virginia General Assembly, was signed into law by
Governor Timothy M. Kaine on March 7, 2006. This new law made Virginia
the first state in the Nation to require Internet safety to be
integrated into all instructional programs statewide. The law expanded
the existing statute, which was adopted in 1999. The existing statute
defined acceptable use policies and practices; the new law added the
requirement that the Superintendent of Public Instruction issue
Internet safety guidelines to school divisions.
Dr. Tammy McGraw, Director of the Department of Education's Office
of Educational Technology, and her staff were charged with developing a
guidance document for local school divisions (See Appendix
A*). The overall approach was one of balance, recognizing
the need to address the risks and highlight the benefits of Internet
use in schools. We wanted this guidance to reflect our belief that the
Internet offers unprecedented access to resources that can enhance
learning, research, communications, exploration of new ideas, and
expressions of creativity. At the same time, we wanted educators and
students to understand that the dangers associated with the Internet
are real, significant, and constantly changing.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
\*\ All appendices to this document are retained in Committee files
and can be found at www.doe.virginia.gov.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
To develop the guidelines, agency staff consulted with students;
parents; educators; researchers; law enforcement; local, state and
Federal representatives; and independent nonprofit organizations. These
consultations and an extensive review of research and resource
materials led to the following essential conclusions regarding an
effective Internet safety program:
Internet safety must be a shared responsibility.
Children and the many adults in their lives all play important
roles in ensuring safe and responsible Internet use. In developing the
guidelines for schools, we identified key issues that each role group--
from students to school board members--should know.
Internet safety must be integrated into the curriculum as part of a
teacher's daily practice.
Our work showed that Internet safety cannot be covered in a single
lesson or unit or by using a single program or resource. The Internet
is pervasive in children's lives; strategies for ensuring safe and
responsible use must reflect the many ways in which children experience
the Internet. We developed a guide to provide teachers with strategies
for addressing Internet safety in the context of Virginia's Standards
of Learning (See Appendix B).
There are many high-quality resources available to schools free of
charge; however, schools and families need to be aware that
they exist.
We have reviewed many excellent resources that address various
aspects of Internet safety for schools and families. Our greatest
challenges are helping schools identify the most appropriate resources
and ensuring they have the ability to use these resources effectively
to cover the full spectrum of issues. Unlike books and other
traditional resources, Internet content changes every second of every
day. As a result, we routinely apprise school divisions of new
developments related to Internet safety. Our information briefs provide
summaries of the most current research (See Appendix C). This is a
continual process due to the ever-changing risks on the Internet.
Technical assistance and professional development must be available to
school divisions as they design locally appropriate programs
for their students.
Each community is unique, and Internet safety issues tend to vary
greatly from one part of the Commonwealth to another. We provide
technical assistance as divisions move forward with designing their
comprehensive Internet safety programs. Divisions request assistance
from the state Department of Education on a wide range of Internet-
related issues; most notably, they struggle with the need to balance
safety and security with instructional innovation. Social networking
sites and blogs have been particularly challenging for school
divisions.
Virginia is fortunate to have approximately 1,500 instructional
technology resource teachers who work directly in schools to help
integrate technology into instruction. These highly skilled educators
receive extensive professional development and support from our agency.
They, in turn, provide training and support for the teachers in their
schools. Library media specialists and school administrators also
receive professional development through conferences and regional
events. These educators are essential to our Internet safety program
implementation.
Program implementation must be monitored to ensure quality and
effectiveness.
To assist division superintendents, we have developed a set of
rubrics that measure the degree to which each division has adapted its
acceptable use policy and implemented an Internet safety program (See
Appendix D). These tools enable divisions to track their progress and
determine technical assistance needs.
Public-private collaboration is essential.
Protecting children on the Internet is a daunting task that
requires the commitment of everyone. We have been particularly
successful in working with other organizations, both public and
private, to advance Internet safety in Virginia. Attorney General Bob
McDonnell launched a Youth Internet Safety Task Force comprised of
leaders from prominent Internet companies, educators, parents, elected
officials, and law enforcement to identify solutions to the growing
problem of sexual offenders and other criminals who use the Internet to
target children and teenagers in the Commonwealth. This group's work
has formed the basis for significant legislation and programs to
advance Internet safety in Virginia.
We have worked closely with Bedford County Sheriff Michael J. Brown
and the Operation Blue Ridge Thunder Internet Crimes Against Children
Task Force as well as James Madison University's Institute for
Infrastructure and Information Assurance, the National Cyber Security
Alliance, and other organizations devoted to Internet safety and
security. Furthermore, we have engaged in direct dialogues with
companies to help shape their products and services to address Internet
safety concerns.
All of these efforts are converging toward one principal objective:
maximizing the potential of the Internet while ensuring the safety of
each student. Safe and responsible Internet use is at the forefront of
all our efforts, even as we develop cutting-edge Internet applications
that range from online testing to studying astronomy in the daytime
through a remotely controlled telescope in Australia.
The Chairman. I thank you very much.
And may I now call upon Ms. Christine Jones.
Ms. Jones?
STATEMENT OF CHRISTINE N. JONES, GENERAL COUNSEL AND CORPORATE
SECRETARY, THE GO DADDY GROUP, INC.
Ms. Jones. Good morning, Chairman Inouye and Members of the
Committee. I'm Christine Jones, General Counsel and Corporate
Secretary of The Go Daddy Group.
Go Daddy's principal business is domain name registration.
We are currently the largest domain name registrar in the
world. We have something on the order of 22 million domain
names under management. We register a domain name once every 2
seconds, or less. And every single one of those domain names
has the potential to become a website that children can look
at. The amount of data--as you mentioned in your opening
statement, Mr. Chairman--online is simply overwhelming, and we
cannot look at all of it to make sure that it's OK.
I want to make a distinction between a domain name
registrar and an Internet service provider, just to make the
point. For example, if you wanted to register
ChairmanInouye.com, you could go to Go Daddy and register that
name, except that I already registered it, in anticipation of
this hearing, so now you can't, but, nevertheless, that's what
we do.
[Laughter.]
Ms. Jones. OK. I'll give it to you at the end of the day.
OK. And Mr. Stevens, you know we went through this once before,
as well. A domain name--and I gave him a domain name, for the
record.
[Laughter.]
Ms. Jones. A domain name is different from a traditional
ISP, in that the ISP provides the access to the Internet, so
through a DSL line or a cable modem or even an old-fashioned
dial-up connection. The registrar provides the entrance to
establishing the presence on the Internet. So, in your case,
ChairmanInouye.com.
We also host a substantial volume of Internet data. That
means once you build your Website, you have to have a computer
to put it on. We provide those computers, and we have a whole
lot of them. So, we end up seeing a lot of what Ms. Nelson and
Dr. Finkelhor and Mr. Allen and Mr. Neugent talked about, on a
daily basis. And we devote substantial resources to working
with law enforcement, the National Center, other watchdog
groups, and others, to help protect children from Internet
predators.
This can be frustrating, because it seems like the number
of ``bad guys'' is growing faster than the number of ``good
guys.'' And we count ourselves among the ``good guys,'' by the
way.
Six years ago, when I joined Go Daddy, we had one guy, one
employee, working on these types of issues. Today, we have two
full departments that run 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, with
dozens of employees that do nothing but try to respond to
issues of child pornography, child modeling, online harassment,
cyber bullying, inappropriate content, outright child
predators, like the one that Ms. Nelson talked about, and other
issues affecting children and their use of the Internet. It is
a huge and growing, menacing problem.
And, despite our efforts and the efforts of many of my
esteemed colleagues here, there are still grave dangers for
children who spend time online, some of which Senator Nelson
mentioned in his statement.
Not one single day passes when we don't have at least one
example of something nefarious happening. I mean, every single
day. These include school districts calling us, asking us to
remove websites where children are being harassed or
threatened; parents calling us, because their children have
been approached by adults in online communication communities;
videotaped kidnappings--I'm not kidding you--some real, some
not--that we work with the FBI on; and so on and so on and so
on.
There's one very real example I wanted to share to make a
point, that we must educate children and parents about the
risks of sharing information about themselves online.
A few months ago, we got a call from MySpace, the social
networking community. They told us that there was a website
online that had about 60,000--that's six with a zero, 60,000--
MySpace user name and passwords posted on the website for
everybody in the whole world to see. MySpace asked us to take
that website down. And we thought, OK, that sounds like a good
idea, we don't want MySpace user names and passwords out on the
Internet for people to see. Most of those are run by children.
A lot of those children put information about themselves out
there. So, we took it down.
The gentleman who ran the website immediately removed the
content. We put the website back up. There was no problem with
that. The entire thing lasted about an hour. But, I want to
tell you, the amount of outrage and backlash that we
experienced as a result of taking that down was phenomenal. To
this day, there are full-blown websites devoted to criticizing
our decision for removing that content.
I don't know what people would have had us to do. Leave the
user names and passwords out there, so that everybody can go
stalk Ms. Nelson, like the gentleman that did that to her when
she was 13? I don't know, you tell me.
Many people, I think, would simply rather that the Internet
be a free exchange of ideas, with no rules and no oversight.
They have little or no concern for the potential dangers this
model creates for children.
Because so much of the burden, therefore, rests on parents,
we would encourage the Committee to focus on ways to educate
both children and parents about the dangers of using the
Internet. Apparently, protecting your MySpace data with a user
name and password is not good enough anymore.
I would say most major corporations want to do whatever
they can to help. The legitimate ones, the ones that Mr. Allen
is talking about, that his organization works with. But we need
to have some tools, to be effective, as Mr. Allen mentioned in
his testimony.
So, Mr. Inouye, thank you so much for the kind invitation
to testify. We are grateful that this Committee is once again
looking at this issue and for your leadership on this, and for
recognizing that the problem of exploitation of children
online, generally--and, specifically, child pornography--is a
growing and unacceptable problem that must end. And we are
committed to working with law enforcement to see to it that
that happens.
Thank you.
[The prepared statement of Ms. Jones follows:]
Prepared Statement of Christine N. Jones, General Counsel and Corporate
Secretary, The Go Daddy Group, Inc.
Introduction
Good morning, Mr. Chairman and Members of the Committee. I am
Christine Jones, General Counsel and Corporate Secretary of The Go
Daddy Group, Inc.
Background
The Go Daddy Group, Inc. consists of eight ICANN Accredited domain
name registrars, including Go Daddy.com. We have over 22 million domain
names under management, and are the number one domain name registrar in
the world. GoDadd registers a domain name every 2 seconds or less. Go
Daddy is also a large hosting provider.
A domain name registrar serves as the point of entry to the
Internet. For example, Chairman Inouye, if you wanted to register the
domain name www.ChairmanInouye.com, you could go to www.GoDaddy.com to
register that domain name. A domain name registrar is different from a
traditional Internet Service Provider (ISP), such as AOL, MSN, or
EarthLink. The ISP provides access to the Internet whereas the
registrar provides the registration service for .com names and the
like. In short, in exchange for a fee, the ISP provides the means by
which an Internet user connects to the Internet via a dial-up
connection, cable modem, DSL, or other connection method. A registrar,
on the other hand, enables Internet users to establish a web presence
by registering a unique name such as www.ChairmanInouye.com.
Once www.ChairmanInouye.com is registered, you would need to build
a website and find a place to store, or ``host,'' that website. Again,
you could go to www.GoDaddy.com for storage, or hosting, services. A
hosting provider differs from a traditional ISP in that the hosting
provider supplies space on a computer that is accessible from the
Internet rather than access to that computer which is provided by the
ISP.
How Go Daddy Deals With Online Child Predators
The Go Daddy Group devotes considerable time and resources to
working with law enforcement to preserve the integrity and safety of
the Internet by quickly closing down websites and domain names engaged
in illegal activities. We work with law enforcement agencies at all
levels and routinely assist in a wide variety of criminal and civil
investigations. We are also quick to respond to public complaints of
spam, phishing, pharming, and online fraud and work closely with anti-
fraud and security groups such as the Anti-Phishing Working Group,
Digital Phish Net, the National Center for Missing and Exploited
Children, and CyberTipLine. Go Daddy has made it a high priority to use
its position as a registrar to make the Internet a better and safer
place. It is also a priority for me personally.
My staff routinely investigates and suspends sites involving child
pornography and exploitation of children in many forms and degrees of
severity. These include, but are not limited to, the following: 1)
sites depicting children of both genders engaged in sexual acts with
adults or other children; 2) sites depicting children nude or exposing
inappropriate areas of their bodies; 3) sites advertising, advocating,
or promoting sexual relations with minors; and, 4) sites with false or
altered images depicting children in various sexual situations. Our
investigations have also uncovered sites containing photographs,
videos, and text descriptions; children depicted in a sexually
solicitous manner; sites that claim only to be ``nudist'' sites, but
include pictures of naked children; and, even cartoon images depicting
sex acts with infants and small children. We take each instance
seriously and devote high priority attention to ensuring such websites
are removed from our network, as described in more detail below.
The Domain Name Registration Process
The domain name registration system is entirely automated. There is
no human intervention into the process. Because many words have
multiple meanings and combinations of words can be used for both
legitimate and illegitimate purposes, no domain names are automatically
prohibited from registration. As mentioned above, Go Daddy registers a
domain name once every 2 seconds or less. This makes it virtually
impossible for a human being to verify the legitimate use of every
domain name registration, particularly on an ongoing basis. To
compensate for this, we have developed a notification system for
reporting instances of all types of network abuse, including child
pornography (hereinafter, ``CP''), to our Network Abuse Department.
The Notification Process
With over 22 million domain names under management, most of our
data come from third party complaints or notices. The Go Daddy Network
Abuse Department can receive information that a CP site may be residing
on our network in several ways: 1) direct complaint from a third party
via email; 2) direct complaint via telephone; 3) tip from Go Daddy
employees who have either become aware of, or suspect the existence of,
CP on a customer site; and, 4) notifications from CyberTipLine and
other ``watchdog'' groups.
The Investigation Process
Once Go Daddy is made aware that a potential CP site is registered
through Go Daddy, we immediately investigate to determine whether there
is CP content, and if so, whether that customer has other domain names
resolving to the site with the CP content, and whether there are other
hosting sites in the customer's account which contain CP content.
In many cases, Internet users can only access CP content by
supplying a paid-for membership user name a password. While we cannot
investigate content that requires payment to access, we do investigate
all web pages found to be freely accessible to Internet uses without a
user name and password for any site that we suspect may be involved in
CP. If the site is hosted by Go Daddy, we may also access content
directly in the customer's hosting account to ensure we eliminate all
CP content. Often, the operators of websites of a pornographic nature
are guarded about images on publicly accessible landing pages and store
the most offensive content in directories that site visitors can only
reach with payment.
After we determine that there is content meeting the criteria for
classification as CP, we archive a screenshot (in the case of a
registered domain) and all or partial content (in the case of a hosted
site) sufficient to demonstrate evidence of CP for future use in law
enforcement investigations.
The Reporting Process
Once Go Daddy's investigation is complete, we report the offending
domain names, websites, and registrant information to law enforcement.
We give law enforcement a short time period to request that we leave a
website in tact to assist in their investigations. This allows
authorities to expeditiously gather screenshots, downloads, WHOIS data,
and other information necessary for further investigation. We also
report the offending domain names, websites, and registrant information
to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC) via
their online submission and complaint area, CyberTipLine.
The Suspension Process
After the offending domain names, websites, and registrant
information have been investigated and reported, we permanently suspend
our services. It is important to note that domain names are not
suspended prior to the investigation and reporting processes,
especially where domain names are not associated with an active
website. It is very difficult for us to suspend a domain name before it
is associated with an active website because many words have multiple
uses. And, if there is no CP content associated with a particular
domain name, there is no reason to suspend the domain name itself
because there is nothing unlawful about a domain name, in and of
itself.
How Go Daddy Deals With Private Domain Name Registrations
Go Daddy offers privacy services for domain name registrations. A
private domain name registration is recorded through a proxy
registrant. This enables a domain name registrant to avoid publication
of their personal information in the public WHOIS data base. We find
that most of the users of the private registration service are
legitimate users; bad actors typically do not want to pay extra to hide
their WHOIS data when they are probably going to provide false WHOIS
data, anyway. Most CP sites do not have privacy protection on them.
More often, the registrant simply provides false, but valid looking,
WHOIS data, upon registration.
The registration process for a domain name is exactly the same
regardless of whether the customer chooses to enable privacy. While we
do not have different rules for registering a domain name with privacy,
we do use our Universal Terms of Service broadly to cancel privacy when
the Go Daddy Abuse Department determines it is being used for ANY
improper purpose. Go Daddy also gives law enforcement the proxy
registrant information on private domain name registrations when they
are investigating a domain name with privacy. In the case of a CP site,
this information is voluntarily provided to law enforcement during the
notification process described above.
Child Pornography Statistics
Go Daddy investigates thousands of domain names and websites each
year for CP. The number of unique customers investigated in the past
twelve months was approximately 1,500. (This number does not include
the child modeling sites discussed below which are growing in numbers
daily.) The number of domain names investigated each year is much
higher than the number of unique customers investigated. One unique
customer may have many domain names in one account. Once we find out
about potential CP in a customer's account, we look to determine what
other products they may have associated with CP. Many times, one
customer will have literally hundreds of domain names on account. In
those cases, we suspend ALL the domain names with CP, not just the one
upon which we received a complaint or notification.
Importantly, these numbers are skewed slightly lower because many
times when Go Daddy is the registrar, but not the hosting provider, the
website content has already been removed by the hosting provider by the
time we conduct our investigation. This is a result of third party
complaints being sent to both the domain name registrar and the hosting
provider at the same time. This is a sign that many hosting providers
take complaints of CP as seriously as we do and we are, of course,
grateful when we find that they are fully cooperating with us to rid
the Internet of CP content.
Approximately 70 percent of the sites we suspend are registered,
but not hosted, with Go Daddy. This means that in about 70 percent of
the investigations we conduct, we find that the website content itself
is stored by another hosting provider and Go Daddy provides the domain
name registration service only. Approximately 80 percent of the CP
websites we investigated in the past year were registered to an
individual or company in Eastern Europe. The most common areas were
Russia, Ukraine, and Romania. Importantly, the majority of CP sites we
investigated in the past twelve months were registered fraudulently.
This makes identifying the exact nation of origin difficult, and brings
into question the reliability of numbers we collect.
How Go Daddy Deals With Child Modeling Websites
Much like CP websites, we routinely investigate and suspend sites
involving child modeling. These include, but are not limited to, the
following: 1) images of underage children posing in a manner intended
to be explicitly sexy. (e.g., emphasizing genital areas or posing in
situations easily identified with sex); 2) images of underage children
in adult lingerie; and, 3) images of children in states of partial
nudity or very little clothing not associated with normally acceptable
situations. Images of a child in a bikini swimming at a pool would not
be considered. Images of the same child in a thong bikini laying on a
bed and spreading her legs would be.
As these sites typically do not rise to the level of technical CP,
we classify these sites as ``morally objectionable,'' a term taken from
our Universal Terms of Service. We tend to be more aggressive than most
registrars on child modeling sites. We typically remove them, even if
we can't find CP, because our experience has been that the operators of
child modeling sites tend to be associated, even if attenuated, with CP
in some way. We also remove the non-traditional forms of CP like nudist
sites and cartoon CP.
The Domain Name Registration Process
While there is no prohibition against registering a child modeling
domain name (because there is nothing illegal about the domain name
itself), we do treat child modeling websites in a manner similar to CP
sites. We have seen child modeling sites with more and more frequency
over the past year. Almost every time we find a child modeling site, we
learn that the customer has multiple domain names specializing in child
modeling. We also find that a customer who runs child modeling sites
typically also has CP on its site somewhere, or that the child modeling
sites lead, even if circuitously, to CP on another site the customer
controls somewhere. Based on our investigations, we have found that the
vast majority of these sites are of little girls.
The Notification Process
All child modeling website investigations originally come in as
notification of alleged CP (as described above) by third parties or
employees. When we are notified of a child modeling site, it is
transitioned to a child modeling investigation as soon as it is
discovered to be a child modeling site not containing explicit
pornography.
The Investigation and Reporting Process
We follow nearly the same procedure for child modeling sites as
described for CP investigations. Because the child modeling sites fall
squarely under the charge of the NCMEC, as they are clearly exploiting
children, these sites are also reported to the NCMEC.
The following example demonstrates the importance of all ISPs,
registrars, and hosting providers taking child modeling sites
seriously. One child modeling investigation we conducted recently
uncovered a registrant engaged in CP. We discovered this particular
customer had over 200 domain names attached to active child modeling
websites. After following our standard investigation procedures, Go
Daddy submitted their information to authorities. Two weeks later, this
customer was arrested and indicted on multiple counts of CP. This is
just one of many examples of a direct link between information we have
provided and arrests for CP.
Child Modeling Statistics
We investigate thousands of domain names and websites each year for
child modeling. The number of unique customers investigated in the past
year was approximately 780. As with CP, the number of domain names
investigated each year is much higher than the number of unique
customers investigated. This is because one unique customer may have
many domain names in one account. Many times, one customer will have
literally hundreds of domain names in its account. In those cases, we
suspend ALL the child modeling domain names, not just the ones upon
which we received a complaint or notification.
Approximately 60 percent of the sites we suspend are registered,
but not hosted, with Go Daddy. This means that in about 60 percent of
the investigations we conduct, we find that the website content is
stored by another hosting provider and Go Daddy provides the domain
name registration only. This statistic might tend to suggest that child
modeling operators are more comfortable using the services of a
mainstream hosting provider than those who engage in pure CP, although
we have no independently verifiable data to support that suggestion.
Approximately 60 percent of child modeling websites we investigated in
the past year were registered to an individual or company overseas,
typically in European countries. Unlike with full blown CP,
approximately 40 percent of child modeling sites we investigated and
suspended in the past twelve months were registered to an individual or
business in the United States.
Conclusion
Thank you, Chairman Inouye, for the kind invitation to testify
today regarding protecting children on the Internet. We are grateful
for this Committee's attention to this important issue and for
recognizing that the problem of online exploitation of children
generally, and child pornography specifically, is a growing and
unacceptable menace that must end. Go Daddy is committed to taking
whatever steps are necessary and feasible to assist in ending this
practice, and we would challenge our counterparts on the Internet to
make the same commitment.
The Chairman. Thank you very much, Ms. Jones.
Senator Stevens?
Senator Stevens. Thank you very much. I would not be able
to come back after the vote, so I do thank you, appreciate the
opportunity.
I'm interested, Ms. Jones, in the question of whether or
not the community out there dealing with the Internet in
general has any idea of what type of an education program would
work.
Ms. Jones. There are many conversations that happen around
this issue. And, as Mr. Allen said, there's not one single
silver bullet, there's not one single simple solution. But, if
you teach a teenager not to post pictures and not to put their
address and phone number, not to put their hometown on the
Internet, those kind of simple solutions--I mean, basic,
fundamental stuff--that would go a long way toward helping kids
escape some of the predators that are out to get them.
I think Ms. Nelson made the point, people on the Internet
go after the weakest link. They want the kid that's easy to
get. So, if each child knows, ``Hey, you know what, if you're
going to be on the Internet, don't put your stuff out there,''
that would go a long way to solving the problems that we're
talking about right now.
Senator Stevens. Is there any way that you think that the
system could be modified so that parents would have greater
control over children?
Ms. Jones. Well, there are some proposals around that
issue, for example, the dot-US [.us] country code top-level
domain, which is central to the United States. They have an
area called dot-kids-dot-US [.kids.us], which is supposed to be
used specifically for children on the Internet. That type of
thing would work for smaller kids. Teenagers, they're not going
to buy it, right? Because they want to go out, and they want to
explore, and they want to do their own thing. But, if you had
some areas that were defined so that parents could know and
monitor and get feedback and reports on every single spot that
their kid went to, every single chat conversation they had,
every website they viewed, I think the parent would kind of get
the idea, if they know their kid was talking to some kind of
strange-sounding person in another State. That is pretty simple
to implement. Getting the word out and helping people to
understand that that's available, that's the educational
process that we're talking about.
Senator Stevens. Is there agreement on the panel that the
real problem is in the sub-teens, rather than in the teen
level? Teens have access to a lot more computers in school and
in clubs and everything else. I think the sub-teen level ought
to be the main target of any legislation. And is there
agreement on that?
Dr. Finkelhor. I guess I would say no. I think that, while
it's important to educate the preteens about the dangers that
they can encounter online, I don't think that they are quite
yet ready to understand some of the kind of risky activities
that will really get them into a lot of trouble. I think this
has to go along with some of the information that we give them
when they start to be interested in romance and taking risks,
so that there's a different kind of educational package that we
need to target at those teens, and particularly at these teens
who are inclined to take risks and who may be having serious
problems in their----
Senator Stevens. I was talking more about parental control.
It seems to me we could put some parental controls on home
computers, but I don't think we can go out to the stores and
other places where teenagers can access the Internet somewhere.
The sub-teens really don't have that opportunity.
Anyone else comment on that?
Ms. Nelson, what do you think?
Ms. Nelson. I feel, as Dr. Finkelhor said, I think that we
can educate our teens on ways to stay away from predators, but
I feel that education of safe Internet usage should start a
lower level. Kids as young as 5 and 6 are using the Internet.
If they knew simple habits, like, ``Don't talk to strangers,''
just like you don't on the street, ``Don't share your personal
information, involving adults if you feel uncomfortable,'' if
they know those habits at a younger age, they will learn to be
more responsible Internet users as they grow with age.
Mr. Allen. Senator Stevens, let me add, I think there's no
question that educational emphasis has to be put on the sub-
teen group. Teens are tough. And what we've tried to do, what
many of the groups that are doing such great work in this area
have done is try to look for that way to really communicate
with teens on their level, that they understand. The second
part of the message is to parents, ``Your parenting obligation
isn't over just because your kid's 13 years of age. They're not
virtual adults, they are still kids.'' I think we have to
continue to pound home the message on parents that, ``You need
to be involved in your kids' lives, you need to talk to them
and communicate with them, and make sure you understand the
kinds of challenges they're facing.''
So, I think the answer, unfortunately, has to be
multifaceted, comprehensive, and target both age groups, and
keep parents in the mix.
Mr. Neugent. If I may add to that, in education what we've
found is that many of the teachers that are working with
children don't have all of the skills that are necessary to
help protect them, and that's why we're developing the Internet
curriculum, so that they can take a look at that. And we do
find it pervasive, all the way from kindergarten through high
school. There are unique issues with every age group, and the
guidelines and the things that we're working on are to try to
make it so that all of those areas have some influence over
that. The role of leaders, the role of administrators in
school, the role of the people that influence children's lives,
is critically important as they start to work with it.
One of the things we're trying to do, for example, is to
educate parents so that they understand how to check a log and
see where children have been, just as many of the panelists
have said, sometimes a simple thing like that, parents just
don't know how to do that, and can't track where their children
have been.
Senator Stevens. Thank you very much.
Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
The Chairman. Thank you.
Senator Nelson?
Senator Nelson. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
We know, on the basis of Mr. Nugent's testimony today, what
they're doing in Virginia with regard to education. And I'd
like to ask the rest of the panel, what do you think are the
kind of programs that will work the best in order to educate
children as part of the overall curriculum?
Ms. Nelson. As I said earlier in my testimony, they have
the opportunity to be a part of computer classes, as young as
the middle-age schooling. Taking time during those computer
classes to implement Internet safety education is one of the
ways that I feel that it would be most effective, because they
would be made to learn about the issues of the Internet. Kids
aren't always going to want to hear these stories, they're not
like Ms. Jones said, they want the Internet to be a free place
where they can express themselves. But if they're made to learn
about it, if they're made to be safer Internet users, they will
learn these rules a lot easier.
Dr. Finkelhor. I'd just like to make another pitch for what
I see as crucial here: research on this issue. I'm not sure
that we know what the best prevention message is. I'd like to
highlight some missteps that were made many years ago with the
drug-use problem. We ran in, in response to the sense that kids
were taking drugs, and tried to scare them off. And it turned
out not to have been very effective. And it took us a decade or
more before we understood that we had to go in and teach kids
specific drug-resistance techniques, and help them by role-
playing these skills.
Senator Nelson. Well, do you think that----
Dr. Finkelhor. And we need to go through that same
process----
Senator Nelson. Do you think Virginia----
Dr. Finkelhor.--to try to do it earlier.
Senator Nelson.--is on the right track?
Dr. Finkelhor. Do I think what?
Senator Nelson. Virginia is on the right track?
Dr. Finkelhor. I'm not familiar, entirely, with what
they're doing, but my sense is that a lot of the messages that
we've got are based on hunches about what would work, but we
really haven't roadtested them yet to see if they actually get
kids to be safer online.
Senator Nelson. Mr. Allen, you mentioned a number of
additional tools that you'd like to see Congress give to law
enforcement. Of those proposals, which are the one or two that
you think are the most important?
Mr. Allen. Well, the two that I think are the most
important, Senator Nelson, is--one, I think the Congress needs
to fix the 1998 law that mandates Internet service providers to
report child pornography on their system. The good news is, the
major players are doing it willingly and aggressively. I think
that's a problem that is fixable by statute and needs to be
fixed.
The second thing is, I think there is a huge challenge for
law enforcement in terms of the connectivity information. I
know that's a complex issue, with--certainly with the ISP
community. I'm convinced there is a reasonable resolution that
does not go after content, but just requires preservation of
those connectivity logs.
And third--and I know this is the Commerce Committee and
not the Appropriations Committee, but I think law enforcement
needs help. Somebody said earlier, the sheer scale of this
problem far exceeds anything that we anticipated, and Federal
law enforcement, the FBI's Innocent Images National Initiative,
ICE, and the agencies that are attacking this problem, need
resources. State and local law enforcement needs resources.
Senator Nelson. Mr. Chairman, I just want to agree with
your comments about the young lady providing testimony. And I
want to say that, Ms. Nelson, you're in a unique position
because of what you have been given, the title, in order to
have a great deal of influence on a lot of people. And the fact
that you have chosen this as your subject area, I think, should
indicate the highest of compliments from us, who are concerned
about this.
Thank you.
Ms. Nelson. Thank you very much, Senator.
The Chairman. Thank you very much.
Senator Rockefeller?
Senator Rockefeller. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
I'm a little bit mystified by the whole concept of
educating parents and educating children, as opposed to
stopping the activity, in the first place, through law.
There was a instance recently here where the movie industry
spent $250 million--not of their own money, I might add--of
trying to convince Americans that they were doing the best that
they could on indecency, and how to use the V-chip, and all
those kinds of things. And it was a predictable failure. It was
a predictable failure.
I agree with, I think, with what you said, Ms. Nelson, that
if people--if children--young people feel they're being talked
down to, or they're being ``educated'' to achieve a higher
moral standard in, sort of, a special circumstance, they're
less likely to listen. I think parents are more likely to
listen, but parents, on the other hand, are less likely to
understand what the problem is, except as their generation is
younger and they're more familiar with it.
I mean, for example, 85 percent of parents, which is
certainly the overwhelming majority, claim to have implemented
rules in their homes about Internet sites their children can
visit. Implemented rules. That's definitive. And, additionally,
a majority of parents, 53 percent, claim to have filtering
software to limit access to certain Internet content. Again,
that would seem to be a case-closed type of activity. But then,
at the same time, 70 to 90 percent of children claim to have
viewed pornography online, much of it graphically very
hardcore. So, on the one hand, we educate, or we give people
either--in the case of television, V-chips or Internet--other
types of ways of blocking. And, on the other hand, it doesn't
seem to work. So, I think this is the conundrum. There's no
single bullet.
I think what appeals to me the most is what you suggested,
and that is making it part of the curriculum. I don't know,
what do you have, a 45-50-minute Internet class, and little
kids start, you know, at 4 or 5 years old, or 3 or 4 years old,
and they start, and then they get better at it. But they always
have that available to them. And I think it ought to be--just
as we don't teach physical fitness anymore, maybe we could
substitute mental stability for physical fitness, and at least
not have people fall into those types of situations.
I think children respond to what they learn in the
classroom, because it's sort of like math and science. I mean,
it's likely to be right. What you're told is likely to be
right, or at least it's a point of view which is given to you
by a figure that you respect who's not threatening to you--that
is your teacher--as opposed to your parent, who can be put into
that position.
So, on the other hand, I have no idea that that will work
either. I have no idea that that will work either. And I just
wonder, several of you made your remarks, and you said we've
got to do more of this and more of this and more of this, and
nobody really got, again, back to the people who are actually
doing it. It was a question of how to stop something from
appearing on the Internet, stopping opportunities for children
to be able to do things they shouldn't, but not foreclosing--
you were different, Ms. Jones, when you talked about getting
rid of some of these sites, and then all of the backlash, which
I find absolutely fascinating, which I think underlines the
problem of the voracious hunger for this kind of stuff, which
ought to be extremely scary to all of us.
But, to me, if you don't want to have bad language on
family programming, which is now described as 7:00 to 10:00,
and children's hours are 7:00 to 10:00, and which we all know
is ridiculous. I mean, children start their homework at 10:00.
And so, they get to see all the bad stuff, even while we're
preaching the 7:00-to-10:00 concept. So, isn't it--actually
making it a part of the curriculum--I don't know what you do
about parents, because I think parents are a very mixed group.
Some want to, but don't know how to. In the case of the
Internet, obviously, if you come from a rural State, West
Virginia, like I do, there are a lot of parents who don't know
how to use the Internet, so they wouldn't have the first idea
of how to tell their children about what to do, or there is no
Internet connection at home. In the classroom, yes; at home,
no. I think a lot of parents are also afraid to appear to be
moralistic in such direct, ``You can do this, you can do that,
I'm going to block this, I'm going to block that, this is why
I'm going do it.'' And so, that's a hard thing for--it's a hard
intervention for a parent. It's a necessary intervention for a
parent, but, on a human basis, it's a difficult one for them to
make.
So, my feeling, still, is that you put this into the
education, you make it part of the training, and you don't make
it just for 1 year, you make it all throughout, so that whether
you're dealing with 5-year-olds or 15-year-olds, they're all
children, and they're all subject to different people's, you
know, malevolent interests. And then, second, finding ways to
close legal loopholes, to raise fines, or simply to make
something illegal, to make something criminal. I mean, if
there's anything that's criminal, it's the attacking of a young
child, even the attracting of a young child. It's a criminal
activity, as far as I'm concerned. Now, I'm not a lawyer, it
may be treated as such, but I don't think so. So that I think
sometimes we're too delicate in the way we try to approach
things. Education is a very long-term process. There are a lot
of people that don't know a whole lot about Shakespeare, and
we've been teaching Shakespeare for two or three hundred years.
So, I'd just like to have you react to my point; that is,
number one, you make it a part of the curriculum, so that the
children themselves ingest in an atmosphere which they can
trust and feel comfortable with, surrounded by their peers,
therefore no bullying, as to how they can get into trouble; and
then, after class, they discuss how some of them did get into
trouble. And so, it sort of feeds upon itself, on the one hand;
and, on the other hand, action which strikes down the
profitability factor, not just closing in on the records, but
figure out ways to make it impossible for people to do it.
Mr. Neugent. Mr. Rockefeller, before others respond, if I
could just say that, in your packet is Virginia's Internet
Safety Guidelines Curriculum. We certainly concur with what
you're saying, Internet safety instruction needs to be in the
schools, it needs to be in all of the curricula areas. And
you'll see examples in all of the major areas in Virginia.
Senator Rockefeller. Is it done every time an Internet
class is taught, is it done? Is it done three times a week? Is
it done once a week? Is it a regular part? Does it go on for 10
or 12 years? That's what I'm interested in.
Mr. Neugent. Yes, in all of the curricular areas.
Senator Rockefeller. It just never gets--you never can get
away from it in school.
Mr. Neugent. This is a shared responsibility of all
teachers. That's the way we work with Internet safety in
Virginia, so that a teacher in kindergarten, first grade, a
history teacher in ninth grade, all have a shared
responsibility. And what we've tried to do is to show them,
against our standards, those things that they should do in each
of the curricula areas.
Senator Rockefeller. And then they have to do it.
Mr. Neugent. They have to do it.
Senator Rockefeller. And then, are they monitored by the--
--
Mr. Neugent. Also in your packet is a monitoring document
to check and see that it is being done.
Senator Rockefeller. Any other----
Mr. Neugent. I don't think it's something we will have an
answer to immediately, but certainly the monitoring document
will give answers over time----
Senator Rockefeller.--comments?
Mr. Neugent. I don't think it's enough, it's just a start,
but I know we will do more in the future.
Senator Rockefeller. No, no, it's----
Dr. Finkelhor. I agree with what you're saying, and I think
that broadening the approach across the curriculum is very
important. There's an additional broadening dimension, in
addition to talking about Internet safety: we need to be
talking about Internet citizenship. We can take a lesson from
the community policing and crime control experience. When
communities were able to mobilize neighborhoods into
Neighborhood Watches, where everybody felt a kind of
responsibility for what was going on, reporting things that
they saw that were disturbances, behaving well themselves when
they were in public spaces, we cleaned up a lot of
neighborhoods. And I think the Internet is a kind of
neighborhood too, which needs this kind of Neighborhood Watch
kind of orientation. And that's something we can be also
addressing in this curriculum that you're talking about.
Senator Rockefeller. Mr. Chairman, will you yield me an
additional 30 seconds?
The Chairman. Proceed.
Senator Rockefeller. I want to disagree with that. I don't
want to say it's a bad idea, but, to me, there is such an
enormous difference between the Neighborhood Action Committee,
between breaking and entering and permanently either scarring a
child's mind or damaging a child, which is a criminal activity
of an entirely different dimension. I meet regularly, when I go
back to West Virginia, with students and parents and
psychologists and others, and school officials, and we talk
about that. Their view is so one-sidedly in favor of cracking
down, it's not even funny. And I don't pick them out to reflect
the way I think about it, they just show up. I mean, they're
angry about this, and they feel helpless about this. And if the
parents have tremendous Internet capacity, that's terrific, but
most of them don't feel confident, or they don't feel confident
how to approach their children on this thing. And I think it
has to be a really targeted one-on-one type of thing.
Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
The Chairman. Thank you very much.
Senator Klobuchar?
STATEMENT OF HON. AMY KLOBUCHAR,
U.S. SENATOR FROM MINNESOTA
Senator Klobuchar. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
Thank you, all of you, for coming.
And I know Mr. Allen well, from the work he's done, as a
former prosecutor. We've worked together.
And I will say that I look at this just from, first, as a
parent, the challenges I've had. I remember the last 2 years,
the only campaign question that stumped me was at a teen
program. They asked me if I knew what ``LOL'' meant. Do you
know what that means----
Ms. Nelson. Laugh----
Senator Klobuchar.--Ms. Nelson?
Ms. Nelson.--out loud.
Senator Klobuchar. Exactly, laugh out loud. Well, I didn't
know that, and my daughter, who's 12, reminds me of that every
day.
And one of the things I think we see is that these kids are
ahead of us on the Internet, and it means that we have to learn
what we're doing and make sure those standards are in place.
And I've been impressed by some of the work you've done, Mr.
Allen, on that, as well as the rest of the panelists.
The second way I look at this is as a former prosecutor.
And I saw these horrific cases that we had, where we would
trace them back--rapes or other cases--to where young people
had met people over the Internet. And we had a number of child
porn cases, as well. And one of the things I always reminded
our people was that these child porn cases, while it's a crime
itself, there's something sort of distant about it, where it
doesn't seem real, but it became very real to us when we had a
case where it was just a child porn case, actually, against a
professor. I remember, his name was Professor Pervo----
[Laughter.]
Senator Klobuchar.--and he had been looking at hundreds of
images of porn. He was prosecuted. There were some pictures, so
we were trying to figure out, Are these real kids? Do they live
in Minnesota? Can we help them at all? And we saw--one of the
pictures had a high school--some kind of emblem in the back,
and the police traced it, and they found a kid in a small town
in rural Minnesota who had basically, been molested, and he
somehow had ended up in this grouping of pictures that this
professor had as a series of pictures of child porn. And it
reminded me again that these are real children who are real
victims of crimes, and not just images on the Internet.
So, I look at this in terms of law enforcement. My
questions are more along that vein. First of all, I know that
we've had some concern in investigating these cases, about the
data retention policies of some of the Internet service
providers, that they're inadequate, and sometimes we're unable
to get the information we need. And I guess I'd ask you, Mr.
Allen, or anyone else that could shed some light on this, What
is the average time that ISPs retain this information? And what
do you think would be an appropriate amount of time?
Mr. Allen. It varies widely, and that really is the
problem. There are a number of companies that have been
extending that retention period 30 days, 60 days, 6 months.
From the law enforcement folks that we talk to, in our view it
needs to be at least a year, preferably longer. And, again, our
accommodation, recognizing that this has real impact on these
companies if they're required to maintain massive amounts of
data, our view is that what they should be required to retain
are the connectivity logs. The key issue for law enforcement
is, you have to establish that this person went online at this
time from this particular site. I think there is a way to
resolve this conflict without devastating the industry. But we
hear it from our law enforcement partners across the country
every day, you can't make the cases without that basic
information. We really have to resolve the whole data retention
issue.
Senator Klobuchar. And the other piece of this, which you
touched on is the training of police officers. I just remember
some cases we had early on with small police departments, where
they'd come upon a scene and were investigating a child porn
case. And sometimes there aren't big rings, it's just one
person or they're trying to figure it out, and they get to the
computer, and they start turning it on, themselves, and turning
it off, and basically there were triggers in there that would
ruin all the evidence that we had. And we did some training
videos on this that were really basic. But I remember, at some
point, the Federal Government was offering to do these regional
investigations to help local law enforcement with forensics and
other things. And I just wondered what the status is of that.
It's clearly a problem for local police departments.
Mr. Allen. It's a huge problem. We, at the National Center,
are bringing law enforcement in, as well as going out to do
these kinds of training programs. A real step forward in all
this has been the creation of the Internet Crimes Against
Children Task Force Program. Your ICAC in Minnesota has been
terrific, and has made lots of cases.
Another major challenge in this area is the whole issue of
forensics, because computer forensics are very demanding, are
time consuming. If you seize a computer that has 60,000 images
on it, it's going to take time to get that. I've talked to FBI
leadership about it. One of the big challenges now is, it's
just taking too long to build these cases. I know there's a
dollar sign attached to that, too, but we've really got to pay
more attention to building forensic capability targeted to this
kind of issue.
Senator Klobuchar. And my last question is, Is there
technology currently on the market or in development that can
catch perpetrators who rely on this peer-to-peer file-sharing
networks to traffic in child pornography?
Mr. Allen. The answer is yes, but this is an evolving
proposition. One of the real challenges here, as you know from
your time as a prosecutor, is, like every other aspect of human
life, the bad guys tend to get the new technology before law
enforcement. So, we've spent 10 years trying to help law
enforcement catch up. And what we're seeing now is that, when
you make headway in one area, the technology evolves. So, it is
a continuing process.
I think the most encouraging thing is that these technology
companies want to help. For example, we are now working with
AOL, Microsoft, Yahoo!, Google, EarthLink, and United Online in
an effort to develop a database of hash values. Basically, each
one of these images has a fingerprint; and a lot of the images
on the Internet are not new images, they circulate forever. So,
one of the things we're trying to do is work with technology
companies to try to develop new technologies to identify and
interdict those identified illegal images and keep them from
reaching the computers of America's consumers.
Senator Klobuchar. Thank you.
And I also wanted to thank you, Ms. Nelson, for being here.
I must tell you that we had a case once when I was a
prosecutor, a white-collar case, and one of your predecessors
testified in favor of the defendant, because she was his
friend, that he should get a lighter sentence. And I was always
telling the story, for years, that we took him on, even though
the former Miss America testified on his side, and that it
didn't bother me, because I was a former Miss Skyway News of
March 1988.
[Laughter.]
Senator Klobuchar. So, I'm just so pleased that you are on
our side, testifying on this issue, so that you've righted the
name, in my mind.
Ms. Nelson. Well, thank you.
Senator Klobuchar. Thank you.
The Chairman. Thank you.
Senator Pryor?
STATEMENT OF HON. MARK L. PRYOR,
U.S. SENATOR FROM ARKANSAS
Senator Pryor. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
Let me start, if I may, with Dr. Finkelhor. In your
testimony, and in your written testimony, you say that--I guess
you come to the conclusion that giving out personal information
or participating in social networking sites is not the most
crucial factor that places children at risk. Is that fair?
Dr. Finkelhor. That's right.
Senator Pryor. All right. I'd like to ask Mr. Allen if you
agree with that statement.
Mr. Allen. We think that putting personal information out
there puts kids at risk. I think what Dr. Finkelhor is saying
is that--I won't speak for Dr. Finkelhor--but that there are
other factors that appear greater.
We think there is abundant evidence, including Dr.
Finkelhor's research, that indicates more kids are posting
personal information, more kids are posting photographs today
than ever before. His research indicated that kids are being
more cautious. Fewer kids are interacting with people that they
don't know. But, in our judgment, it puts kids at risk, and
that we should continue to work to stop kids from doing it.
Senator Pryor. Dr. Finkelhor, do you agree with what he
just said?
Dr. Finkelhor. Well, I think it's a generally good idea to
tell kids, ``Be judicious about what you do with personal
information, because you don't know where it's going to end up
or who's going to use it.'' But our research does suggest that
it's the exchange of personal information, the posting of
certain elements of personal information, like your Web
address, and things like that, are so widespread. And our
research suggests that that's not an indication of the kids who
are actually getting solicitations and getting into trouble.
The parallel, I think, to make is with kids being out on
the street say, walking to school. It's probably the case that
if you never walk to school, your chances of getting abducted
are reduced somewhat, because some kids are going to get pulled
off the street. But there are other reasons to be on the
street. And it's not a big factor. What's most important is to
talk to kids about what to do when they get approached, how to
not play into the hands of the solicitors and the predators
there. If we think that we're making kids safe by just telling
them, ``Don't post information, don't talk to anybody you don't
know,'' that that's not going to really take them very far on
this road to protecting them.
Senator Pryor. All right. Well, just to be clear for the
Committee, in your opinion is the Internet fostering an
increase in inappropriate contact between adults and minors? Is
the Internet adding to the problem, or is it a net neutral?
Dr. Finkelhor. Well, that's a really good question, because
it would seem as though adults have greater access to kids on
the Internet, and the Internet has provided a kind of community
forum for people who have these deviant sexual interests, to
kind of communicate with one another, maybe even learn from one
another. But an interesting fact is that, during the same
period when the Internet was penetrating into so many
households over the last 10-12 years, sex crimes against
children have actually been declining in this country.
Senator Pryor. So, is----
Dr. Finkelhor. And I'm not sure that it's the Internet that
has caused that decline. In fact, I don't think it's really
been a part of it. But it seems to me a mistake to jump to the
conclusion that the Internet has made kids much more vulnerable
to sex crimes than ever before, when you see this decline in
overall sex crimes.
Senator Pryor. All right. In your opinion, then, is it fair
to say that child predators have, kind of, moved from the
shopping malls and the playgrounds and et cetera, et cetera,
ball fields, et cetera, to the Internet?
Dr. Finkelhor. No, actually--for the people we consider
pedophiles, that is, people who have a primary sexual interest
in prepubescent kids--they really don't get much access to kids
online. Those kids, at that early age, are really not
interested in communicating with people online. These
pedophiles have to go through the traditional social networks
to access kids. What it has, perhaps, increased is access to
teenagers, and particularly those teenagers who are vulnerable
because they're in turmoil in their lives and in search of
romance and affection and understanding.
Senator Pryor. Interesting.
Mr. Allen, let me ask you--and it's good to see you again,
by the way--but let me ask you about--you mentioned something--
I believe it was Senator Bill Nelson, here, a few moments ago--
about the statute needs to be updated, needs to be fixed. Could
you give the Committee some more of your thoughts on that? What
do we need to do to the statute?
Mr. Allen. Well, the Congress mandated Internet service
providers to report, but regulations have never been issued by
the Justice Department. The law was passed in 1998. And, while
we have worked with the companies voluntarily--327 companies
are reporting--the position of the Justice Department has been
that this was a flawed statute that's essentially a civil
statute with a criminal penalty; and, therefore, for ``intent''
reasons, nobody's ever been sanctioned under the statute. Our
view has been: If the statute is flawed, we ought to fix it; we
ought to amend it.
And so, simplistically, the code section is 13032, and we
believe it's time--we think this is an important tool. These
reports have led to hundreds of successful arrests and
prosecutions. And what we have learned, anecdotally--I mean,
we've handled 500,000 reports, but, of the cases that we have
handled from these reports from the ISPs, we are learning that
these are overwhelmingly not instances in which people are just
downloading images and looking at the pictures; these are
people who are downloading images, looking at the pictures,
fantasizing about it, and then acting physically against real
kids. So, we think this is, in the scope of things, I'm sure
it's not as big as some other issues, but we think it's one
that is yielding real dividends, and our concern is that, if
there are only 327 ISPs reporting, what we don't want to see is
smaller ISPs become safe havens for this stuff. So, our
recommendation is that that statute be amended so that
regulations can be promulgated, and every electronic service
provider be mandated to report. And if they don't, they should
be sanctioned under the statute.
Senator Pryor. Well, I'd like to work with you on that. If
you all have some language or some--you know, if we can get
down and really look at the statute and try to come up with
some specifics, I'd really like to work with you on that.
Mr. Allen. That would be great.
Senator Pryor. So, please be in touch on that.
And the last thing, Ms. Jones--and I know I'm out of time
here, but--parental controls. Are parental controls the answer?
I mean, it seems to me--I have a bill that, you know, really
tries to do a better job of identifying images, et cetera,
information out there that we don't want young people to see
and be exposed to. But how important is the parent in this
process? And what is some of your practical advice of things we
can be doing, or should be doing, as a Congress?
Ms. Jones. There's no simple answer to that question.
Parental controls are not ``the'' answer. Parental controls are
``an'' answer. Amending the 1998 statute so that my colleagues
in the hosting community actually provide data to Mr. Allen's
organization is ``an'' answer. Getting out and implementing
something like what Virginia has in schools in schools is
``an'' answer. But I cannot overemphasize the importance of
parents being involved in this process, because if your kid is
sitting in their bedroom looking at the Internet, and you don't
know what they're looking at, chances are they're looking at
something bad, just like everything else your kid does in the
bedroom with the door closed without you knowing about it. Kids
push boundaries, and so, the parent has to be involved.
Some parental controls that are available work. Some of the
filtering works. If the technology coalition that the National
Center has put together actually gets this database of known
images, that will be hugely helpful. I can go bump up against
our database of thousands upon thousands upon thousands of
computers with millions of hosting accounts, clean the entire
thing of every image that's in that data base. That's a filter.
That's helpful. But the parent has to put the filter on the
computer of the kid that's looking at it in order for what I
just did to make it effective.
I think no matter what we do, it's always going to come
back to the user. And I know Senator Rockefeller was
uncomfortable with that, because it seems like we're putting
the burden on kids and parents to do the right thing, and we're
letting the criminals run free. That's not the case at all. We
get phone calls every single day from law enforcement all over
the country who are pursuing the ``bad guys.'' Yesterday, in
Florida, 22 people were arrested in a case that we helped with
in a child pornography ring. That stuff is also happening--
that's another sort of parallel line that's going on. But
you've got to have the parents involved. I cannot overemphasize
it. And if you're a kid, and your parent doesn't know how to
use the Internet, teach 'em how to use it.
Senator Pryor. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
The Chairman. Thank you.
Senator Cantwell?
STATEMENT OF HON. MARIA CANTWELL,
U.S. SENATOR FROM WASHINGTON
Senator Cantwell. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
And thank all the panelists for being here, and, Mr.
Chairman, for holding this Committee.
Could we talk about statistics for a minute? Because I know
that some were mentioned, but I want to understand--I think, in
2004, there were reports of 200,000 online child pornography
cases. Do we know, Mr. Allen or others, if that has increased?
This was part of the International Center for Missing &
Exploited Children's data.
Mr. Allen. Right. We----
Senator Cantwell. And that was, one in five children ages
10 through 17 has been solicited online----
Mr. Allen. That----
Senator Cantwell.--for unwanted sexual advances. So----
Mr. Allen. The one-in-five data were from Dr. Finkelhor's
research, which the University of New Hampshire conducted for
the National Center in 2000. The good news is, his most recent
version of that indicated that that number has gotten a little
better. It's now one in seven.
In terms of child pornography cases, we don't have the same
kind of scientific data. What I can report to you is that the
numbers of child pornography reports received by the National
Center for Missing & Exploited Children are up dramatically.
The other thing that we're seeing from those reports is
that the victims are getting younger. Again, citing Dr.
Finkelhor's research from a couple of years ago looking at
offenders, what we've found is that most people don't
understand what the true composition of this issue is. His
research found that 39 percent of the offenders who were
identified had images of children younger than 6 years old; 19
percent, younger than 3. Many people think this is a problem of
20-year-olds in pigtails made to look like they're 15. It's
not. Overwhelmingly, the demand is for prepubescent children,
and the numbers are getting younger and younger.
Senator Cantwell. So, if you were going to say the decrease
of--in fact, if it is a decrease--and, you know, you never know
what's going on; it may be that people have gotten better at
hiding the contacts or who knows, maybe software on the other
side, and encryption technology, who knows what's happening.
But, let's say, for example--for sure there is an improvement
in the situation. To what do we think we can attribute the
effort that led to that reduction?
Dr. Finkelhor. One of the things that we found was that
young people, between 2000 and 2005, when we did our two
surveys, reported they were going to chat rooms less, that they
were talking to people that they don't know less, and it
suggested that actually they had gotten some of the prevention
education messages that we had been putting out, and that was
the good news.
I don't want to put too much stock in the decline from the
one in five to the one in seven. We didn't see a change in the
number of kids who were experiencing what we call ``aggressive
solicitations.'' Those were the really endangering ones, where
the person who was soliciting them tried to make contact with
them offline, in addition to the computer communication. That
stayed at around 4 percent. Those are the ones that concern me,
that one in 20. Most of the kids are handling those pretty
well, the other ones, that don't involve these aggressive
solicitations. Unfortunately, the aggressive solicitations did
not decline.
Senator Cantwell. And, Mr. Allen, I'm assuming that the
National Center does work with the International Center on----
Mr. Allen. Yes.
Senator Cantwell.--on these efforts, since the Internet is
global and----
Mr. Allen. Absolutely.
Senator Cantwell.--and so, that connectivity issue and data
storage issue is being addressed on an international basis,
because you don't want to just chase the problem to some server
somewhere else that isn't regulated. So, are we working on
that, on an international basis?
Mr. Allen. Senator Cantwell, we're working on it. In fact,
you helped us launch our partnership with Interpol on that. The
great challenge, internationally, is that we reviewed the law
in the 186 member countries of Interpol, and we found that 95
of them have no law at all, child pornography is not even a
crime. And in 136 of the member countries of Interpol, the
possession of child pornography is not a crime. It is a real
challenge, because, in much of the world--this is now an issue
in which Eastern European organized crime is very much
involved, because it's so easy and so profitable. And we have
great work we need to do work to change the law around the
world and build capacity. With Interpol, we've now trained law
enforcement in 100 countries to build capacity----
Senator Cantwell. And do----
Mr. Allen.--but there's a long way----
Senator Cantwell. And do you have----
Mr. Allen.--to go.
Senator Cantwell. And do you have data from that, Mr.
Allen, about the success of that? Do you have any statistics
from that?
Mr. Allen. From the legislative research?
Senator Cantwell. No, from that 2004 Interpol effort of
training law enforcement to identify an online crime scene, so
they could better find the perpetrators. That training, which I
did applaud, I thought was a useful effort, particularly given,
again, that so much of these activities, from an international
basis, are going to impact us here in the United States. We can
do a really good job of trying to clean things up here, but, if
we're seeing Websites, you know, from all over the globe----
Mr. Allen. Absolutely. We----
Senator Cantwell. So----
Mr. Allen.--can certainly get you the data that was
generated.
Senator Cantwell. So, do you think that that's worked,
this--here's my point. I think everybody's doing great work,
but we definitely have an enormous task in front of us, and
we're only going to have increases in communication and
technology. We do want to use that to our advantage. But,
measuring what--to the best of our degree--what is being
successful, so that we can invest more in it, I think, is
critical, at this early stage.
Mr. Allen. I agree. And there's very little research, or
very little empirical data, on this issue outside the United
States, and that's a real challenge.
Dr. Finkelhor. And even the information that we have within
the United States, I'm afraid, is woefully inadequate, in many
respects, for tracking what's going on. I would just contrast
the information that we have on infectious diseases, for
example, which are another threat to the public, but we have
tremendous information about infectious agents and accidents
that we can track, over time, to see how we're doing. In the
crimes-against-children area, we are woefully lacking, with
just general epidemiological information, on some of the things
that are most frightening to families, like abductions and
Internet crimes against kids, and we could really improve. And
it would answer some of the questions that you're interested
in, I think.
Senator Cantwell. Well, I think it's very important.
Again, Mr. Chairman, thank you for the hearing, and thank
everybody on the panel for your hard work. But we obviously
have a lot more work to do.
Thank you.
The Chairman. Thank you very much.
I've been listening intently to the testimony. And,
according to reports that we have gathered, about 5 years ago
there were about 100,000 child pornography Websites. Today, I
think they get close to 400,000. At the same time, over 70
percent of children, teenagers, preteenagers, have viewed child
pornography on the Internet. At the same time, we have
statistics that suggest that the American family, 67 percent
have both parents living with their children, the remainder are
either living in homes, institutions, or with single parents,
or with grandparents. At the same time, statistics suggest to
us that most of these single parents are so overwhelmed with
trying to make a living, they spend very little time with their
kids. And I believe in parental involvement, but these numbers
suggest that, for many of our kids, parental involvement does
not exist. And so, I am concerned about what the Federal
District Court in Utah did--making one of those laws
unconstitutional. What I'd like to know is, What can we do--and
maybe this is in the jurisdiction of the Judiciary Committee--
to toughen the laws?
Now, for the record, what are the punishments that we have
in the books, at this time?
Mr. Allen. Well, Senator, the Congress, certainly on
Federal offenses, over the past several years has increased
penalties significantly. And I think that's been a huge step
forward. The States have some more work to do.
On the issue you raised about the Utah court decision, my
reaction certainly is one of discouragement. This Congress has
tried very hard to address this issue with governmental
solutions, limiting the access, filtering and blocking and
keeping kids from reaching this kind of content, or content
reaching them.
Frankly, I think my judgment is that one of the things this
Commerce Committee can do is to encourage and promote more
private-sector innovation, because there are tools that are
being developed. Ms. Jones talked about some of the leadership
within the technology industry. I think there are tools that
are being developed on the private side that should be
encouraged, should be examined, and we should begin to try to
implement them.
Frankly, the courts have sent a pretty loud-and-clear
message, and that message is, they're going to look very
carefully at governmental regulatory mandates in some of the
areas. And I think what the Congress has to do is look for a
balanced approach, not that previous approaches weren't--but a
more balanced approach that put greater emphasis on private-
sector tools and private-sector innovation.
The Chairman. How can we convince our parents that what is
involved here is serious, dangerous, and will just eventually
break up families? What can we do? Can we do anything,
legislatively?
Mr. Allen. Well, Mr. Chairman, our view, from the
beginning, has been that this is a three-pronged process. One,
the kind of activity we're talking about, almost without
exception, is illegal. And so, I think law enforcement--an
increased emphasis on law enforcement to identify those who are
misusing the Internet for unlawful purposes, is more important
than ever before.
Second, I think we have to continue the drumbeat to try to
motivate America's parents, and awaken them. We live in a
unique time, in which kids know more about a transcendent
technology in our lives than do their parents. There are some
terrific models and programs out here. Jackie Leavitt, the wife
of the HHS Secretary, is here with us this morning. She has
mobilized the Nation's first ladies around a program called
iKeep Safe. There is a terrific training program that's gone
into schools across the country, called i-SAFE. We, at the
National Center, created, with Boys and Girls Clubs of America,
an interactive online educational tool, called NetSmartz, with
animation for younger kids. There are great tools out there.
The Virginia model of mainstreaming it, of institutionalizing
it, for making it a part of ongoing educational curricula, I
think, is real important. So, we have to continue to emphasize
and promote prevention and education.
But, third, I think the ultimate answer to a lot of this
problem, frankly, is rooted in technology. The softwares have
not yet been developed that can automatically identify,
interdict, prevent certain kinds of issues. Members of this
Committee talked, this morning, about the concern about a
hands-off approach. I think if we continue to promote
technology innovation to develop tools that can be used to
prevent the most heinous of these problems, while emphasizing
education in the classroom as an ongoing and integral part of
what kids are taught and what they learn, continue the efforts
to reach out to parents, recognize it's hard, but we've got to
do it, and then give law enforcement the tools and the
resources they need to go after, and prosecute, the ``bad
guys''. The good news is, there have been thousands of them
brought to justice. The bad news is, there are far more of them
than we thought there were. And the reality is, as someone
raised earlier, the Internet does create a situation where
people can be anonymous, they can fantasize in the privacy of
their own homes, they have little risk of detection. That's
something we have to deal with.
The Chairman. Any closing remarks here?
Miss America?
Ms. Nelson. Again, thank you for the opportunity for
allowing me to be here to speak on this issue. I feel that the
legislation has been put in place, that there are things being
done that are the step in the right direction, but there is
more that we can do. Again, I want to promote education,
because I feel that education on this issue will help to keep
our kids, and help them from being the victims in the first
place. If we can police the Internet on our side of the
keyboard, I think that's the best way to go about this issue.
The Chairman. Thank you.
Dr. Finkelhor?
Dr. Finkelhor. I want to thank you, also, for the
opportunity to address the Committee, and also appreciate your
interest in this topic.
My final remark is that the vulnerability of children on
the Internet is an extension of their vulnerability in every
aspect of their lives, and we should not ignore that, as well,
as we try to face the risks that are posed online. But children
are still being bullied in school, sexually abused in their
families, and they are still witnessing domestic violence in
their homes. And this is all part of one fabric and in order to
address victimization online, we also need to address some of
these other issues, as well.
The Chairman. Mr. Allen?
Mr. Allen. Just, finally, Mr. Chairman, thank you for the
opportunity, and thank you for your extraordinary leadership
and commitment on this issue. This is timely, and it's
important.
The Chairman. Mr. Neugent?
Mr. Neugent. Thank you, Mr. Chairman, also, for allowing me
to speak today. I do believe that education is one of the
answers, and we will continue to pursue that in Virginia. We
will continue to work with the attorney general's task force.
And we hope, at some point, to have information to show that,
in effect, our programs are working.
Thank you very much.
The Chairman. Ms. Jones?
Ms. Jones. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
I'm sure you know, but your staff, James Assey and Margaret
Cummisky and the people that work behind you, are tirelessly
pursuing this, that the staff members of every Committee member
here that we've met with who pursue this issue are. We are
profoundly grateful for that, because, we feel like we're out
on the front line, trying to defend this thing. It's nice to
know that somebody in Washington is paying attention to it.
It seems like a noncontroversial issue, nonpartisan. Nobody
thinks child predators are a good idea. So, we would continue
to urge passage of the McCain-Schumer child pornography bill,
the bill that Senator Pryor mentioned, in regards to online
parental controls. Any of the tools that are small steps in the
overall solution, we would encourage this Committee to continue
to pursue.
But, most importantly, just thank you so much for taking a
look at the issue and for making it a priority at the end of a
session and on a hot summer day, when you might be off doing
something else. So, we are just profoundly grateful for that.
Thank you.
The Chairman. Obviously, there's much to be done. And we're
not quite knowledgeable as to what should be done.
But, Mr. Allen, we will find out. And I promise all of you
that we'll make it tougher, we'll get more parents involved,
we'll have PTAs involved. And that has been a concern of mine.
I used to attend PTA meetings, as a Member of Congress, which
meant I had to miss some votes. But, today, in a school of,
say, 500 children, if you have 50 parents at a PTA meeting, you
are doing very well, which is sad. It wasn't so in my days of
youth. But I suppose, with all the advancement and technology
advancements, we don't need these things. But I think they're
wrong. Parents must get involved.
And I thank you all very much for your contribution.
The session is adjourned.
[Whereupon, at 11:52 a.m., the hearing was adjourned.]