Nancy Willard's take on DOPA

Below is a longish posting made to LM_Net and WWWedu by cybersafety guru, Nancy Willard. She's given me permission to reprint it here. Well worth reaading. - Doug

In my personal opinion, the biggest problem about this proposed legislation is that it will do absolutely nothing to protect teens from seduction by -- or seeking out connections with -- predators.

The legislation is so vague, I am quite certain that if it does pass it will be ruled unconstitutional. And this is going to waste everyone's time and money. And do nothing to help kids.

I hope this does not alienate the Republicans on these lists, but it is my sincere opinion that the most important reason this legislation has been proposed is in an attempt to place Republicans in a position where they can appear in public to be making an effort to address a significant concern -- and to give them something to use against any Democrats who might vote against this bill.

I worked very hard, going to the offices of key Senators on Capital Hill and making a presentation to Senate staff, in an attempt to defeat the CIPA legislation. So I am more familiar than I want to be in how these things work.

My Senator, Senator Wyden (Democrat), was on the Commerce committee when CIPA was pending. His staff agreed with me on the concerns of CIPA. But Wyden voted in favor of CIPA for one reason: This was a law that was seeking to address concerns of Internet safety and youth. To vote against such a law would have resulted in political harm.

For any Congressman voting against DOPA, the political advertisements will run run: (Candidate's name) voted against Deleting Online Predators Act -- a law  intended to keep children safe from predators online. If (candidate) is not dedicated to protecting your children from Internet predators, how can you expect him or her to effectively address other important concerns?

Do not make the mistake of thinking that this is anything other than pure politics in an election year. Even without Delay, there will be very strong pressure on all Republicans to support this legislation for political reasons, despite any personal concerns they might have.

So, in order to defeat this legislation, we have to give Democrats and independent Republicans, strong reasons to do so.

The strongest reason that will resonate with independent Republicans is the inconsistency of this legislation with the idea of local control of schools. Schools already have filters because of CIPA. If school officials are perceiving that there are concerns about the social networking sites that other methods of student Internet use management are not effectively addressing, then schools certainly already have the means to seek to address the concerns by setting the filter to block the sites that present concerns. There is simply no need for this legislation that seeks to intrude on the decision-making of local school officials.

Here is another great argument to use with any Congressman:

In 2002, the U.S. National Academy of Sciences released an extensive report entitled Youth, Pornography, and the Internet. In the preface to the report the chair of the committee that investigated this issue, Dick Thornburgh (former attorney general under Reagan), noted:

"It is the hope of the committee that this report will be seen as comprehensive and authoritative, but I believe it is bound to disappoint a number of readers. It will disappoint those who expect a technological "quick fix" to the challenge of pornography on the Internet. … It will disappoint parents, school officials, and librarians who seek surrogates to fulfill the responsibilities of training and supervision needed to truly protect children from inappropriate sexual materials on the Internet."

Could not have said it better myself -- actually, this is exactly what I did tell this committee and the COPA commission.

Simply telling schools and libraries to block certain sites will not address the problems of online predators. Any place that kids congregate to communicate will attract predators. So unless Congress wants to shut down all student and youth communication online through schools and libraries, which would be quite impossible, we still have to address the training and supervision necessary to protect youth.

Other arguments:

There are significant concerns about the ability of Internet filters to actually address the concerns of online sexual predators. All you have to do is go to Google and type in: "bypass, Internet, filter" to find the many ways that students can use to bypass
school filters. A moderately intelligent middle school student could, in about a half hour, set up his or her home computer as a proxy and be able to bounce right around any blocks established by the school using a filtering product. The filtering companies will be unable to find and block all of these proxy servers.

The crazy thing is that the US Government itself actually provided funding for the creation of any easy to implement system to circumvent filters. If you go to the Peacefire site, http://www.peacefire.org, you can find Circumventor -- a proxy system that was developed with funds and support from the Voice of America folks. Of course, the VOA concern was repressive
governments. But it will work to circumvent any school filtering product also.

You might not want to go to this level of argument. But in my opinion, one of the reasons that schools are having such great difficulties in controlling student use of these sites is that their Internet use management approach is heavily based on reliance on filtering. What is needed in schools is a stronger focus on educational use of the Internet and more effective monitoring, including technical monitoring. IMHO CIPA headed schools in the wrong direction and that is a big part of the current problem.

Another point that might be helpful in communicating with Democrats is that in October, the US DOJ will be going to trial to seek to uphold COPA -- a criminal law that requires sites with adult materials to have age verification. ACLU challenged COPA arguing that filtering is effective and a less restrictive alternative. Based on a prior ruling on COPA by the Supreme
Court, in order to uphold COPA, DOJ has to prove that filtering is ineffective. So assuming this trial date does not get moved -- which it could, but currently it is scheduled to be held before the election -- there will likely be significant news coverage of the fact that filters are totally fallible. (This is something that schools also ought to pay attention to -- because when DOJ proves that filters do not work, then you are going to have to explain to your parents why you are relying on a technology that does not work.)

What are the three things that would more likely work:

Ensure that all sites eliminate any chat rooms or discussion groups that have names that suggest engagement of youth with adults for sexual purposes. Also ensure that every site has an effective response mechanism to address any reports or suspicions of sexual solicitation of youth. This should include a vehicle for teens to report inappropriate contact to the site -- with a continuing requirement of the sites to report any complaints filed by teens or parents that raise any concerns about predators to appropriate law enforcement. Also require that every web site for teens has posted Internet safety information. You can recommend legislation requiring this.

Congress could also require that all schools and libraries develop Internet safety and responsible use educational plans -- but should not dictate how schools will provide such education. The legislation could include topics that should be addressed.

(Unfortunately, a problem with this is that many schools would be inclined to use ISafe and it is my professional opinion, based on a review of the ISafe curriculum and especially a review of the evaluation of ISafe, that this curriculum is totally worthless. Totally worthless. It is quite clear from the evaluation of ISafe that the instructional objectives of the program were considered to be met the student's responses to survey questions demonstrated unrealistic and inaccurate fear.)

Provide effective information to teens through many different venues: through parents, schools, libraries, community groups, and churches -- in addition to the web sites. This information must provide teens with specific information on the strategies most predators use, as well as actions they might take that could place them at risk and how to respond if they have been contacted by a possible predator. Also, probably the vast majority of teens who get together with predators have told a friend. So we have to help teens understand that "friends do not let friends get together with predators" and they should report any concerns to a trusted adult.

Educate parents on the importance of talking to their children about sexual predators and monitoring their children's online activities. Parents should know every site their child is registered on, their child's username and password and review what their children are posting, and who their children's friends are on a regular basis. This review should be conducted in a way that seeks to help the child learn how to make safe choices.

I hope this helps.

Nancy

--
Nancy Willard, M.S., J.D.
Center for Safe and Responsible Internet Use
http://csriu.org
http://cyberbully.org
nwillard @ csriu.org

Cyberbullying and Cyberthreats: Responding to the Challenge of Online Social
Cruelty, Threats, and Distress, a resource for educators, is now available
online at http://cyberbully.org.

Comments

[Noah from attract women help]

I think now with the advent of the Internet it's more difficult to keep children away from harm, sometimes they throw themselves at it, especially in unmoderated chat rooms and IAM where predators are abundant.
Thanks for your post.

[Samuel Junghenn]

sexual predators are everywhere not only in the internet but in video like popular MTV they are one of the legal obvious predator pervert and was praise by kids, most music video have adult scene and kids see this cool that is why kids now a days even at the age of 13 are wearing sexy clothes already because they are influence by there idol pervert music stars who dances and sing wearing only underwear