Mix of new tools helps fight online predators

According to the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children, one of every seven children between 10 and 17 has been solicited for sex on the Internet. It's the kind of statistic that can frighten parents into pulling the plug.

Parents who would rather fight back are getting help.

FromMySpace, the world's top social networking website, to the computer labs of Boston's public schools, specialists are working to fend off the exploiters with a mix of technology, law enforcement, and Internet education.

Computers in Boston schools use blocking software to fend off predators. But Leo Carey, who teaches computer safety to seventh-graders and high school seniors at Boston Latin Academy, said the real danger lurks at home.

"They're going to be at home 15, 20 hours a week on the Internet," he said, and many home computers lack filtering software.

Boston school officials are rolling out a new online safety campaign, in cooperation with i-SAFE Inc ., a federally funded nonprofit foundation that offers a five-hour online training program in Internet safety. Each Boston school's technology support teachers, those assigned to help students use computers, will complete the program.

But young people are more likely to listen to people their own age, says Kimberly Rice, chief information officer for the school system.

"We're looking for students to become mentors," she said. The schools will recruit high school students to receive i-SAFE training and share it with their peers and with younger children.

The mentoring effort began last summer, when Rice recruited high school students to design an online safety campaign. While the schools already had some Internet training materials, the high schoolers were unimpressed.

"They said this isn't good for little kids," Rice said. "Little kids won't understand this, and my little brother or sister needs this information. . . . Can we create a campaign for them?"

The students crafted their own program, the Cyber Super Heroes, a band of cartoon characters that seek to teach principles of safe Internet use in terms that a fifth-grader can understand.

It's not all about sexual predators. The Cyber Super Heroes campaign warns children about cyber-bullying, the practice of threatening or insulting other youngsters via e-mail or instant messages. It warns children to protect their online privacy by not sharing sensitive information like addresses, phone numbers, or birthdays.

They are also urged not to download illegally copied music or movie files from the Internet.

Posters and digital videos featuring the Cyber Super Heroes have been distributed through the school system.

Meanwhile, Rice is working with the Boston Student Advisory Council on a systemwide Internet safety campaign set for April. It won't completely eliminate the threat; nothing can.

But Carey said that his students, especially the younger ones, are desperate for help in dealing with predators and online bullies. "They feel like they're all alone," he said. "They think adults don't understand; a lot of adults don't understand."

The adults at MySpace understand all too well. The leading social networking site is a favorite online haven for teenagers and a popular hunting ground for predators.

Critics of MySpace say that it is more interested in attracting users than in weeding out the worst of them. And while there are lots of other sites where predators congregate, MySpace has the deepest pockets, since it was purchased in 2005 by a giant media company, News Corp.

MySpace has been hit with at least four lawsuits alleging that predators used the service to locate and assault underage girls. A federal judge in Texas dismissed one of the suits last week , but even when MySpace wins in court, the company suffers an unwelcome dose of bad publicity and threats of stricter government regulation.

On the day of its Texas court victory, US Senator Ted Stevens, Republican of Alaska, proposed legislation to ban the use of MySpace and other social networking services in public libraries and schools that receive federal funds. A similar law has been proposed in Illinois.

Hemanshu Nigam, the former federal prosecutor who serves as MySpace's chief security officer, wants states and the federal government to pass a different kind of law, one that requires convicted sex offenders to register their Internet addresses, just as they must register their street addresses.

Nigam wants to combine this statute with a new kind of blocking software. In cooperation with Sentinel Tech Holding Corp., an online identity management firm, MySpace is developing Sentinel Safe, a nationwide database of online sex offenders. Once the system is in place, any offender who tries to log into MySpace will be instantly identified and blocked.

Anybody can get a new Internet address for free from Yahoo Inc., Microsoft Corp., or dozens of other online firms, Nigam acknowledged. But under his proposal, a predator who tries to do so would pay a heavy price.

"If you use a different e-mail address or one that's not registered . . . there is a 10-year penalty for violating the law," Nigam said. He said he hopes that the threat of such a stiff sentence would scare the offenders away.

MySpace is also working on surveillance technology for parents.

The company plans to offer a program that will run on a home computer and track whether anyone uses that machine to go to MySpace. The software won't show the messages being posted on MySpace, but it will show the name, age, and location listed on the user's account. A parent might find out that her 12-year-old daughter is not only using MySpace, but pretending to be 18 when she's there.

Of course, it's up to parents to use the software and to deal with their children's Internet habits. Carey worries that most parents are clueless. "They're the ones that have to be educated," he said.

One goal of the i-SAFE program is to have high school students share what they've learned with their parents. "The purpose of i-SAFE," Carey said, "is to train the kids to train the parents."

Hiawatha Bray can be reached at bray@globe.com.