Produced by the Sacramento County Office of Education in conjunction with the
U.S. Attorney's Office, Eastern District of California. Run time: 59 min.

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Thank you for joining us. I'm McGregor Scott, the United States Attorney for the eastern district of California. The Internet is without question one of the great advances of our age; it is a magnificent location for the exchange of ideas and information. Unfortunately the Internet also has a very dark and sinister side and there are people on the Internet and sites on the Internet that should absolutely be off limits for our children. In the following hour we hope to arm you, both parents and children with information about the dangers of the Internet. You'll hear from law enforcement officers, technology experts and victims from online predators. It is our goal that through the information you obtain from this video that you or your child can avoid becoming the next victim of an online predator.

"Earlier this year the department of justice led by Al Gonzalez launched a Project Safe Childhood to help federal, state and local enforcement officials investigate and prosecute crimes against children that are facilitated by the Internet and other electronic communications."

"The most basic and most important role of any civilized society is to protect its children is a challenge that never ends. After all there are so many dangers that we must protect our kids from, injury and illness, drugs and gangs, the list is frightening and it is long. One threat haunts us more than all the others, the threat of sexual predators. Their crimes against children are irreversible. Their pain lasts a life time because it steals the gift of innocence. At times, it seems as if we cannot stay ahead of the threats against our kids. And there is a cruel irony in the fact that societies technological advancements have provided those who seek to hurt our children with new opportunities. Every day children are sexually solicited online. Every day thousands of individuals obtain, distribute, and produce child pornography over the Internet."

"When the Attorney General launched Project Safe Childhood, he had two things in mind. The first thing was to make sure that we can teach our children and our parents about how to protect them and keep them safe from online sexual explotation. The second thing is to make sure that we are supporting law enforcement, prosecutors, individuals that are on the other side of the criminal justice system to make sure these predators are brought to justice that they're investigations (inaudible) for cyber crimes and that we use the entire force of the criminal justice system to protect our children."

"You get these cases and they say it's just a picture, it's just an image and you have to educate judges, you have to educate the public that it's not just a picture but it's a kid being abused and every time that image is portrayed, every time that image is published, it's a continuing abuse of that child."

"There is a misconception as to what child pornography is. These are not just pictures; these are not baby in the bathtub types of photos. These images actually represent the graphics sexual assault of children in just the last eight years of reviewing the child pornography for the cyber tip line and the (inaudible) program. We've seen the age of the child victims dramatically drop. At this point, 6% of the children that we know are identified were actually infants. In a full 58% otherwise our children who are still prepubescent."

"We are seeing escalating levels of violence; we're seeing more gregarious forms of abuse. It's almost like it takes more to get people excited then it did a year ago."

"Individuals who sexually exploit children are very often in positions of trust in that child's life."

"We have arrested unfortunately lots of cops; we've arrested lots of teachers, lots of clergy, boy scouts. There's no profile per se for persons who do this type of work and nothing I've seen in twenty years of law enforcement compares to the things I've seen since I've been in this chair. An example is a little baby probably 8-9 months old being penetrated by an adult male in a video with sound and the male is narrating what he is doing to this child and talking about how he likes to feel of the child squirming in his hand and he likes how the child screams in pain and that sort of stuff. That is unimaginable horror for the kid, unimaginable that anybody in their mind would ever think to do something like that."

"This just isn't a picture. It's a crime scene, with a child being abused. Even at some of these images you can see them crying, tears in their eyes as they are being abused."

"You're seeing pretty harsh stuff. You see some very hard material. We tracked an individual that was trafficking in child sexual abuse images and we saw a very high volume. I ended up reaching out to San Diego and working with them to getting the information so they would work this case. They ended up arresting an individual who was working as a respiratory therapist in children's hospitals there. When they started investigating, they found out this guy had been molesting one, two, three kids a week. He had been there for 10 years. He was molesting kids that were coming out of surgery, that were there for hospice care, children that couldn't ask for help and there were a lot of kids involved. When they asked him about it he was looking out the window at the weather and it was snowing where he was, they asked him how many kids he had molested and he said how many snow flakes are there."

"The (inaudible) task forces are group of state and local law enforcement agencies that are brought together, supervised and funded by DOJ office of justice programs to do investigations of child exploitation on the Internet. "The (inaudible) data network is a series of servers located in Wyoming that are accessible to investigators through out the United States. One of the big advantages that comes from being able to do this is we can actually make it possible for investigators to not have to look at these videos over and over and over again. The images that we see that depict two year olds being violently raped are not only destructed to everyone involved but they can tear down these officers that are working these investigations."

"There are about 37 (inaudible) images task forces across the country. In almost all of those task forces, there are state and local representations on those task forces. So if overlay the (inaudible) map of where their task forces are with the FBI map, the country's pretty well blanketed in terms of online presence, covert presence to working these matters. Obviously we do our enticement cases every day. There are agents online in this country every single day that are posing as kids. In a matter of minutes, you have 4, 5 guys asking you how old are you, are you a virgin, what is your bra size, do you have pubic hair. You'll see very aggressive solicitation or you'll see a grooming process that could last over several weeks, where the person slowly introduces sex into the conversation."

"The Internet connectivity has allowed it to be either a federal crime or a state crime and it could be prosecuted either way."

"California until extremely recently has had a very weak law on possession child pornography so we've really been the only game in town in terms of a true felony count for possession child pornography. So our ability to get a felony conviction obtained really very real legitimate sentences and get these guys off the streets for extended periods of time is going to do nothing except make our community safer."

"It's critical to work closely with our U. S. Attorney's office. Where an individual in state court might get probation or a year in jail, we often can get much heavier sentences through the coordination of our assistant U. S. attorney's that are assigned to investigate these cases."

"We've had a number of cases in past years up to the present where we partnered with district attorneys where they will prosecute the same suspect for child molestation charges while we will prosecute that person for child pornography charges."

"We use that as a heavy hammer when we have cases in the state system."

"The brownie case is a case that involves a little girl who was being sexually abused by an adult. This particular case probably has the worst images I have ever seen. The pictures were seen in late November 2003 in Denmark. The officer in Denmark put it on a network that was run by Interpol, sent it to the Canadians, the Canadian Toronto police, the Toronto police had done some training with us prior to that, they got the pictures, they looked at it and saw the brownie uniform that appeared to be an American uniform. They contacted agents here. The perpetrator had obliterated the brownie troop number on the uniform. The agent and the officers from Toronto were able to locate that number and put it to a location in North Carolina. The agents in North Carolina went out and identified the victim, identified the perpetrator and ended up arresting the perpetrator who was actually the father of this young girl. Some of the pictures that we saw, the girl was in a dog kennel, naked, locked in a dog kennel, crying, naked with a butcher knife across her chest, there were carvings on her chest that says kill me slut, that kind of stuff, urination on the child. The exploitation of this, the data that we recovered at the search, we found to believe 188,000 images of child abuse."

"It's terrible that these children are going to have live for the rest of their lives, not only having to live with what happened to them, but the fact that their exploitation is now shared around the world with individuals who are getting sexual gratification by collecting their photos."

"There's been a positive impact in respect that everyone in the bureau and everyone across the law enforcement community that works this violation is on the same page. Once you make that relationship, that relationship lasts and it goes across all programs."

"Everybody has a tool that they can bring towards this fight against child sexual exploitation, whether it be the U. S. Attorney's office or the (inaudible) task force, or the innocent images program within your community, the local law enforcement agencies as well as entities such as The National Center for Missing and Exploited Children."

"Whatever the turf battles might be whatever the conflicts might be between interagencies when we're talking about this issue all that stuff falls away. We're all kind of focused on the same thing; we're all focused on saving kids. From where I sit, there is no option for that. We can't be effective if we're not working together, we just can't."

"I think if you'll speak with most investigators or prosecutors the one key component that you'll hear in the success of these types of cases is collaboration with other agencies."

"It's been a successful prosecution team with U. S. Attorneys, the county prosecutors and local law enforcement all working together in doing the number one goal which everyone wants is protect our children."

"The law enforcement is working together. We are very aggressive; we're much more aggressive than we were a couple years ago in terms of addressing this problem but it's a huge problem."

"It's far more important I think that this not be the flavor of the month. We want this to be a very sustain operation that has meaningful results to ensure safer communities."

"Task forces cannot do it alone. We will need the help of every individual in the law enforcement community. I encourage you whether you are a parent, concerned law enforcement member at the federal, state or local level, we must all do what we can as concerned citizens and criminal justice professionals to make sure that our children are kept safe."

"The best long term solution here is information and education. We've got to prevent our way out of this problem."

"You can help me teach parents that they must stay vigilant, stay smart and most of all lets work together to make sure we're keeping our children safe from online sexual exploitation. To stop this problem from becoming more pervasive then it is, we need three elements coming together. We need education, we need prevention and we need enforcement. Project Safe Childhood pulls all of those elements together to make sure we are keeping America's children safe."

"In order to confront this threat to our kids we must rise up together as soldiers in the armies of compassion, called to action by President Bush. The core idea behind Project Safe Childhood remains a key to its success and that's the idea of teamwork. Project Safe Childhood makes a single powerful team out of all of us who want to protect children. If we work separately we are no match for these criminals but when we work together our network is much stronger than theirs. Make no mistake this is a war. Our opposition is obsessed with hurting our children. We must be obsessed with protecting them. I want to thank you for your dedication to this cause and I look forward to continuing this fight together. Each of us is but one soldier in the armies of compassion I mentioned earlier. But we will prevail. As long as we can count on each other to be out there fighting shoulder to shoulder our voices united as one. Thank you for your work to make Project Safe Childhood a success."

End of video

Well, I think that 12 or 13 minute video does a terrific job of telling the tale in a very short narrative fashion that is both entertaining and I use that term in its broad sense as well as very informative. So our goal here this evening is to help you parents have a better understanding of what this technology is all about, the dangers that are posed as well as what you can try to do about it. Our next speaker serves as an example of how anyone's child can fall prey to an online predator. Katie Canton serves as the ambassador to youth for Web wise kids, a non-profit organization whose mission is empowering today's youth to make wise choices online. At the age of 15, Katie found herself being groomed by an Internet predator who convinced her that they were in love. Thankfully she was able to realize through the help of watchful parents and the missing game that she was being lured by a child predator. This realization prevented her from becoming his next victim. Katie uses her gripping experience to warn teenagers that they can easily fall into the same trap. She's a dynamic speaker who presents or conferences schools and after school programs. It gives me great pleasure to introduce Katie Canton.

My name is Katie and I am 20 now. When I was 15, I met a man on the Internet. I went into a chat room, I was bored. I was just sort of chatting and I met John. He was 22 and we started talking, you know the usually ASL (age, sex, location) and we had only been chatting for about 5 or 10 minutes when John asked me if I wanted to speak with him on the phone. Now I never really done that before but it seemed harmless. He lived in North Carolina, I lived in San Francisco. I was sort of like, well, you know, there's thousand of miles between us, if anything is weird I just can hang up the phone plus I had older friends who talked to people from the Internet on the phone. So I was like okay, alright I'll talk to you John. So John gave me his phone number and a phone card number so I wouldn't have a bill on my parents' phone bill, or whatever, calling North Carolina and I called John and we talked for about 10 minutes until the phone card ran out and he said, "Well can I call you back," and I was getting along with him alright and said okay so I gave him my home phone number and John called me back and we talked for probably about 3 hours that night give or take a few. You know just sort of getting to know you type things. What I like to do, what he likes to do and it was really interesting because I think what really drew me in about John was his attention. It felt really good to have this man who wanted to know about me, cared about me, he wasn't interrupting me, he wanted to know about me and he cared what I had to say. Now I was 15 years old, I was really on the shy side, didn't really know where I fit. I had a lot of friends that were really outgoing, they were the type of people, they'd walk into a party, everyone would turn around and sort of notice them and they were getting all sorts of attention from guys and just everyone. And I felt sort of in their shadow at times. I just felt invisible. Like at home I have a brother, my parents, it's not like they ignored me but there's just life. I am talking with my mom and she's got work, the phone, she's cooking dinner, and the dog. It's sort of the shuffle of life. But to have someone just give me 110% of their attention, to ask me questions, who really cared what I had to say, it was just overwhelming especially since he was a guy. He was telling me that I was pretty and that I was a good person and that I was funny and that I was attractive, and all this. While we are talking all along he's going you know I think we are really hitting it off. You're really amazing person. I am so glad we found each other. I believe love can be anywhere and all this and that. And so I am like yeah okay. The next day he called me and left me a voice mail on my pager cause this was back before everyone and their grandmother had a cell phone. So he left me a message the next morning or afternoon, like I had a really great time talking to you. You're really awesome. I really think we hit it off. I can't wait to talk to you again. I miss you already type of thing. And so you know I'm all, this guy's really into me or whatever. So I really bought into it. I was excited about it. We talked again that night. And it wasn't long before we were boyfriend and girlfriend. It really took off really fast, just hours and hours on the phone every day. If I wasn't at school or asleep or eating dinner with my family I was basically on the phone with John. And if I wasn't on the phone with John, I emailing John or chatting with him online. So I would get up the next morning like 7:00 and I emailed him before school. While I was at school, he leave me about 10 voice mails, usually 10 or 11 voice mails a day in about a 5 hour period telling me he missed me and he loved me and he couldn't wait to talk to me again. He couldn't wait until I got out of school so he could hear my voice and that kind of stuff. Now, if I had a boyfriend who called me that many times in 5 hours I probably really freaked out. But at the time it was just this attention and it was new and it was exciting and it was really something that I think I was really hungry for. I really wanted that sort of attention for someone to notice me. And I came home and he's like how was your day and he cared. I didn't really have anyone else asking me how was your day, what's going on, how do you feel, what are you thinking. And so again I was so sucked into that. So we were a couple on the phone all the time. He's telling me he loved me. He sent me gifts. He sent me letters. He sent me pictures. He told me I was the one. He wanted to marry me. And as we continued to talk, he started to slowly introduce me to things that I don't think I really was ready to talk about. He started bringing up sex and sexual content. The first time he actually said the word sex, I freaked out. I was like no; I'm never having sex with you. Don't even go there. He's like calm down. I am not going to ever make you do anything you don't want to do. I just want you to be comfortable talking about it. He just really, really, subtly and very slowly sort of edge it in there to our conversation until towards the end of our relationship it was something that we talked about a lot and very openly and it was something that you know really made me uncomfortable but he kind of pushed me into it and then it kind of became just what we did. So anyway, this is all going on and my parents obviously know about John because I'm on their phone for hours and hours and hours every night. I think there were several factors about it. Like one, John wanted me to tell my parents all about him. He's always saying you know tell your mom and dad about me. Tell them how great I am. Tell your mom what a nice guy I am. Tell your dad you want to me marry me. Tell them how great and wonderful and amazing I am. So I was constantly talking about John. I was like yeah John this, John that. So my parents I think, one they sort of thought of him as pen pal. They knew he lived in North Carolina. I don't think they knew his exact age. I think I was sort of like oh yeah, John, he's twenty….and they sort of thought what's going to happen, he lives across the country. They're just emailing, talking on the phone. She's happy. And another thing was actually I didn't even realize this until a couple of years after the fact and I was talking about it one day and I realized you know I'd gone through this really hard time the year before, when I was 14, it was my first year in high school and I was just, I had a really hard transition. I basically made friends with the wrong people, started hanging out with some older kids and not making very wise choices, started getting into trouble. And my parents from their side they all of sudden didn't know who I was. I stopped talking to them, I stopped communicating with them. I started acting very different. I was very angry. I was very closed off. So all of a sudden their kid is just someone else. I was doing these things they couldn't imagine me doing before. They didn't know what I was up to half the time. I don't think they really wanted to know. And they were just terrified because they had no way to talk to me. They didn't know who I was. They didn't know how to get through to me. And it was a really, really, really rough year. I was sort of coming out of that at the time I met John. We were rebuilding trust and rebuilding our relationship. I think my parents were terrified to over react to something small. Now if they over reacted to something that wasn't a big deal, maybe I'd shut them out again. Maybe I would stop talking again. Maybe I'd freak out and be like you guys, you're not cool, you don't understand. So they kind of backed off on that more than I think they would have in other situations. Anyway so they thought it was pretty harmless I guess. Now John has started talking to me about visiting from day one but obviously I couldn't just go to my parents and be like this guy from North Carolina wants to come see me. Also I think I told them that he was a friend of a friend of a friend type thing. Anyway, John is coming out, he's bought a plane ticket and now I have to tell my parents. I went to my mom because I knew she was the easiest. I'm like you know John, well the reason we started talking is he planned to move to California. He already planned that and then we started talking. And he's coming out to look for a place to live. All of this wasn't true of course but she didn't know that was the case. I was wondering if he could stay with us. So my mom is sitting there trying to be open minded, she's trying to understand what's going on. I mean just culturally different with what she grew up. She's like well you know maybe. It sounds okay but you really need to talk to your father. So of course I did what many 15 year olds often do, I turned around and said, "Hey dad, mom said yes." They were kind of stuck with that. So now at this point my dad like he just realized right away there's only one thing this twenty something year old man is going to fly across the country to visit my 15 year old daughter for and that's sex. He's not going to get it. But at the same time my dad didn't know how to stop this. He knew that I was convinced that I was in love with John. I was 15 in this big epic Romeo and Juliet type love story and if my father had been like you can't see him, we're not going to let this happen, it would just have escalated the thing made it more dramatic and more appealing. I would have been like well you don't understand, we're in love, you don't know us, you don't know me, you don't know him, blah, blah, blah, blah. Who knows what would have happened. So my dad's just sitting there playing this out in his head going you know I know my daughter she's gonna probably be more inclined to run the other way if I tell her no. What do I do? He actually worked for the city of San Francisco at the time and he just met this police officer from the Internet crime division, the ICAC unit, which is Internet Crimes against Children, about like a month before this all had started and he so he pulled out her card. He called her up and he's like, her name was Officer Mercer, so he called her up and he's like oh look I don't know if I'm over reacting or not but I've got this 15 year old daughter and she's been talking to this man and I know he's older and I think they may have met on the Internet but they've been talking you know quite a bit and now he's coming out to visit. So Officer Mercer was like you know what, I need you and your wife to be in my office tonight. They hadn't told her anything and she sat there and looked at them and said, "Well, she's doing this, she's saying that, this is going on, he's doing this, things like he's sending her gifts, she's on the phone with him all the time, she talks about like this, he's saying this to her." Obviously, they didn't know what our conversations contained. A lot of this stuff was just spot on and they're going how do you know these things. We didn't tell you anything. How do you know what's going on in our home? Officer Mercer said this is pretty typical behavior in an Internet predator. And so now my parents are really freaking out. Well, they're like what do we do. This terrible person has gotten to our daughter, she's in love with him, and she's sided with him. How do we tell her? How do we say this person is a bad person who wants to hurt you when you think you're in love with him? Officer Mercer gave them the missing game, which is a computer game, that's actually a really good game. So they dragged me kicking and screaming and sat me down in front of our family computer. They had my big brother there as well. Who is also kicking and screaming, which I found out later was him just pretending, he was in on it but I didn't know that. So we're sitting there, I don't want to play this game, I don't like video games and I don't want to play with you and I want to go talk to John. No, we're playing this game. Sit down. So actually the game was so good, I was about ten minutes in and if my parents said you can go back to your room, I would have stayed. Actually my brother and I told my dad to get out of the way because he was typing too slow at one point. So it gives you an idea of how engaging this game is. While we were playing the game, there was these really odd moments, there's sort of these red flags popping up in the back of my head and I was trying to ignore them. It was really, really strange, these weird, weird coincidences, things that Fantasma the predator in the game were saying were identical to things that John was saying to me, like phrases word for word and just situations and actions, the whole time I'm playing the game and I'm having fun but all of a sudden I'm starting to realize this Fantasma guy really sounds like John. Of course, that would mean that John had been lying to me and the last three months of my life had been a lie. This man that I thought cared about me, loved me, wanted to marry me and all that, all of sudden, maybe that's not true, maybe I'd been lied to, manipulated, maybe this man has been using me. It was something I didn't want to face and it was something that was incredible hurtful. So I'm just sitting there going no, no, no, no, it's coincidence, it's weird, freaky coincidence, it can't be true. John loves me. I love John. No. And so this is all going on in the back of my mind and we finish the game. I just don't want to deal with it. I just want it to shut off. So I run upstairs and I start going to my bedroom and my parents like no, we're not done. So they sit me down and they're like, look we love you, we care about you, we're not trying to ruin your life but we cannot allow you to meet this man. We don't feel it's safe. I pretty much didn't have any arguments. I was in sort of in shock at the time. I think the first things I said were, what am I going to say to John. I said you know what John, this is moving really fast and I am still really young. I don't know if I can do this. And John just freaked out, like he started crying and telling me that he had been hurt too many times and he was so sick of it. He was so sick of people doing things like this to him and breaking his heart and that he couldn't take it anymore and that if I broke up with him, he'd kill himself. And you know what, I believed him. I fully believed him. I was upset, I was crying, he was crying and he was at work and he was crying. I was just like, John would you just calm down. Can I call you tomorrow? Let's just calm down, take some space and I'll call you tomorrow and we'll talk about it. He's like no, no, no, if you hang up the phone right now, if you hang up and call back tomorrow, someone else will answer my phone and tell you John is dead. So I'm freaking out and I'm 15 years old, I'm not equipped to deal with this. I really believe this man is going to kill himself if I break up with him. And I didn't know what to do so I kind of just back pedaled and covered it up, oh no, no, I just got freaked out, I'm sorry, no it won't happen again. I'm sorry. Coming from that, I started to realize that how manipulative he was, how well he knew me, how well he knew how to play off my guilt and he just knew how to make me do anything really he could just get me to talk about things I didn't want to talk about apparently and just do all this so I'm sitting there like well how am I going to break things off with this man. If I call him, he's just going to talk me right back into it. So I actually met with Officer Mercer the next day and we talked about John and everything. And then I emailed him that night. I was like, look my parents have been talking to the police and if you don't want to get into trouble, you really shouldn't contact me anymore. He sent me one email back like well I haven't done anything, why are they talking to the police. Well, actually, it's pretty illegal for you to talk to me about the things you've talked to me about so I've never heard from him again. So I was like okay, this is over. I'm not 100% sure he was a predator but it's very likely that this man has been lying to me. He didn't want me to be with my friends, like he wanted me to talk to him all the time, how like he was allowed to go do things but I couldn't and it was just these weird double standards and he was really protective and obsessive and things that I just ignored and written off is him being affectionate or into me or what not. A couple of days later, I got a phone call from Office Mercer and she said well, Katie, have you heard from John. I was like no, I broke things off like you told me to and I haven't heard from him. She's like well that's great but I looked into and it turns out he's wanted by the FBI and we don't know where he is. So apparently John had been having ongoing sexual relationship with a 13 year old in West Virginia the entire time. He told the girl the same things he told me. He actually wrote her the same letters, word for word, sent her the same gifts, you know everything, except she was closer so he was actually able to have psychical contact with her. He did have many encounters with her and in fact took her across state lines which made it a federal offense. So now I'm sitting there and I realize that this man is sick. He's not a good person. He did not care about me at all. Everything he said to me was a lie and not only that; it was a lie he said to someone else who believed him as well. And I don't know how many people he told this to and I don't know how many girls he was actually able to have contact with but I do know one other for sure and then I had this moment where I realized John knows everything about me, without meaning to, I had told this man everything he needed to know to get to me. He knew where I went to school, he knew where I lived, he knew where I went on the weekends, he knew where I hung out with my friends, he knew everything and there's nothing I could do about it. And it wasn't like I meant to say oh here's my life story, here's everything you need to stalk me. It was just like, well, what'd you do today. Oh I went to the mall with my friends. What mall. Oh this mall and things like that, little things were enough to give him information to where I was extremely vulnerable. He had a plane ticket to San Francisco. No one knew where he was. Now, I had this, it was about a week where no one knew where John was and it was absolutely terrifying and very sobering for me cause I'm 15 years old. I hadn't thought I told this man everything and I had. So it was very scary. They actually did catch him and arrested him. I ended up flying to West Virginia to testify against him in court, which was also quite an experience. That was the first time I actually saw John in courtroom setting. So he was actually convicted and is now spending twenty years in prison. My favorite groups to speak to are parents like you guys and kids cause I think you guys are the ones that you know need the information, absorb the information, and I'm just going to leave you with a thought, actually two. One is the Internet is deceptive. It's so deceptive to teens, to parents; it's something that feels safe. You're in a safe place, you're in your bedroom, your living room, your den, wherever, it's a place where you don't normally have strangers come in to. If you are on the street, you used to confronting strangers, having to deal with them, you have your guard up. When you're in your bedroom, you're relaxed, that's the safest place you can be. You're not used to strangers coming in and that's what happening over the Internet. Everyone on the Internet is a stranger, whether they know all your favorite shows or not, whether they are cool or not. It's really hard for teens sometimes to separate that because their friends physically look the same. It's just a name on a screen and it's really hard to remember that you have no idea who the other person could be. You don't know. You can be anyone. They can be anyone. It's really hard to remember that. Another thing that, my other point is mostly for parents, that the Internet is a privilege. It's really hard to look at it that way especially if you're teens know more about the Internet than you do. It's important for parents to have open dialog with kids. Talk to your kids. Know what's going on online. It shouldn't be some foreign world. Sometimes I've had parents who actually gone down and said to their kids, show me how to use this and the kids do. It's seems really scary but as long as the lines of communication are open. I think it's a really positive thing.

I'm Jim Harris with the FBI of Sacramento. MySpace, we're talking about MySpace a lot and you hear everybody talk about MySpace. I don't want to pan MySpace. MySpace is actually very cooperative with law enforcement. When we have a missing kid, MySpace will do whatever needs to be done to get the kid back. There are a lot of other social networking sites that are not as cooperative so I always want to say that to begin with. I'm not panning them. I think they provide a service, it's an inevitable service and they actually provide it much more safely than a lot of their competitors do. With that said, what's so popular about it. Well, it's free to use. When I was a little bit younger, when I was in college, if you wanted to have a space on the Internet and tell everybody about yourself, you made your own Web page. On that everybody can their own Web page and it's actually kind of expensive to host your own Web page even if you have a free site. MySpace just made it all convenient. Lately though, MySpace users have been involved in a lot of incidences, which has led to class action lawsuit against MySpace which not to render an opinion but maybe unfounded, the reality is though MySpace users have been targeted for even physical rapes. I mean we've had incidences in the Sacramento Valley area where kids who post on MySpace on MySpace you know kids are who they want to be and they tend to be a little bit more sexual provocative, girls especially will dress provocatively, they'll pose, the thing about this is, that it attracts people who think okay that's how she is in real life and they don't understand that the poster doesn't understand that this picture of me and my tight shorts and you know posing is just to be funny but to this guy it means that I'm willing to do something more. In cyber bullying, cyber stalking, these are other things that are happened, other dangers that are not sexually in nature but hey if you're posting your entire identity online, people can use it for anything they want. They can pretend to be you to make you look bad. There have actually been incidences where girls had their MySpace pages ripped off and it says it looks just like their MySpace page except somebody's saying hey I'm available for out calls, which is prostitution talk for hey come and set up a date and come over to my house. In this case, this is an actually MySpace profile so everything has been blanked out to protect privacy but this girl says she's 17 years old but and she says she's in Tallahassee, Florida but over here she says she's actually 13 years old. It gives her true grade level, her school name and first name. Why does she say she's 17 to MySpace and say she's 13 in reality? If you're 13, you can't have a MySpace page. So everybody under the age of 14 lies how old they are to MySpace but puts their real age in the verbiage. Tons and tons of pictures including Tyler Marino, now we know her name and her birth weight, not that it's any use to anyone and her date of birth. Well, now, most people are now familiar with consequence of identity theft. You can already kind of think this is a bad thing. I know everything about this person. And Tyler like most users of MySpace has multiple MySpace accounts so if her parents find one and shut it down, that's okay, she's got six others. And again they all say the same thing, I'm Tyler, I'm 13 and I go to Griffin Middle School. She gives her AIM address, her school address, her AIM (AOL Instant Messenger) account, everything, which you can go to and find out even more information including her first and last name and her zip code and everything else, which you could plug into white pages and ultimately into Map Quest and get a map from your house to her house. 13 years old and in a matter of minutes, you can go to her MySpace page, find out everything there is to know about her, get pictures of her and draw yourself a map to her house. Well, here is another guy, Danny. Danny's profile on MySpace, he likes poetry, plants, flowers and watching movies by the fire. Danny drops a lot of F bombs so we kind of edited it out. Danny loves his country. He's here for dating, serious relationships, friends, networking so far he has 14 friends listed. There's some pictures, it even says, he's got some pictures of his tattoos, he's looking for a girlfriend but there's another Web page you can find information about Danny on and it's the Arizona basically they're equivalent of Megan's Law Sex Offender Registry and there's Danny and amazingly he failed to mention that he's a level 3 high risk sex offender. No where in his profile does he point that out to any potential girlfriend, something you would think that they might want to know. Here's another charming guy up on the Internet. This is another service, Yahoo is just as, it's been around longer than MySpace and it's still (inaudible), Yahoo is trying to compete, come back and kind of compete with MySpace. The hair might through you but that's actually me from 20 years ago and in about 5 minutes I created several profiles including this one as Jamie, in Sacramento with 15 year old, with some typical 15 year old geek stuff and I even say things like my dad moved me out here, my parents split up, all these things are like big red flags to a predator. Hey his parents split up; I've only got one parent to deal with. He's living with one. He's already unhappy. They've moved me out here, I don't know anybody. I don't have any friends. It's a great target. And in the link I even put a link to the MySpace profile, which I won't go into, but I also created a MySpace profile for this person. Now the problem is I download Yahoo Instant Messenger and a lot of you hear about chat. Yahoo Instant Messenger, there's a million links from the Yahoo page to take you to Yahoo Instant Messenger. You download the application, it takes a few minutes and then a few minutes after you install it, you log in with your same Yahoo user name and password, which I've done here, and then I go over to Yahoo connection over here, I go down to Yahoo Chat and I say I want to join a room but I'm 15 and I actually told Yahoo that I was 15 so it tells me no you have to be at least 18 years old. No problem, in 5 more minutes I can go back and make another profile this time I've told, it's the same profile, same information, I even say in the profile I'm 15 years old but I've told Yahoo when I filled it out that I was 18 and now I can go right into Yahoo Chat. I've just changed the username just a little bit and now this is what's available to me. I can drop into Yahoo Chat room. I look into romance, well I'm 15 years old, and I'm very interested into romance. I drop in, adult; I'm adult enough so I would drop in what's an adult romance mean. Well, apparently it means bondage and sadomasochism, fetishes, gay male, lesbian, married but looking, masturbation, role playing, straight, straight was at least thrown in there some place and if I look at the bondage and S & M, BDSM there, I've got bondage a go go, dungeon, more bondage a go go, more dungeon, dungeon Canada, I can drop right in and see what people are doing. And over in the corner in the top right hand corner, I've got everybody else who's in this chat room. Now everybody in this chat room can see everything everybody else is saying and I can sit here for a while and you're not going to see anybody saying much. Why? Because what they're really doing is dropping in to see who is interested in the same topics and they're starting conversations with them. But who are some of the people that I is now a 15 year old can easily talk to and by the way I just go up to the right, I click on their name and I say want to see their profile and this is what I get. Well, here's one of their profiles. She's offering to cam for money, by cam, you turn on your webcam and you do sexual things, she strips, she does whatever you want her to do. Here's another I actually had to edited it out because it was too much for this. Again offering to appear on camera for you, turn on her webcam and do all sorts of pornographic things. And another, guess what, occupation stripper, what's she offering to do on camera, get naked for, they're just sitting in this room and now as a 15 year old boy, I have access to this. And typically when you tell parents about this, you got all the fathers in the room going my 15 year old is going to go look at these girls, big deal. Guess what, your 15 year old daughters are looking at these girls too and they're going hey that's okay. These are role models to them. It's desensitizing children to sexuality at a young age. The problem with all of this is that kids are learning at a young age that is perfectly okay acceptable behavior. So now all I have to do is young 15 year old Jamie is just click on one of the names, double click on it and say hi and off the races we have a conversation, a 15 year old talking to 24 year old stripper who wants to get naked on camera for him. What do they talk about? Well, here's an actually chat session, this is an undercover chat session I did with a gentleman who thought I was a 16 year old girl and I've actually, I skipped all the rapport building that went on before this but basically the guy says hey, how are you doing. He starts off right away with did you get the card or I got the card you sent me, oh thanks. Well, he actually did, this guy actually mailed me a Christmas card, very touching. He's very interested into bondage and domination, by the way. He wants me to wear a collar, all sorts of things like this. They say things like how are you, you know nobody spells anything out anymore. No body even knows how to spell anymore I think. Did you keep my address? He's very worried about that. He says I'm doing okay. I've got court coming up in May. My antenna perked up a little bit. Really, you've got court coming up in May. For what? And he kind of blows me off for a little bit. Hey send me a picture of you, okay. Why do you have court? Some bad thing I did on the computer. Anybody what to guess? Okay, will you write to me? He wants me to actually write him back. He's given me his home address by this point. And he's in Mississippi so don't worry. Are you gonna go to jail? I'm worried about you, all that sort of stuff. Love, hugs and kisses. I will write. And as it turns out he's been arrested locally and is out on bail for child pornography. Peer to peer file sharing programs. This is another area that people think you're so innocuous. It's a, you know you hear about all these file sharing programs. What are they? Peer to peer file sharing programs. Your computer can share files with any other computer on the Internet and it sounds totally harmless. What are most people do with it, music, movies. There's Kazaa, there's LimeWire, Morpheus, eMule...but the reality is here are the uses and you'll get my MP3s, illegally traded movies and music, illegally copied pornography, illegal child pornography and resumes. Anybody noticed anything here, the only legitimately use that I have personally seen on these things, resumes. Every other purpose that is any sort of volume is illegal, okay, even the pornography because it's copyrighted is typically illegal to, the adult pornography illegal, but there's child pornography and its so easy and it's easy to come across because one of the things that happens is people download a pornographic, if you're a kid and you're curious, you download a pornographic video or image, thinking that you're going to get a pornographic video or image of an adult, you think you're going to go see Angelina Jolie and in fact it's a four year old on the other end and that happens. It happens a lot more than people think it does. But either way you go, get rid of this stuff because if it's on your computer and your kids using it, you know when we do search warrants on these peer to peer file sharing programs, we have an address. We don't know who's doing anything and they do search warrants for things like copyright violation. So if your kids got you know his entire CD collection on Kazan, he's sharing it with the entire world and the FBI shows up and knocks on your door with a search warrant, it's a bad day. Child pornography, getting back to the topic, you can read this if you want but I'll just say it in my own words and it was kind of already said in the video. Child pornography is not happy naked kids running on a beach. Those days are long, long gone, alright. Child pornography now what we see overwhelmingly on just about every case over and over again is graphic, vicious, brutal. The ages of the victims are getting younger, the things that they do to the victims are getting worse and worse. Bondage, S & M, torture, some people like the audio where you can hear the child screaming in pain, I mean, these are the things that these guys are looking at, these are the things that bring them pleasure. This is not normal. Okay, so there was a study about child pornography and the bottom line most of your kids between the ages of 10 and 17 are gonna have some sort of exposure to pornography online. In a lot of cases it's going to be accidental. And the other part of this is that they can have exposure to child pornography online. Well, they talked about this, I won't go too much in the statistics of it but 83% of what we're seeing now are children ages 6 to 12, okay, 19% children younger than 2, so I won't go into this too much either. Bottom line is these are as someone said in the video earlier, these are crime scene photos. They're horrible. They're horrible for us to look at. Who are the possessors? Well, there's been a lot of talk about who these guys are and how dangerous they are. 55%, one study was done, 55% of these people were known to be direct threats, 40% were known to have sexually abused a child, 15% were known to have attempted to allure a child and at the time of the conviction, 42% of the offenders were known to have committed contact sexual offences, actually molested the child, 55 known victims. Now we're talking about a group of only about 62 people here. So long story short. I'm not gonna go through all of these but what's the long story short on the study. It was done by a psychologist of the sexual offender treatment program in Butner, North Carolina. Bottom line is, 62 people, they asked them, they said 10% of you are going to be randomly polygraph to verify your results. They knew about 55 molest, out of 62 perpetrators, most of whom 49 of which were in for just child pornography, does anybody have any guess about how many actually molest victims there were? Anyone want to hazard a guess? Higher, much higher, to save you from guessing, 1444, all but 10 of those victims were from the child pornography guys, which means, if you do the math, basically law enforcement has about 1 in 30 of catching a child molest, that means for all the 45,000 registered sex offenders in the eastern district of California, we've only had, those are the guys that got caught. We only had 1 in 30 chance of catching them so do the math. I just wanted to show you and this slide is a little out of place, I apologize. On the peer to peer file sharing program, this is how easy it is. You download a client, this took, this client took me about 5 to 10 minutes to download. You install it, you run it, you do a key word search and in minutes, you start having files appear, I start the download and you can say okay I want this one, this one, this one, this one and you click on them and off you go and in a few minutes later, you have whatever it is on your computer and that can include anything from the latest CD, somebody released to hard cord pornography and there's, to the program they all mean the same thing. The program doesn't know. It has no filter of content, which means if you have this on there, you're opening the world not only to viruses and things like that, but to all kinds of stuff you do not want your kids to have access to and there's no way for me to alter this program so it doesn't look for pornography, it doesn't look for child porn, it filters that stuff out. It's all the same to the computer. So what do you do? Well, most of, I won't beat it to death because most of its already been talked about and I think the reality is Katie did a better job of talking about than I would any how. Look for these signs. If your kid is spending 8 or 9 hours a day on the computer, that's a bad sign. If your kid is getting gifts from somebody you don't know, that's a bad sign. If you are talking on the phone with somebody you don't, these are all things you got to think about. Gifts in the mail is a big thing. We have arrested a number of people. What did they do? They sent a webcam to somebody. They were involved in a explicit chat and they want the person to take pictures while the person at the other end's a cop who looks like me and he doesn't have, I can't pass myself off as a 14 year old girl on camera so they sent him a webcam. No problem, I'll buy you one. I'll send you a webcam. Gifts in the mail, it's a very common thing, cell phones, all of these things. Where does the computer go in your house? Well, if it goes in your daughter's bedroom, you have a webcam and high speed Internet access, there's going to be child pornography images of your daughter on the Internet for the next two centuries and that's a fact of life. Even if she's not turning it on, by the way, there's hacks for Yahoo chat, which makes it possible for a remote user to turn your webcam on when you don't think it's on. Talk to your kids, the most important thing. Katie's parents did exact right thing. They talked to her and they were obviously engaged and they obviously did the right thing because it worked out. If you don't talk to your kids and you don't learn from your kids and let them teach you, she even, she kind of hit on that when they started the video game, her and her brother like get out of the way, let me show you how this is done. It's a reality the situation that your kids do know more about the Internet and computer than you do. Software and overt surveillance, okay, there's all kinds of software packages out there and nobody asked me afterwards which one I recommend because I can't and I won't. It comes up every single time. There's tons of them out there, go research them, there's a lot of Web pages you can research them, find the right one, install it and don't think that just because you installed the software that you're safe because the software isn't responsible for your child. The software doesn't know your child and the software is only logging stuff for you to review and if you're not reviewing it, it's worthless. Remember who the real victim is. Why I talk about this is, in cases where we do have real child victims, we have to talk to parents, it's very difficult for parents to realize because they're confronted with this knowledge, oh my God, my kid did this and it's shocking and it's appalling, I can't believe she did this. I'm gonna just and the anger starts up and everything else, but the reality is, like Katie was telling you tonight, these guys know all the angles. They worked on the kid for a very long time. We had a runaway from the Sacramento Valley area, 15 years old, went to go live with her Internet boyfriend in another state, you know, after we got her back, trying to piece together what happened, they had been working on her for two years from the time she was 13. Two years is a long time to wait but not for the predators. And my last little rule for you is to remember that kids have absolutely no expectations of privacy except for what their parents give them and it's very difficult for people to understand that but the common theme through the traveler case is that we have over and over again, for the successful traveler cases where the guy got the kid to go is the parents, I didn't want to be that kind of parent so I let them have their space and privacy. Well, it doesn't work out. The reality is you're not there to be their friend, you're not there to be really permissive, you're there to make sure that they are okay and you're giving them this tool, it's an amazing tool and it can show them the entire world but the reality is it's probably one of the most dangerous things in your house. You wouldn't leave a loaded gun lying around. If you leave this thing lying around, you just think well they'll figure out how to use it. You're asking for that same level of trouble.

"With millions of the children using the Internet daily both at school and at home, it is vital that both parents and educators work together to ensure that our children are using the Internet wisely and safely. There are a number of software packages and products available to help us to protect our children while they're online. To learn more, please visit the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children Web site at www.missingkids.com. That Web site offers a wealth of valuable information about the dangers that exist online and how to deal with them. Thank you for watching our presentation. Please remember, keeping our children safe on the Internet is everyone's job."