A bill just approved by a U.S. Senate committee would slap steeper fines on Internet service providers that fail to alert authorities when they obtain knowledge of child pornography on their servers.
Federal law already requires ISPs to file such reports "as soon as reasonably possible" to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children's Cyber Tipline--although they're not required to proactively search for the illegal images.
The Protecting Children in the 21st Century Act, which the Senate Commerce Committee cleared by a unanimous voice vote on Thursday afternoon, would triple the fines for failure to comply with the current law--rising to up to $150,000 for the first offense and up to $300,000 for each subsequent violation.
ISPs would also have to include a variety of information in their reports that is not required by existing law, including any relevant user IDs, e-mail addresses, geographic information and IP addresses of the involved person or reported content.
It's not exactly clear whether the steeper fines and extra reporting information are necessary. Ernie Allen, who heads the National Center, told Congress last year that since its conception in 1998, the Cyber Tipline has handed law enforcement more than 400,000 leads and led to hundreds of arrests and successful prosecutions.
Allen also said it's partnering with companies like AOL, Microsoft, Yahoo, Google, Earthlink and United Online to come up with technological solutions for disrupting child pornography sites.
Lest you be confused, this bill is entirely different from one of the same name that was introduced in January by Sen. Ted Stevens (R-Alaska), ranking member of the Commerce Committee. That proposal revived two thorny approaches to online child protection that generated significant controversy last year: limiting access to social networking sites and chat rooms in schools and libraries and threatening jail time to Web site operators who don't label "sexually explicit" pages as such.
None of those proposals shows up in the version approved Thursday. Instead, the bill calls for schools and federal regulators to launch online safety educational campaigns and would establish an "online safety and technology working group." The working group would be required to issue a report about the "prevalence" of online safety educational campaigns, blocking and filtering software and parental control technologies--along with recommendations about what sort of "incentives" could be used to boost use of those techniques. Such assessments have been known to fuel calls for new laws.
The group would also be tasked with finding out what Internet service providers do about retaining user records "in connection with crimes against children." That information could prove a step toward reviving the push for federal data retention requirements put forth by former Attorney General Alberto Gonzales in recent years.
Whether the bill will go anywhere from here, as always, isn't so clear.
Here's another bill to add to the heap of congressional proposals offered in the spirit of combating child pornography and keeping kids safe from predators on the Internet.
It's called the Protecting Children in the 21st Century Act, and it was proposed on Thursday by Sen. Ted Stevens (R-Alaska)--along with Sens. Daniel Inouye (D-Hawaii), Mark Pryor (D-Ark.), Bill Nelson (D-Fla.) and Kay Bailey Hutchison (R-Texas).
But this one doesn't seem to be as aggressive as some previous approaches, which called for requiring everything from labeling Web sites containing sexually explicit content to wiping out access to social-networking sites and chat rooms on school- and library-based computers.
If the 11-page bill seen by CNET News.com on Friday becomes law, ISPs would face tripled fines for failing to report child pornography on their servers--up to $150,000 for failing to report child pornography the first time and up to $300,000 for each subsequent failures. But unlike an earlier draft proposal by Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), however, this version does not attempt to expand those reporting requirements to include other Web operations, such as commercial Web sites and personal blogs.
The ISPs would, however, also have to include a variety of information in their reports that is not required by existing law, including any relevant user IDs, e-mail addresses, geographic information and IP addresses of the involved person or reported content.
In addition to proposing that both schools and federal regulators institute online safety educational campaigns, the bill would establish an "online safety and technology working group." Composed of businesses, public-interest groups and relevant federal agency representatives, they would be charged with exploring the state of various industry efforts dealing with, you guessed it, online safety.
Among the topics slated for discussion is ISPs' existing data retention practices. That's a far more watered-down approach than some draft legislation circulating last year, in which politicians, backed by Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, were considering requiring ISPs to record data about their users and hang onto it for a specified block of time in an effort to aid investigators.
After meeting, the working group would be required to issue a report to the Senate Commerce Committee and the Commerce Department about the "prevalence" of online safety educational campaigns, blocking and filtering software and parental control technologies--along with recommendations about what sort of "incentives" could be used to boost use of those techniques. Such reports, however, have been known to fuel calls for new laws.
The House of Representatives is also scheduled to turn to the issue of "Internet sex crimes" before politicians scoot out of town for their August recess. On Friday afternoon, House Judiciary Committee Chairman John Conyers (D-Mich.), House Democratic Caucus Chairman Rahm Emanuel (D-Ill.) and three of their Democratic colleagues plan to stage a press conference at which Conyers is expected to announce hearings on the topic this fall.
Rep. Earl Pomeroy (D-N.D) is likely to make another push at the event for his bill, the Keeping the Internet Devoid of Sexual Predators Act of 2007 (or KIDS Act, for short). It would require convicted sex offenders to register their online identifiers, such as e-mail addresses and screen names, in a federal database that could be checked by commercial social-networking sites.
MySpace responded Tuesday afternoon to the letter sent by eight states' attorneys general Monday requesting the popular social networking site to turn over data pertaining to registered sex offenders who have profiles on the site. The letter, signed by the attorneys general from Connecticut, Georgia, Idaho, Mississippi, New Hampshire, North Carolina, Ohio and Pennsylvania, requested that MySpace respond by May 29 with a count of how many sex offenders' profiles have been located as well as a plan for how to deal with them.
The News Corp.-owned site had provided a less detailed statement Monday.
The formal statement, attributed to MySpace chief security officer Hemanshu Nigam, said that the social network has been doing "everything short of breaking the law" to ensure that sex offenders' profiles are discovered and removed. "MySpace has zero tolerance for sexual predators," he wrote, "which is why we devoted a team of engineers to work around the clock with Sentinel Tech, to develop the nations? first proprietary software dedicated to identifying and removing sexual predators from online communities."
According to Nigam, MySpace has been proactive: "In the 12 days since the software has become operable, we have deleted and removed every registered sex offender that we identified out of our more than 175 million profiles."
But he said that the states' request was actually illegal under the terms of the Electronic Communications Privacy Act (ECPA): "A few Attorneys General have asked us to turn the names of the sexual predators over to them, we are, unfortunately, prohibited by federal and state laws from doing so." To clarify, Nigam later added a comment on Tuesday evening to the earlier statement, emphasizing that MySpace is "more than willing to provide this information as long as we don't have to break laws to do it."
Nigam instead suggested that politicians could be taking different measures to combat sex offenders' presence on sites like MySpace. "We need cooperation from lawmakers to drive mandatory sex offender email registration legislation at the federal and state level to make blocking predators from community-based websites a more efficient process," Nigam wrote. "Our hope is that the Attorneys General who signed onto this letter, and other websites, join us in pushing this legislation into law."
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