Predators

BY DAN PETTY
STAFF WRITER
THE CAPITAL NEWS SERVICE

RICHMOND – The Internet, long considered an anonymous safe haven for sexual predators, may be harder for them to exploit if a bill sponsored by Del. Robert Hurt, R-Chatham, passes through the Virginia General Assembly.

The bill, HB 2749, would require sexual offenders convicted in Virginia to register their e-mail addresses and instant messenger screen names with a local law enforcement agency, which would then forward the information to the Virginia State Police. Changes to e-mail addresses or other Internet communication names by a sex offender must be reported to a parole officer or the State Police within 30 minutes, by the bill's provisions.

The House Appropriations Committee unanimously approved the bill Friday, 23- 0, and reported it to the House floor, where it must be passed before Feb. 6, the final day the House can consider its own legislation. A similar measure was unanimously approved by a Senate committee last week.

"I come from an area where I don't think there's a great deal of awareness about what kids are doing online, and I think it's probably like that across the Commonwealth," Hurt said. "People really need to know about sexual predators, and many recognize that this is a terrifying danger."

Hurt's bill is part of a broader campaign by Virginia Attorney General Robert McDonnell to crack down on sexual predation in Virginia. His "Safe Kids Initiative," launched during the 2006 General Assembly session, aims to drastically reform the way Virginia monitors, incarcerates and treats sexual predators that prey on children, according to his Web site.

"This bill will have a significant effect on making children safer," Hurt said. "Obviously we want to enhance the penalties for the people who do this. I'm convinced that you can't fix these folks. You've got to punish them and get them off the streets for as long as you can. That's the only solution."

During the 2006 legislation session, Hurt sponsored House Bill 1014, which prohibited Web sites from charging people to view child pornography over the Internet. Hurt was a member of McDonnell's Youth Internet Safety Task Force, which visited the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children in Alexandria, Va., and watched a demonstration by a State Police officer, who posed as a teenager in a chat room.

"It was remarkable how quickly the officer had people, who identified themselves as grown men, requesting his age, gender, location and a photograph," Hurt said. "That was bone-chilling to me."

Hurt said the bill would allow the State Police to monitor, in cooperation with Internet service providers, the behavior of convicted sexual offenders on the Internet. Predators found to be on certain Web sites would be kicked off and reported to the State Police for a sex offender registry violation.

Sex offenders are required to re-register with the police every 90 days.

"I think everybody would agree that Internet is a fantastic," Hurt said. "But there's so much anonymity, so many dark places, and so many ways for these people to get right into your home. If you've got children who are talking innocently to people online, you can see how something very terrible can happen."

Besides increasing efforts to track sexual offenders, HB 2749 comprehensively rewrites the laws regarding the possession and production of child pornography.

Sentences for violating this part of the bill carry prison terms between one and 40 years, with mandatory minimum imprisonment ranging from five years to 25 years, depending on the violation and whether it was a repeat offense.

The bill defines child pornography as sexually explicit visual material with a person less than 18 years old, and further clarifies that a person who is depicted, in a sexually explicit way, to be less than 18 years of age, is presumed to be less than 18.

Seven other delegates, including Terry Kilgore, R-Gate City, and David Albo, RFairfax, are listed as co-patrons and supporters for the bill.

But some people, like University of Richmond computer science professor Douglas Szajda, believe that from a technological standpoint, the law is ineffective.

"There's an assumption here that e-mail addresses or IM addresses are difficult to get, or that it's easy to say an e-mail address belongs to a particular person," said Szajda, an expert on computer security. "That can be very hard to do."

"You can send e-mail to anyone and from anyone. So effectively this bill is using e-mail as an authenticator and that's always a bad idea."

While the bill may not effectively limit sexual predation on the internet, Szajda said it provides prosecutors in Virginia a tool to further punish sex offenders who don't register e-mail or instant messenger addresses.

Hurt acknowledged that some sex offenders will evade the law by failing to properly register e-mail addresses and instant messenger screen names.

"The bottom line is, if they get caught, then they can be guilty of probation violations," Hurt said. "And that will put them back in jail before they hurt somebody again. There will be those that get around it, but that's not something we can control."

As for solutions to the problem, legal precedent exists for barring certain people, like computers hackers, from using computers and the Internet. But even these restrictions may not be effective.

"Even if you could put something around predators' houses that prevented them from accessing the Internet, how do you prevent them from accessing it at someone else's house or a library, for instance?" said Szajda, who has two younger children. "I'm not sure of any technological solution to that problem."

Although Internet filtering programs block access to certain Web sites, they cannot prevent children from browsing social networking sites like MySpace.com. The best solution, Szajda said, involves actively monitoring a child's internet use, which he acknowledged was not always what parents want to hear.

"This particular attempt at making the Internet safer is not really going to prevent a whole lot of folks from doing bad things if they want to," he said. "You don't have to be technologically sophisticated to get temporary e-mail addresses or IM addresses, or to get a bunch of them."