N.J. Sex Offender Internet Registry

The poster child of sex offenders who altered their digital identity is Fran Kuni, who changed his name to Jamie Shepard and was able to get a job as a U.S. Census worker in New Jersey before being busted by a mom who recognized him when he knocked on the door of her home.

Nearly one in six convicted sex offenders is using sophisticated techniques invented by identity thieves to avoid their legally mandated registration requirements, a new study has found. These digital absconders might be able to avoid post-incarceration restrictions by living near schools and playgrounds, and could possibly gain employment working with children.

The study, conducted by Utica College and funded by the U.S. Justice Department, estimates that roughly 92,000 of the 570,000 registered sex offenders across the country are systematically manipulating their names, birthdays, Social Security numbers and other personal identifiers so they can live as they want while appearing to satisfy court-imposed or statutory restrictions.

"These are offenders who are flying under the radar and authorities don't know it," said Don Rebovich, the Utica professor who directed the study. "The authorities really don’t have the resources to keep on checking on these people. Offenders find where the vulnerabilities are in the system and exploit them."

These digital absconders create two obvious problems. Communities expend energy and resources dealing with offenders who aren't really there -- local police knock on doors and send notices to warn neighbors; public listings are published on the Internet. And sex offenders live where they please as normal adults, without any protective measures kicking in.

"In the worst-case scenario, by thwarting registration requirements, they could potentially have easier access to children," said Staca Shehan, director of case analysis at the Center for Missing and Exploited Children, who is familiar with the study. "(In) those jurisdictions that have residency restrictions that would not allow (offenders) to live within distance of a school, daycare or park, (they) could avoid that type of requirement."

While the study found that an average of 16.2 percent of sex offenders manipulate their identities nationally, some states fared worse: Louisiana, Washington, D.C., Nevada, Tennessee and Delaware all had digital absconder rates of higher than 25 percent.

Officials in Tennessee, Nevada and Delaware challenged the study's conclusions and complained that they had not been contacted by the researchers for additional information that might have clarified the results; officials in the other states did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

'Strategic' manipulation
Shehan said there are generally two kinds of sex offender absconders: those who simply fail to keep their records current, and hope they fall through the cracks; and those who are more systematic in their evasion, intentionally altering their identities so they can circumvent the restrictions. 

"That takes a lot more thought," she said. "They are much more strategic about what they are doing ... and so that's much more concerning."

In one celebrated case of sex offender identity manipulation, a convict named Frank Kuni changed his name to Jamie Shepard and was able to get a job as a U.S. Census worker in New Jersey. Kuni was recognized by a mom after he knocked on the door of her Pennsauken home, and he was later sentenced to three years in prison. Kuni’s case attracted national headlines because of the fear it created surrounding temporary Census workers.

The Utica study, believed to be the first attempt to quantify these more strategic absconders, was conducted by Utica College's Center for Identity Management, set up to examine a variety of identity issues in the digital age. Rebovich is director of the center.

It's well known that some sex offenders neglect their registration requirements, dropping off the grid and accepting only cash-paying jobs to remain hidden. But the Utica study found something more subtle, and perhaps more disturbing -- sex offenders who appear to be satisfying their registration requirements while living a digital double life.

In a parallel survey of 223 law enforcement agencies from 46 states, Utica found that awareness of ID-theft style registry evasion was low -- only 5 percent of respondents said they knew of an identity manipulation case within their jurisdiction. 

And nearly 40 percent of the agencies responded that they had zero absconders, suggesting some law enforcement agencies are unaware of the problem.

The power of the Utica study lies in the use of sophisticated algorithms developed by private firm ID Analytics, a fraud-fighting company used by many large banks and other financial institutions. ID Analytics receives more than 1 billion credit applications and other credit-related events from clients every year. It uses sophisticated software to track the behavior of identity thieves across the credit system, and can find fraud that individual firms miss. It knows, for example, if a criminal uses a systematic series of birthdays or addresses on a set of credit card applications at various banks in an attempt to evade fraud detection. The ID Analytics tool has enough data that it can generally tell the difference between honest typographical errors and systematic fraud attempts. 

ID Analytics ran sex offender data through its massive database of credit-related events, and found evidence of rampant identity manipulation among the offenders.

Kristin Helm, a spokeswoman for Tennessee's sex registry, challenged the study's findings, saying that fewer than 1 percent of that state's sex offenders are absconders. Criminals have always used false identities to try to evade police, but law enforcement systems are geared to handle that issue, she said. "Fingerprints obtained by law enforcement identify individuals regardless of a name or Social Security number," she said, adding that names sometimes change for legitimate reasons, too, such as marriage. 

But Stephen Coggeshall, chief technology officer for ID Analytics, said his technology is well-versed in screening out mundane reasons for identity changes and finding patterns that specifically indicate active evasion is taking place.

"This goes way beyond typos," he said. "These are people who have slightly adjusted or substantially adjusted their personally identifiable information for a reason. They are actively doing so, and we are observing them use these aliases relatively recently."

Nevada spokeswoman Julie Butler also questioned the validity of the study, which she had not seen. She said that Nevada uses fingerprints to track sex offenders, so identity manipulation techniques would be ineffective.

"Our registry is fingerprint-based. We don't base it on date of birth, or Social Security number, or name," Butler said. "They can put down their name as whatever and we still have them in the database."

But Coggeshall responded that even in states which use fingerprint identification, an identity manipulator would only be discovered when trying to engage in an activity – such as becoming an elementary school teacher – which triggers a fingerprint evaluation. 

"In general it doesn't help you track where they are or if they're living under an alias at an unregistered location," he said. "It can help to find sex offenders as they enroll in certain groups, but many … groups don't routinely fingerprint new enrollees."

SSNs connected to multiple people
Two years ago, using this tool on a database of Social Security numbers, ID Analytics found that rampant evidence of identity theft: 5 million SSNs were connected to three or more U.S. adults in credit applications, and 140,000 were associated with five or more people, indicating almost certain fraud. The tool can also track individual identity manipulators, as ID Analytics calls them, as they attempt various frauds across an array of credit issuers.

This tool was turned on the sex offender registry problem at the invitation of Utica College in Utica, N.Y., beginning last year. ID Analytics took a large sample -- nearly 100,000 -- of the 570,000 active registered sex offender records and ran them through its credit application database, looking for signs of manipulation.

The findings were disturbing. In Louisiana, the study found, nearly two-thirds of offenders' records showed signs of manipulation. Rebovich theorized that Louisiana's problem might stem from the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, which gave some people a golden opportunity to drop off the grid.

Officials in Louisiana did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

In many cases, the study found, the steps criminals take are subtle -- changing an address from "440 Monroeville Road" to "434 Monroeville Road," for example. In fact, in the majority of cases, digital absconders were much more likely to move across town than across the country. Absconders who fake their address are six times more likely to remain in the same state than to cross state lines, the study found, and 90 percent of those who remain in state stay within 40 miles of their original registered address. In many cases, the data shows, those addresses belong to a family member. That might allow absconders to show up on a moment's notice at their registered address in case local police do a random check, Rebovich said.

But the address change could also allow them to apply for jobs and housing they would otherwise be unable to qualify for, he said.

While half of the manipulations involve bad addresses, plenty of other types of evasion are going on, the study found. One subject studied had five names, three Social Security numbers and four dates of birth, for example.

About 10,000 offenders had used at least four different Social Security numbers, Rebovich said. The evidence indicates this was usually done to evade the court registration requirements rather than commit financial identity theft, the study found.

One reason sex offenders seem to get away with evasion is that registration requirements are set by states and vary widely. In some states, convicts merely send updates through the U.S. mail to state officials, and are subjected to little, if any, verification. In others, officers try to check on sex offenders, but ofter are assigned hundreds, or even thousands of offenders, to track.

In other states, such as Florida, there are strict requirements and frequent random inspections, Rebovich said. That shows up in the data -- Florida's digital absconder rate is about half the national average, at 9.4 percent.

The study was funded by the Justice Department's Bureau of Justice Assistance, which plans on issuing a comprehensive report later this fall. Requests for comment from the Department of Justice went unanswered.

'System is never going to be perfect'
Shehan, of the Center for Missing and Exploited Children, said she didn't believe that the potentially high rate of digital absconders means the entire sex offender registry program is broken. In fact, she said the situation has improved since passage of the Child Safety and Protection Act of 2006, which instituted some national standards on offender registries.

Still, she said it's important that states move to biometric identifiers, such as fingerprints, to maintain more accurate records of offenders and their whereabouts.

"Criminals are constantly thinking of ways to beat the system," she said. "The system is never going to be perfect."

Rebovich is hoping the study will spur new methods for checking up on sex offenders, including techniques that would seem familiar to those who work in financial fraud. In a model developed by Utica and ID Analytics, offenders could be given a score, similar to a credit score, which would rate the likelihood that identity manipulation was occurring. 

"We are trying to develop a predictive model," he said. "So we can turn it into an alert system, so states can do this in real time, if they want to."  

Coggeshall said such an alert system would have helped police track down Frank Kuni before he was able to get a job with the Census Bureau.

"In retrospect, we know there are things we would have been able to observe" he said.

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Does web whining work? Private websites with names like ComplaintsBoard.com and PissedConsumer.com have developed an enormous following among consumers who feel cheated by companies. But are these complaint magnets filling an important role in protecting consumer rights or do they merely serve as online bitch sessions?

They're a little bit of both, the Consumer Federation of America (CFA) said in a report issued Monday. Researchers for the consumer advocacy group considered about a dozen such sites, before whittling the list down to what it says are the six most popular places to whine online: Complaints.com, My3Cents.com, ComplaintsBoard.com, PissedConsumer.com, ConsumerAffairs.com and RipOffReport.com. All show up in the top 20 listings when a Web user Googles "consumer complaint."

First, the bad news: There appear to be very few happy endings for those who complain.

"There is little evidence that the websites help consumers resolve their complaints," according to the report. That shouldn't be too surprising, given that, "None of the six sites claims to perform this service." But the lack of a clear path towards resolution was cited as a severe shortcoming by Jack Gillis of CFA, who helped write the report. The sites rarely point users toward the right government officials or agencies that could deal directly with companies and get refunds or redress, Gillis said.

On the other hand, there was good news about the web whine hangouts. Consumers in the middle of a dispute can sometimes find useful tips in the complaints of others who have gone before them: ("Try calling Bill in executive assistance. He helped me.")  And the repositories of complaints act as cautionary tales for future consumers.  In fact, complaint websites are usually more useful to shoppers than to complainers, the report concludes.

Still, Gillis said, consumers who feel ignored by a nemesis company seem to genuinely appreciate the chance to talk about their frustration.

"The large majority of people who post complaints understand fully that this posting is not going to lead to a resolution," he said. "But they are irritated at the company and perhaps want to warn other consumers."

Gillis recommends posting complaints on all six top sites, but said that those who only have time for one should visit my3cents.com. It has the largest number of recent complaints, lists the number of complaints per company, has the best design and offers some help with complaint resolution, he said.

While complaints sites are notoriously one-sided -- rarely do companies chime in with responses, even when they can -- Gillis said that most complaints are surprisingly even-handed, with posters adopting a just-the-facts tone full of dates, times and names. Still, no single report should be taken that seriously, Gillis said.

"People should not assume that any one complaint is valid, but when one sees a large number of complaints of the same kind, that ought to be a red flag," he said.

Complaint sites have other shortcomings. Not surprisingly, they include far more complaints about large companies than small, but make no allowances for that in their compilations. That can unfairly disadvantage large firms. Fourteen of the 21 sellers with the most complaints on My3Cents.com are Fortune 200 companies, for example. 

A better way to use complaints for comparison purposes would be to create something like the "complaint ratio" used in the insurance industry, which compares overall complaints to sales figures, he said. (Consumers who want to look up the complaint ratio of a particular firm can visit the National Association of Insurance Commissioners.)

Meanwhile, some of the consumer complaint sites -- which are privately owned, for-profit sites -- engage in tactics that seem strange for people who are used to the nonprofit ways of organizations like Consumers Union.  PissedConsumer.com, for example, offers companies targeted by complaints the chance to sign up what the site calls "Reputation Management" for a $5,000 annual fee. For that price, according to the site, businesses can "post rebuttals and monitor their online profile." Popular Consumer Review site Yelp, which was not considered by the CFA, has been dogged by accusations that companies can impact their review ratings by paying for advertising. And RipOffReport.com -- which was included in the survey -- has numerous advertisements on its site proclaiming Cash4Gold is a "Ripoff Report Verified Safe" company, despite numerous news reports alleging that the company has mistreated consumers.

It also appears that complaint sites and their users are under assault. A recent New York Times story detailed an uptick in defamation lawsuits again consumers who complain publicly about companies on the web.

And search engine optimization companies aggressively market their ability to trick search engines into burying negative reviews in their results so other consumers never see them.

Still, many firms are clearly taking web complaints seriously. Comcast has a full-time employee named Frank Eliason who is dedicated to finding and resolving web complaints via a Twitter account named ComcastCares.com.

RED TAPE WRESTLING TIPS
Gillis said there is no evidence of widespread legal action against web complainers, but it's best to be prepared -- legally, that it.

"If people just stick to the facts, the risk of being sued, we believe, is minimal," he said. As the report notes, truth is an effective legal defense. "Avoid what might be interpreted by a court as slander or defamation of character," it says.

Also, while generic complaints sites are often the best place to whine, there are exceptions in some specific industries -- auto complaints are often better placed at CarComplaints.com, for example -- so be sure to look for a site more focused on the target of your complaint.

For example, I recently had an electric window regulator fail on my out-of-warranty 2007 Jeep Liberty -- notice two of the top 6 complaints concern my issue -- and used the site to find out that Chrysler is honoring out-of-warranty claims, as long as the driver follows the proper complaint procedure.  That saved me a $500 repair.

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Cyberbullying may not be as widespread as feared, as most teenagers are more worried about old-fashioned pushing and shoving than online tormenters, according to a new study.

Still, about one-third of all teenagers say they've been bullied through the Internet, complaining about a range of attacks that range from annoying to dangerous, according to research released Wednesday by the Pew Internet and American Life Project.

While focus groups with teenagers conducted for the study unearthed plenty of horror stories, the research suggests that computer-based taunting among children may not be as widespread as some feared. Only 6 percent of participants said someone had posted an embarrassing picture of them online without permission, for example. And 13 percent said someone has spread rumors about them online.

On the other hand, 67 percent of kids said they were more likely to face real-world bullying than cyberbullying.

Researcher Amanda Lenhart said the results were unexpectedly tame, given the media attention focused on the problem of cyberbullying. Computer conflicts apparently don't faze kids that much, she said.

"The computer is just part all the experiences kids have now," Lenhart said. "It's part of what it means to be a kid. ... Still, it's important to note that one-third of kids have been targeted."

Cyberbullying is psychological rather than physical, Lenhart said – but it can go far beyond virtual name-calling. Embarrassing photos secretly taken in schools, at parties, or on the beach can end up on the Internet, for example. Instant messages intended for a private audience can be posted on MySpace pages. And in a 21st Century version of traditional bullying, threats of physical violence are easy to make anonymously online.

During focus group discussions conducted after the survey, a 15-year-old boy told researchers he had threatened to kill someone online, but added it was only a joke.

"I played a prank on someone but it wasn't serious," he said, according to the report. "I told them I was going to come take them from their house and kill them and throw them in the woods. It's the best prank because it's like 'oh my God, I'm calling the police!' and I was like 'I'm just kidding, I was just messing with you.' She got so scared though."

Some bullying has unexpected consequences. One 17-year-old boy who talked with researchers said a photograph of him taken at a New Year's party was posted online without his permission and seen by officials at his high school. He was suspended.

The dangers of forwarded messages
The most prevalent form of cyberbullying involved publishing someone's private e-mails or text messages in a public space -- about 1 in 8 teens said that had happened to them. Many said the content of those digital conversations was sometimes altered to make the author appear to say embarrassing things.

"I was in a fight with a girl and she printed out our conversation, changed some things that I said, and brought it into school, so I looked like a terrible person," a middle-school girl said.

Alteration of digital content isn't always that tame. Another middle school student told researchers about a gay student's home page being taken over by young bigots.

"I have this one friend and he's gay and his account got hacked and someone put all these really homophobic stuff on there and posted like a mass bulletin of like some guy with his head smashed open like run over by a car," she said. "It was really gruesome and disgusting."

Lenhart said her study picked up a slim gender gap in online bullying: more girls say they are victims than boys. Girls 15-17 were about 10 percent more likely than boys the same age to be targeted. Girls 12-17 were almost twice as likely to report a particular form of cyberbullying -- having rumors about them spread online -- than boys.

"Bullies are very creative," Lenhart warned. "What we have here is junior high writ large."

RED TAPE WRESTLING TIPS
Like real-world bullying, there's really no way to stop cyberbullying. But there are a few things kids can do to limit their exposure.
• No privacy. Everyone knows this, but everyone forgets this. Everything you type online, even in private e-mails or IMs, can end up in public for all the world to see. For this reason, use the phone or talk in person for really private conversations. And remember, even innocent-sounding jokes can sound terrible when taken out of context.
• Strong passwords. Kids try to hack into each other's e-mail and MySpace pages all the time. Never share your password, even with friends (today's friend could be tomorrow's enemy). And use strong passwords, mixing letters, numbers, and punctuation characters so that it's hard for others to guess.
• Parental involvement. Parents need to be aware of cyberbullying techniques -- they are changing all the time, said Lenhart -- and keep an open dialog with their teens about the kinds of things they might be facing at school. For example, text-message bombing, which overloads a kids' phone with hundreds of messages, is the latest trick, Lenhart said.
• More parental involvement. Family therapist Susan Shankle, author of What in the World Are Your Kids Doing Online? endorses an aggressive form of parenting to put the brakes on cyberbullying: "Nothing takes the place of parental involvement," she said. "Parents need to periodically check computer history and cell phones for messages that a child may feel scared to report."

In October, Wired News reporter Kevin Poulsen ran a simple experiment that produced some disturbing results. He wrote a computer program that matched databases of registered sex offenders with MySpace profiles and found hundreds of matches.

On Poulsen's list: A thrice-convicted sex offender who had recently finished a nine-year jail term for sexually abusing two young boys. It turned out he was using MySpace to approach and proposition young boys. The offender was soon arrested again.

Two months after Poulsen's story was published, MySpace announced it had hired an outside company, Sentinel Tech Holding Corp., to compare registered sex offenders rolls with MySpace profiles and root out sex criminals from the site. Until earlier this month, though, it appeared little progress had been made.

Then, a public spat erupted between a group of state attorneys general and MySpace, with the AGs demanding to know how many offenders the review had uncovered. After about a week of public jousting, MySpace said it had removed 7,000 profiles that might have belonged to registered sex offenders.

The controversy has raised questions about MySpace's diligence in trying to keep predators off its service and its ability to work with some law enforcement officials.

That so many registered offenders were attracted to MySpace, largely a haunt for young Web users, is disturbing to Connecticut Attorney General Richard Blumenthal.

"It is a very, very frightening number when you consider they ... are using their real names," he said. "One would think a convicted sex offender would use an alias. This number is just the most visible tip of the predatory problem on MySpace and other social networking sites."

Why did this rather public controversy over sex offender MySpace pages erupt this month? Curiously, it began when MySpace – often criticized for inaction on child safety issues – took a strong action against registered sex offenders.

Sentinel starts

The initial spark flew on May 2, when MySpace unceremoniously turned on the product developed by Sentinel and began removing profiles from the site.

Within days, the group of attorney general offices already eyeing MySpace policies found out about the deletions and became concerned that evidence of crimes might be destroyed.

"We were rather concerned that we were hearing back channel information about profiles being removed and deleted without us receiving that information," said Nils Frederiksen, a spokesman for Pennsylvania Attorney General Tom Corbett. "We need to know which Pennsylvania residents have been identified because of possible terms and conditions of their release that may have been violated."

Some probation agreements prevent sex offenders from using computers at all; others prevent them from any contact with minors. The offenders' MySpace profiles may have included clear evidence that such provisions were being violated, Frederiksen said.

"Along the way we were hearing that this was a work in progress, that it wasn't ready," he said. "Then in the spring we found out they'd already deleted profiles. That was what motivated the public call to action."

On May 15, eight attorneys general sent a letter to MySpace demanding more information about registered offenders on the site. The next day, MySpace refused to provide the data, saying it could only do so if compelled by a court order. Several states began seeking court orders to obtain the data, but five days later MySpace announced that an agreement had been reached to share the information.

A misunderstanding

To MySpace officials, it was all a misunderstanding. The new system was still being tested when the suspect profiles began being removed, so the company believed there was no need, at that point, to notify attorneys general who were already working with the company, said one MySpace official, who agreed to discuss the matter on condition he not be identified.

And the profile removal process was designed to preserve any evidence law enforcement might subsequently need, the company said.

"In addition to immediately removing registered sex offenders from MySpace, our plans have always been to provide the information collected by Sentinel … to law enforcement, including the attorneys general," Mike Angus, executive vice president and general counsel for Fox Interactive Media, which owns MySpace, said in a statement.

But the spat likely signals more than concern about deletion of evidence. There is obvious sentiment among law enforcement agencies that MySpace was acting too slowly to remove known sex offenders from the site.

"We were disappointed it's taken a year to get to this point," Frederiksen said. His office had approached MySpace about the sex offender issue even before the Wired story was published. "We would like to see things move forward in a faster pace."

No national sex offender registry

But company officials say government sex offender registries are to blame for the hold-up.

Because most registries are maintained by state offices and there is no national database, Sentinel had to build a tool that collected information on 600,000 offenders from more than 50 sources, the company said. Because the data couldn't be downloaded from registry Web sites, collecting the data was a complicated project. Building the tool took about 6 months, the official said.

Still, some officials in the various attorney general offices suggested MySpace had another motivation for moving slowly and deleting profiles without informing public officials: quietly removing the offender profiles without drawing attention to the number of convicted sex criminals who lurk on the site.

"In fairness to MySpace, it did take the step of hiring Sentinel … but they are ambivalent about releasing the results," Blumenthal said. "Perhaps they feel it may reflect badly on this site and other sites."

In his October story, Poulsen concluded that matching sex offender registries to MySpace profiles was hardly the most effective tool for improving the site's safety. After all, would-be predators could easily foil such filters by registering with fake names and other information. Blumenthal and other attorneys general are pushing for additional measures, such as mandatory age verification to keep kids off the site altogether.

But the presence of 7,000 registered offenders on the site -- and the time span required to remove them -- raises inevitable questions about MySpace's ability to keep its neighborhood safe.

"The measures taken by MySpace have been baby steps when giant strides are needed," Blumenthal said.

{Clarification: An earier verion of this story said MySpace didn't notify law enforcement while it was testing the Sentinel product. The sentence has been edited to say that the attorneys general were not notified during testing.}

Google video, YouTube and other online video sites host violent clips of children lighting themselves on fire and doing other dangerous, stupid things. MySpace is loaded with provocative photos of children and has become a playground for pedophiles. I think all these companies should be doing more to protect children, and I said so in two columns this week. Hundreds of readers have chastised me, saying that parents -- not companies -- are responsible for keeping their kids safe.

They're right. And I'm right.

We live in a world of black-and-white, this-or-that, dualistic conversations, and I think that causes more harm than good. Both parents and corporations can be held responsible for what's going on here. While I agree with almost every comment readers made urging greater parental responsibility and personal responsibility to deal with these problems, these are not mutually exclusive with corporate responsibility.

I run into this personal accountability deflection tactic often when I write about the unseemly ways of credit card companies. Predatory lending practices helped push 2 million Americans into personal bankruptcy last year, an outrageous number that is far higher than any other developed nation. Thanks to industry marketing and tradition, many non-debtors react to this devastating truth by saying something like, "No one holds a gun to their heads to buy new clothes with a credit card." Credit card companies just provide a service; and if people overspend, it's their fault, they argue.

And that's true. But there is an additional truth. Some companies purposefully pump more credit at people as their credit file shows high debt. Low-credit-score customers pay higher interest rates, so they're valuable, if risky, customers. Others lenders market heavily to college students, knowing the default rate will be high. These credit card companies share the blame for the bankruptcy problem. Blaming them is not the same as exonerating the students or the high-debt consumers.

The tobacco companies tried this technique too: "We don't force people to smoke, we just make the cigarettes." We know how that went.

Plenty of blame

As is almost always the case, there is plenty of blame to go around. Blame for people, blame for companies.

And so it is with online safety. You have to wonder where parents are when children are sticking fireworks in their behinds and lighting them. You have to wonder where parents are when a child buys a plane ticket to fly half-way across the world to see a man she met on MySpace.

But that doesn't exonerate Google, MySpace or any other Internet firm for the role it may have played in helping those things happen. These companies know this. None of them argues with absolutes; none of them says that anything goes on their sites, that total Internet freedom is a good thing. They have filters; they have people who remove illegal material and potentially dangerous material. None of them has any desire to be a part of a child getting hurt.

But when predictable bad things happen on your property, you are partly to blame. You don't get to build a rickety playground on your property, invite children in and then wipe your hands clean if the swing breaks and a child gets hurt -- even if you put up a sign that says "Play at your own risk."

It's clear from content easily discoverable on these Web sites that each needs to do more to keep kids safe. And so do parents. And so do kids. Now is not a time for absolute arguments on any side of this.

Five-step approach

Online child safety expert Parry Aftab likes to say attacking this problem actually requires a five-pronged approach:

1) Companies like MySpace have to know what they're really getting into when they open their doors to kids. They need mature risk-management plans and compliance strategies, and they need to know the kind of liabilities they might incur if things go wrong.

2) Parents need to understand new technologies. And even more important, they need to say "no" to their kids sometimes.

3) Kids have to get involved in keeping one another safe, since often they are the experts.

4) Law enforcement has to have a good relationship with Web sites and be ready to act quickly when necessary.

5) Schools have to help educate kids on the safe use of technology, and teachers have to be on the lookout for signs that something is wrong.

The Red Tape Chronicles often focuses heavily on No. 1. Companies should both make money and do the right thing. Sometimes, the pressure of one outweighs the honor required to do the other, and journalists can help reset the balance. But Red Tape readers this week were correct to point out that good parenting is even more important than good corporate citizenship as a tool to keep kids safe.

My friend Will Femia, who blogs over at "Clicked," offered up another reason that this issue may have resonated with so many readers. It can be argued that the Golden Age of the Internet is drawing to a close, a point that John Dvorak at PC Mag recently made quite well. With the failure of Net Neutrality, we will soon have a two-tiered, class-structured Internet. E-mail is almost unusable and some people won't accept notes from strangers anymore. Free content is endangered, and free music largely killed. The special chaos that liberated so many to express themselves, that wrested publishing power from traditional media, is clearly under siege. Any suggestion that sounds like censorship is bound to be met -- and should be met -- with skepticism.

Will calls this the "There goes the neighborhood" phenomenon. And I think it's something to be seriously worried about.

Once again, I don't believe this is an either-or situation. I believe we can find ways to make kids safer without destroying the Internet.

But there is another thing I believe: Too many kids are getting hurt today, and we have to do a better job keeping them safe. All of us.

And now, as is the policy here at the Red Tape Chronicles thanks to tech editor Michael Wann, you have the last word.

We've seen this all before.

A young, brash Internet company with an edgy business plan pushes the edges of taste, laws and social standards, becomes the next big thing, gets a lot of attention and funding, begins to mature into a real business, and then finds it can't be young and edgy anymore. Next come a few desperate attempts to rein in the very atmosphere that made the site big. And finally, the last step is a sad end to an Internet phenomenon.

This is what we're seeing now with MySpace.com. The Web site was once synonymous with young people and goofy home pages. Everyone had one. It became a craze as big as Napster in its day. If you are under 25, you no longer exchange phone numbers in a bar, you exchange MySpace pages.

But for the rest of America, MySpace is now synonymous with something else: danger. The name now evokes the thought of online predators. Schools around the country are holding MySpace seminars for frightened parents. Children are flying overseas to see adults they've met romantically through the site. The MySpace craze turned very dark very fast. And all this as the site was acquired by News Corp. for a lot of money.

A tin ear

During much of this time, MySpace has turned a tin ear toward its troubles. Last year, when I first talked to the company, its spokesman insisted the firm removed any blogs that broke the company's terms of service, including blogs where kids reveal too much information about themselves. Empirically speaking, it's obvious MySpace wasn't aggressive enough. Anyone who has even casually browsed the site could see that. Most important, parents around the country who discovered their kids' MySpace sites were continually horrified by what they saw. Your idea of "too revealing" might be very different from mine or anyone else's, but when you're talking about kids, it's parents' standards that matter. And by those standards, MySpace was way over the edge.

As the heat was turned up on the site – when Dateline NBC came calling a few months ago – MySpace went into a shell. The company refused to go on camera and discuss its product. It was still hoping the problems would go away.

But anyone could see that wasn't going to happen. MySpace has a fundamental flaw: People can lie. It's nearly impossible to keep kids under 13 off the site, no matter what the terms of service say. And despite some respectable efforts by the company to allow kids to keep adults off their sites – kids can choose to limit visitors to a permitted group of friends, an option parents should insist on -- adults were finding and contacting kids anyway.

So on Wednesday, MySpace announced its latest initiative to keep kids safe. Those bloggers registered as adults won't be able to contact those bloggers registered as young children unless the adult knows the child's entire name. It's a nice thought. But one has to ask: Has MySpace dealt with its fundamental problem, that people can lie? The answer is no. An adult who wants to talk to a kid can simply create a fake profile as a kid. And kids can easily create profiles as adults. This new safety measure is a farce.

To prove this, I just tried an experiment. I tried to register at MySpace as a 12-year-old. I was refused; good enough. So I took the error message, "Based on the information you have submitted to us, you are ineligible," and searched for that in Google. Up came hundreds of Web pages with kids telling other kids how to circumvent this inconvenience. "I lied about my age," writes one. "I always do that," says another. If you have trouble, advises a third, "Close your browser and open it again." Works like a charm. I went from 12 years old to 19 years old in three clicks and 30 seconds.

The business model: Selling kids' need for attention

Fundamentally, MySpace is popular for one reason: Young people publish hundreds of thousands of risqué photos of themselves, and others like to look. It is a voyeur's heaven. Child advocate Parry Aftab of WiredSafety.org once described the site to me as an "attention competition." MySpace's product is simply kids' need for attention. It trades in a dangerous commodity.

It's not such a far cry from Napster, which traded in free music. Napster could offer to remove songs when copyright holders complained, and it could scream about the First Amendment, but fundamentally, Napster was trying to make a business off of ill-gotten goods. So is MySpace. To fix itself, the company needs to stop making cosmetic rules and fundamentally change its business. It may not survive such a change; but I believe there isn't much choice now.

Here's a hopeful alternative to the current story line. Nearly a decade ago, Internet wunderkind eBay faced ruination from thieves who had seized on it as a tool for vast international crimes. At one point, most of the auctions for items like plasma televisions were fraudulent, for example. Any outside observer could see this; auction sellers insisted on Western Union payments and offered goods at half their normal prices. But eBay kept up a public posture that it didn't want to interfere with its marketplace.

As eBay grew up, it saw the hogwash of its defense, and began to hire hundreds of employees to patrol the site. Now, the firm tells me it has nearly 1,000 eBay cops who take down suspicious auctions all the time. It's not perfect, but it is working. eBay's reputation has improved.

MySpace has said it has such patrols, but they are obviously a fraction of what's required. Parent News Corp. must aggressively – not passively – find a way to monitor kids' sites and remove material that's questionable before waiting for something terrible to happen. That won't keep every kid safe. But it will change the atmosphere of the site. Perhaps the end of the free-for-all will mean the end of the MySpace phenomenon. That's what happened to Napster.

But if the site wants to grow up and if it wants to shake its reputation, it will have to stop trading in the unholy currency of kids who need attention.