Internet dangers can lurk behind every keystroke

Aug. 5, 2007

By John R. Moses/Frontiersman

MAT-SU - If you're a parent or guardian of a teen or pre-teen and think &#8220Facebook” is a beauty magazine you may need to brush up a little on popular culture.

Online social networking sites with chat rooms, and the ability of teens to text message each other by cell phone lend a great deal of flexibility - and apparent secrecy - to their communication among peers.

Police and educators are watching the online offerings like virtual hawks for signs of wrongdoing, even as some sites under pressure from the public and law enforcement agencies are rooting out suspected and convicted pedophiles who seek to lure youngsters.

Facebook.com, myspace.com and other sites offer anyone who wants it some space on the Internet to post photos, share biographies and blogs and create an online network of &#8220friends” they may or may not have ever met.

Kids in the Mat-Su Borough won't be doing that in their school's computer labs.

Safer in the schools

If there's a battle line, it's been drawn in Matanuska-Susitna School District classrooms. Facebook and the other networking sites find the unwelcome mat there.

&#8220All students have a login and a password code [to access the Internet in schools],” said Tim Anderson, the district's director of management and information systems.

The school board discussed new policies last year dealing with Internet access following abuse of school computers in secondary schools across the district.

&#8220We got some help from MTA,” said Anderson, who is employing an updated version of monitoring and reporting software.

This year, if someone on a school campus tries to access a forbidden site from a school computer the alert goes straight to Anderson's department and a call will be made to the principal. No one sits around actually watching over users' shoulders from afar, he said. &#8220That's not part of our policy.”

School board member Cheryl Turner praised former district information systems director Marie Burton for pioneering the district's response to Internet abuse. Staff found that &#8220several of our children spent some unbelievable time on the Internet unsupervised during school time,” she said.

That door has slammed shut. Internet permission forms are now required. Anderson said teachers submit site lists to principals, who approve or disapprove sites they request in conjunction with school curriculum. Teachers can't override the district's controls. Only approved sites will make it through to the classroom.

School employees &#8220do not have more access than anyone else,” Anderson said.

Alaska isn't the only state grappling with students who want the wrong kind of education from their school computers. SpectorSoft Inc. of Vero Beach, Fla., is just one firm that creates systems designed for homes, businesses and schools. Some educators from across the country have shared with the company their experiences using monitoring software.

One product issues electronic reports that &#8220let you know what's happening real fast,” says Robert Haviland, technology coordinator for Hickman County Schools in Tennessee. &#8220It only takes a moment to see who's hogging bandwidth. Right now, on the bandwidth chart, I see one user bringing down large amounts of data. … It looks like lots of music.”

With the program's continuous oversight, Haviland says the online activities are documented, responsible students identified &#8220and consequences paid.”

One national expert and lobbyist for technology use and development in schools said he sees more perils than benefits in limiting student access to the Internet in high schools through strict access policies.

Don Knezek is the head of the International Society for Technology in Education. He said that teachers must be allowed to choose their own course materials and the sites they wish students to access in order to teach kids about Internet responsibility.

&#8220What I believe is that students at 9 years old need to be protected and guarded,” Knezek said. &#8220But by the time they're 18 or 19 they'd better develop a moral compass of their own.”

Taking the ability to teach such principles away from teachers is &#8220really taking away a major responsibility from the school district,” he said.

Anonymity and its pitfalls

In the 1970s and early 1980s, youths in many parts of America gravitated to citizen's band radio channels frequented by their peers for hours of chatting using anonymous names known as &#8220handles.”

Just like in today's chat rooms, one can never be sure who is behind the name that appears with the communication. It's up to parents to know where their children travel on the Internet and who they're talking to, said Nathan Bucknall, an investigator for the Alaska Bureau of Investigation.

&#8220Just be in touch with your children,” Bucknall said.

Bucknall has educated kids and their parents about potential dangers found on the Internet, and said open channels of communication are a big part of the battle. Only 25 percent of kids who are approached online by predators report that to parents, he said. Of that total, 10 percent are reported to police agencies.

During one public demonstration he signed onto a chat room and was immediately bombarded by &#8220bots,” computerized robots that seek out chat users and offer them links to porn or other sites.

Predators don't have to lurk in parks anymore. They can pretend to be kids. &#8220The Internet has created a level playing field with these predators,” he said.

Computers should always be in open areas of the home, like the living room, and never in a child's bedroom, he said. Police agencies are banding together to track predators who swap child porn, and can track the progress of known child pornography photos and who is sending them. Still, there are networks designed for the anonymous transfers of music files that can also trade thousands of photos and movies.

When parents fight back

Plenty of parents suspect their kids might be getting into mischief on the Internet and don't know for sure until someone forgets to clear the browser's history and a site pops up on the screen that is displeasing to the computer's owner, Bucknall said.

Parents should be familiar with social networking Web sites like myspace.com, facebook.com, zanga.com and bebo.com, he said, adding they also should know what information is on their child's social networking page and make sure personal information such as addresses and telephone numbers are never on those pages.

The pages also contain links to pages of online &#8220friends.”

Cell phones are another way people communicate instantly. Bucknall said law enforcement agencies need search warrants to search the contents of a phone, which records text messages. While cell phone firms monitor the volume of text information sent by a phone, they don't monitor the content, he said.

A Web site, benetsafe.com, will track a child's online travels for parents, Bucknall said. It calls itself &#8220your online Internet chaperone” and claims to be &#8220kid proof.”

For those who want to back up their bets themselves, there are other sneaky ways to go. Software commonly used by companies monitoring employee activities are also sometimes employed in the home, Bucknall said. Some allow users to get e-mail warnings if words like &#8220sex,” &#8220pot” or &#8220suicide” are typed into the computer. The user chooses the alert words. If those words appear on a Web site the user looks at, a similar warning is issued via e-mail.

Other more intense monitoring programs capture screen images, peer-to-peer communications and keystrokes and provide snapshots of what a user is actually seeing. Selected objectionable sites can then be secretly blocked, appearing to be simply unavailable to the unsuspecting user, while the attempt to access the site is recorded.

Tips from the state

The Alaska Attorney General's Office offers these safety tips for kids using the Internet:

€ Never give out personal information like your name, address, phone number, credit card numbers or send your picture without asking your parents if it's OK.

€ Don't buy things over the Internet without asking your parents. This can be a way for unscrupulous people to get a hold of your family's credit card number.

€ Never give your password to anyone.

€ Never agree to meet someone in person that you have met over the Internet. That person could be telling you lies in cyberspace, and could be a dangerous person.

€ If you get a message over the Internet that makes you uncomfortable, don't answer. Tell your parents or another adult about it right away.