I think this is particularly important as this writing is on Christmas Day 2002. I am reflecting back over the past year and some of the show ideas I have had. Although I don't think every idea I come up with is a bright one some of them are driven by a greater cause. This is one of those stories as I'm sure thousands of kids got computers this Christmas for their bedrooms.

This idea for a show came to me as I was watching the news and heard of a 13 year old girl who apparently was very promiscuous and finding sex partners over the Internet. The following was a script I was working on for that show. I think the information in it is important so I want to get it out to people. Much of the information is from my working notes and it is stories that I cut and pasted so that I could refer back to them. They are mainly from CNN and MSNBC.

Show on teens and computers script May 18,2002 by Frank Matowitz.

Hello and welcome to our show. We decided to do this show in the shadow of recent events with the death of 13-year-old Cristina Long of Danbury CT. Who apparently was engaging in sexual activity with a variety of partners that she met through the Internet. She was strangled to death Friday May 17th when she met 25-year-old Saul Dos Reis, a married, illegal immigrant for sex at a local mall. It was not their first meeting.

This is a pretty scary thought but as shocking as this is I hate to say that it doesn’t surprise me. The Internet is a gateway to the entire world right in your kid’s bedroom. This means the good and the bad. The difference is that the good isn’t actively pursuing kids and young women for sex. Sexual predators are.

The show today is about what parents should be doing to protect their children from these types of predators. The first thing is that parents must be involved in their kid’s lives. If you’re not then you simply aren’t doing your job as a parent.

For instance: when you come home do you spend time with your kids finding out what their day was like and helping them with their homework or do you send them off into their room by themselves to do their homework with a computer in the room with an Internet connection? Parents who think they are providing the best for their kids by giving them televisions and computers are actually opening them up to the world they want to protect them from.

Sadly I have to say that there are parents who spend less time with their children than I do with my dog. When I come home I have to let the dog out and spend about 10 minutes petting and throwing a ball for her. Then I have to give her fresh water and food and then let her out at least another time before the night is over. Many parents don't even spend that much time with their kids.

And for all the well-to-do parents who give their kids computers in their bedrooms I bet you didn't know that the chairman of Apple, Steve Jobs won’t even allow his kids to have a computer in their rooms. Think he knows something you don't?

(Working Notes: from MSNBC & CNN)

POLICE AND FBI officials said at a news conference that early Monday they found the body of Christina Long, who had been missing since Friday, in a rural area near Greenwich, Conn. Police said she had been strangled.

They said they found Long’s body using information provided by, a 25-year-old Brazilian living in the country illegally after overstaying a visitor visa issued in March 1993.

U.S. Attorney John Danaher said Dos Reis was arrested on a federal charge of using an interstate device - the Internet - to entice a child into sexual activity.

Danaher said Dos Reis appeared in federal court in Bridgeport on Monday and “has acknowledged his responsibility in open court.”

The suspect was taken into custody for questioning after investigators began focusing on the girl’s Internet contacts.

The officials said that Dos Reis, who is married, allegedly struck up a conversation with the 13-year-old in an Internet chat room, and eventually persuaded her to meet him at a Danbury shopping mall.

But police said the meeting at the mall was not the first time the victim and the suspect had met. “We’re aware of other contact,” Danbury Police Chief Robert Paquette said at Monday’s news conference.

Officials said they would study the evidence before deciding whether to try Dos Reis on state or federal charges.

Long was living with her aunt and attending a Roman Catholic school in Danbury at the time of her disappearance.

“The message ... is that parents have got to be careful and have got to monitor what their children are doing on the Internet,” Danbury Mayor Mark Boughton said.

“Unfortunately, we’re seeing an increase in these kinds of cases nationwide and here in the state of Connecticut,” FBI Special Agent Michael Wolf added.

Many safety guides for children using the Net read as if they were written by Robert Fulghum. Everything I ever needed to know to stay safe in the virtual world, I learned in the real world. Don’t go scary places by yourself. If someone is making you uncomfortable, just leave, and tell your parents. Don’t look at pornographic pictures, and you won’t have to worry about them. But most important — don’t talk to strangers, and never give them personal information. Unfortunately, it’s not that simple.

IF IT WERE SIMPLE, you can bet that earlier this month there wouldn’t have been 100 alleged pedophiles arrested and tens of thousands of pictures of children — as young as 2 years old — seized. See the MSNBC story.

It’s not simple because strangers online are hard to identify, since the Net is the land of make-believe. And just as kids are often better than their parents at playing make believe, they’re often better at keeping up with technology, too.

Some are tempted to dismiss the problem as no different from your teen-age son sneaking a peek at Playboy — on paper, or online. No big deal.

True, experts say. The problem is not nudie Web sites. Most of those require credit card numbers, anyway.

“Pictures don’t hurt kids,” said Parry Aftab, author of “A Parent’s Guide to the Internet.” “People hurt kids…. As long as parents think the only real risk is the kids will see adult sex content, they won’t do anything.”

The real problem is people who lurk in chat rooms and Internet Relay Chat (IRC) channels who hope to lure your child into having online sex or a face-to-face meeting. It’s impossible to say how many pedophiles there are lurking on the Net, but if you doubt the severity of the problem, log on to almost any IRC channel. You’re unlikely to last 60 seconds without being propositioned.

U.S. customs agent Marcus Lawson pretends to be young boys or girls for a living. He arrests about 30 pedophiles a year — as big a caseload as he can handle. When MSNBC interviewed him, he was working an IRC “dad-daughter sex” channel. There were 73 users. (“Hmm. He wants to know if my daughter has breasts yet. I’ll tell him no.”)

“I don’t think the Internet has created more pedophiles. It’s removed the societal stigma that kind of kept people in check,” he said. “Before the Net, pedophilia was a lonely business. Now 24 hours a day, seven days a week, you can validate yourself, find hundreds and hundreds of people who will tell you there’s nothing wrong with having sex with children.”

So the real trouble for your kids begins not with information coming into your computer but with what goes out of your computer. The problem is what your child says in e-mail, posts to a bulletin board or writes in a chat room.

And this is where things get complicated.

Think you can simply tell your child not to e-mail strangers? This reporter was put in a very uncomfortable situation doing this story. The bulletin board thread related to this piece had an entry from a poster identifying herself as a 17-year-old girl who felt her parents were too controlling — they read her e-mail, observed her online, etc. MSNBC felt it necessary to write to the girl to confirm her identity and age as authentic. But that left us in the uncomfortable situation of sending an e-mail to a minor, asking her to call us or send us her phone number. That’s exactly what she shouldn’t do. For better or worse, she did not respond to our e-mail.

Many authorities suggest using technology to combat technology. About 75 percent of the parents responding to MSNBC’s survey said they’d consider using software to limit their child’s ability to communicate with others over the Internet. Filtering software like NetNanny, for example, can be set to prevent children from even typing personal information such as their name, address and phone number. But users responding to an MSNBC survey were evenly split over whether they’d read their child’s e-mail, as was suggested by the FBI when it issued a parent’s guide to the Net on Sept. 1.

“I _HONESTLY_ wonder if most of you realize what you are saying when you say read your kids e-mail,” said David Weaver on the MSNBC Technology BBS. “Reading a kids e-mail is like: Reading normal mail they send Eavesdropping on all their conversations Picking up another phone line when they are on the phone.”

One response: “Hands off parenting is not the answer. Blind trust and faith are why you see kids pictures on the back of milk cartons. Now, keep in mind I am not going to go through all their mail every night. They should just be prepare to answer for anything if and when I do.”

Many authorities suggest using technology to combat technology. About 75 percent of the parents responding to MSNBC’s survey said they’d consider using software to limit their child’s ability to communicate with others over the Internet. Filtering software like NetNanny, for example, can be set to prevent children from even typing personal information such as their name, address and phone number. But users responding to an MSNBC survey were evenly split over whether they’d read their child’s e-mail, as was suggested by the FBI when it issued a parent’s guide to the Net on Sept. 1.

Net filtering software

PC Magazine editors preferred Cyber Snoop, noting that parents can modify the list of restricted sites. Most products keep their lists a secret. NetNanny also allows access:

Program Web site ZD review

Cyber Patrol www.cyberpatrol.com

Cyber Snoop www.pearlsw.com

CYBERSitter www.solidoak.com

Cybersentinel www.securitysoft.com

Net Nanny www.netnanny.com

SurfWatch www.surfwatch.com

Time's Up www.timesup.com

WatchDog www.sarna.net/watchdog

WebChaperone www.webchaperone.com

X-Stop www.xstop.com

These programs work in a variety of ways, but generally either block your computer from a predetermined set of yucky Web sites; limit your computer to a predetermined list of Web sites; or block individual Web pages with offensive words. It’s easy to see the limitations of all three, and apparently parents have, too.

Aftab, who thinks filtering software can be an aid for parents, says some mistakenly believe the software is too technical to use or easy for clever kids to foil. Or they shrug and say, “I trust my kid.”

But experts say parents often aren’t really aware of the extent of the trouble their kids can get in on the Internet. That’s why this week is National Kids Online Week, and AOL’s Steve Case and Secretary of Education Richard Riley will be kicking off on Tuesday a nationwide parental education program called “America Links Up.”

And that’s why Seattle police detective Leanne Shirey starts her seminars for parents by posing as a 14-year-old girl in an AOL chat room. She then lets parents watch as a pedophile “grooms” her. There’s never a need to fake the demonstration.

“The problem is we educated kids before we educated the parents,” Shirey said. “Some of these people I see have never turned on a computer. They have to understand that even if they don’t have a computer at home, they have to have rules.”

More safety resources

If you see evidence of illegal activity, call local police and/or write to cybersmuggling@customs.sprint.com

http://www.safekids.com Has tips for parents, including advice on handling the Net posting of the Starr report. Operated by Larry Magid, a syndicated columnist for the Los Angeles Times, the site is sponsored by the Online Safety Project, funded by America Online, Network Solutions and Disney.Com

http://www.bcplonline.org/online Baltimore County schools' Parent Internet Education site. Includes a sample curriculum.

http://www.americalinksup.org Home page for organization sponsoring National Kids Online Week events. Includes searchable database of about 100 local educational events. Also includes sample curriculum.

http://www.fbi.gov/tips.htm FBI's "A Parent's Guide to Internet Safety"

http://www.cyberangels.org/Volunteer Internet watchdog organization that maintains lists of kid-friendly sites. Founded by Curtis Sliwa, Guardian Angels founder.

Baltimore County Public Schools held an America Links Up “teach-in” for parents Sept. 14. Coordinator Della Curtis says the survey of parents in the 104,000-family district showed that most don’t know what their children are doing in school with the Internet, and that lack of information is a chief cause of anxiety.

“I know of one parent who … took the keyboard with her when she left the home,” Curtis said. You might call that filtering hardware.

Not terribly constructive. Here’s a collection of suggestions from several experts that’s a little more practical:

There is no substitute for keeping up with the technology. Don’t shrug or say it’s beyond you. If it is, ask your children to train you. That will make sure you keep up with them.

Learn how to examine your Web browser’s “History” files, or cache. Even if you don’t do it, make sure your children know it’s possible for you to know where they’ve been.. For Netscape Navigator 3.0, for example, it’s in C:\Program Files\Netscape\Communicator\cache.

Look around your desktop, start menu or applications folder for suspicious programs.

Keep abreast of all your child’s e-mail accounts; understand that free Web e-mail may allow your child to have plenty of e-mail accounts you don’t know about.

If your child will chat, take some time to come up with an alias, or fake name. Aftab even suggests you give them a fake address and phone number so, if they’re being harassed, they have a way of vacating the situation.

Play around in Usenet and IRC chat rooms so you can talk to your children intelligently about them, and perhaps decide to ban their use. Contact your Internet provider to see what kind of Usenet groups are available; you can download an IRC program from this site.

Of course, the Robert Fulghum-style advice is useful. Do the things you would normally do in the real world. Get to know your children’s cyberfriends — certainly don’t let them meet anyone in person without your attendance.