apply for a credit card through the mail, and I call the issuing company to activate it, and no one there ever actually sees my face. But credit card fraud is easy to commit. People just throw those forms in the garbage. I could go through your garbage and pick up those applications, fill them out, put in a change of address, and charge things in your name. This happens daily. Identity theft is huge. Once you are in that particular loop, getting out of it is next to impossible.

Biometric technologies and fingerprint scans are possible, but it is cost prohibitive for both the user and authentication organization at this time. In addition, the initial validation is always a problem with anything that you superimpose here. Tokens are too mobile. We see that with identities now. We have juveniles buying alcohol over the counter with false IDs, which are not difficult to forge.

Historically, law enforcement protection is a three-legged triangle. It involves enforcement, education, and prevention. Of the three, education is probably the cheapest. This is where you get the most bang for the buck. You simply get people to change their ways by telling them that something is not right, and that it is not in their best interests. So far we have not been very successful with things like narcotics. If we could get people to stop wanting children to access pornography on the Internet, then it would go away.

That leaves you with the other two legs of the triangle. Prevention involves giving parents and teachers some tools that they can use to try to stem the flow. The tools will not stop it but will give them some control over their own part of the environment. The third aspect is enforcement. We find the people who are bringing this grief on us and we bring grief on them, or we find the biggest offenders and put their pelts on the fence as a warning to others. Historically, that is what enforcement is about. We get them to the point where they do not know if they will be next, and they keep their heads down. If they all decide to do bad things at once, there is no law enforcement agency in the world that can prevent it. But we can keep them on their toes enough that they will think twice before they do it.

Everything I have talked about so far deals with the Web, the least offensive of the content problems. How does any of this technology affect e-mail or Usenet? The worst offender is Internet relay chat (IRC), when kids are involved in that arena. I train 30 task forces around the country to do nothing but go after online predators, people who will get on an airplane and go find a child for sex. They spend months and months cultivating that situation. You would not believe the astronomical numbers involved. In that type of environment, all of the screening software and age verification do no good. Technology will not solve this particular

Front Matter (R1-R14)

1 Basic Concepts in Information Retrieval (1-4)

2 Text Categorization and Analysis (5-10)

3 Categorization of Images (11-15)

4 The Technology of Search Engines (16-22)

5 Cyber Patrol: A Major Filtering Project (23-32)

6 Advanced Techniques for Automatic Web Filtering (33-35)

7 A Critique of Filtering (36-47)

8 Authentication Technologies (48-52)

9 Infrastructure for Age Verification (53-61)

10 Automated Policy Preference Negotiation (62-64)

11 Digital Rights Management Technology (65-75)

12 A Trusted Third Party in Digital Rights (76-84)

13 Problems with a Dot-XXX Domain (85-89)

14 Business Dimensions: The Education Market (90-95)

15 Business Models: Kid-Friendly Internet Businesses (96-103)

16 Business Models Based on Advertising (104-109)

17 Constitutional Law and the Law of Cyberspace (110-123)

Appendix: Biographies of Presenters (124-130)