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Technical, Business, and Legal Dimensions of Protecting Children from Pornography on the Internet: Proceedings of a Workshop
problem. Right now, the only thing that is having an effect is enforcement. We are at least identifying the offenders and taking them out of circulation as fast as we can—surgically removing them from society by whatever means is currently socially acceptable.
If you could keep kids off e-mail and Internet Relay Chat1—that is, if kids accessed the Internet in a way that worked only through the Web, but ported—then it would eliminate access to children for most of these preferential sexual offenders. But you would also eliminate a lot of things that kids use the Internet for; it would be like keeping kids out of the park or off the telephone. IRC has replaced the telephone after school, and that global circle of friends is a strong social draw. For latchkey kids after school, this is their way of communicating nowadays. With Usenet, if they want to surf for porn, then they will find a public news server and pull off whatever they want. Screening does little about that, particularly with all the things that are mislabeled.
9.2SOLUTIONS
Any successful effort to keep pornography away from children will have to draw from all available solutions; you need a bit of everything to make it work. No one model will be successful by itself, but, when combined, they likely will have some impact. The degree of impact will depend on the social acceptance of this effort in the long run. The available models include the following:
Age verification and validation is a positive ID model. Before I can get in somewhere, I must prove that I am an adult. This lends itself to the use of tokens, or what I have and what I know. But this leaves us with the problems mentioned earlier concerning who controls that database and who keeps track of that information.
The supervision model does nothing at the technological level, but rather has parents supervise kids online. If you put your kids online, then you do not throw them into an electronic pool hall without supervision. You move the computer out into the family room; you do not let kids sit in the back room and do these things all by themselves. Unfortunately, the reality is that most parents do not take the time to do this.
The software model involves the screening software—Net Nanny, Cyber Patrol, and the others. With the false positives and so on, this is
1
Milo Medin said that he could build a system to do this; the question is whether anyone would want such a product.
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