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Citizens Fight Internet Pornography From Home 12/13/2002 Internet tip lines assist law enforcement to prosecute pornography violators On March 16, 2002, citizens reported to the CyberTipline.com at the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC) that an individual was trading child pornography. The NCMEC forwarded to their Exploited Child Unit (ECU) the suspect’s screen name, his Internet protocol (IP) address, and a description of the files he made available. The ECU discovered the suspect’s server location, Huntsville, Alabama, and text in the computer files that described child pornography.
Next, the ECU contacted the Huntsville Police Department, which obtained a search warrant to investigate the suspect’s home. A forensic analysis of the computer revealed 5,354 images and 98 videos of child pornography.
Police arrested the suspect, and the Madison County Grand Jury indicted him in October for possession of child pornography and possession with intent to distribute. Both charges are felonies. The suspect is currently out on bond pending trial.
The NCMEC created CyberTipline.com as a means for citizens to report child pornography and other crimes against children (Internet and non-Internet)-and the public is using this tool. Last week child pornography reports on CyberTipline.com totaled 667. From March 9, 1998, to December 8, 2002, Cybertipline.com received a total of 84,981 child pornography reports.
As its Web site states, NCMEC is “a 501 nonprofit organization serving as a focal point in providing assistance in recovering missing children and raising public awareness about ways to help prevent child abduction, molestation, and sexual exploitation.”
The NCMEC case and a March 2002 poll are good indications that Americans aren’t ready to surrender their values. The poll revealed that 81 percent of Americans believe federal laws against obscenity (adult hard-core pornography) should be solidly enforced.
But the poll also states that 70 percent of Americans reportedly “say they do not believe these laws are currently being vigorously enforced.” And what’s more, most people don’t know what to do about it.
The good news is that, in addition to Cybertipline.com, a new tipline now exists for reporting obscenity through Morality in Media (MIM), “a national, not-for-profit, interfaith organization established in 1962 to combat obscenity and uphold decency standards in the media.” MIM created a tip line, www.obscenitycrimes.org, where citizens can report obscene e-mail and obscenity on Web sites.
The NCMEC and MIM tip lines forward information about the illegal sites to the Child Exploitation and Obscenity Section (CEOS) at the U.S. Department of Justice and U.S. attorney’s office in the region where the report originates.
Concerned Women for America's chief counsel, Jan LaRue, is encouraged about MIM’s tipline. “This has all of the potential for success that the NCMEC’s tipline has produced. In just a few months, about 5,000 citizen reports have been made with about 70 percent of them forwarded to law enforcement after screening,” she said.
“This is a great citizen-action tool to assist law enforcement who prosecute pornographers, and to relieve our feeling of helplessness about a serious crime that affects all of us.”
*The results come from an opinion poll conducted in early March 2002 by the Wirthlin Worldwide survey research company for Morality in Media. The national telephone poll of 1,004 Americans over age 18 was conducted March 1-4 and has a margin of error of plus or minus 3.1 percentage points at a 95-percent confidence level. |
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Concerned Women for America 1015 Fifteenth St. N.W., Suite 1100 Washington, D.C. 20005 Phone: (202) 488-7000 Fax: (202) 488-0806 |
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