A TEENAGER is facing child pornography charges after posting nude photos of herself on her MySpace page.
The 14-year-old girl from New Jersey was arrested after uploading 30 explicit images to the social network, according to US media reports.

She posted her photos “because she wanted her boyfriend to see them”, a police spokesman said.

Authorities arrested her after receiving an online tip-off about the images, which could have been viewed by anyone who “friended” her on MySpace.

MySpace has not commented on the incident, but has a team which reviews content uploaded to the social network.

The New Jersey case is the latest in a series of legal wrangles surrounding teenagers’ use of mobiles and the internet.

In a separate case, three teenage girls are suing a US prosecutor who accused them of peddling “child pornography” after semi-nude pictures of them were sent by phone to friends.

Teachers alerted the authorities after discovering a waist-up image of two girls covered just by a bra and another image of a girl topless.

District Attorney George Skumanik called for the girls to undergo five weeks of behaviour courses and take a drug test or face prosecution, according to a letter apparently sent to the teenagers’ parents.

The American Civil Liberties Union, a co-signatory to the lawsuit, said Mr Skumanik’s threat was unconstitutional, and prosecution could have landed the girls on the sex offenders’ register, harming future job prospects.

“In many states these charges would land these kids on (sex offender) databases … for 10 years or more, and prevent them from getting many types of jobs,” said Witold Walczak, from the ACLU in Pennsylvania.

“That’s a heck of a lesson for a kid who probably doesn’t even realise she is doing something wrong.”

The New Jersey girl faces up to 17 years in jail if convicted of possession and distribution of child pornography. She could also be placed on a state register of sex offenders.

The girl has been released into her mother’s custody, and NorthJersey.com reported there may be more arrests on the way. “We consider this case a wake-up call to parents,” police said.

MySpace said it will develop technologies to help block convicted sex offenders.

MySpace is partnering with Sentinel Tech Holding Corp. to build a database containing names, physical descriptions and other identifiable details on sex offenders in the United States. The News Corp. site, however, stopped short of adopting Sentinel’s technology for verifying the ages and identities of its users.

The database, to be called Sentinel Safe, “will allow us to aggregate all publicly available sex offender databases into a real-time searchable form, making it easy to cross-reference and remove known registered sex offenders from the MySpace community,” Hemanshu Nigam, MySpace’s chief security officer, said in a statement.

Parents, school administrators and law-enforcement authorities have become increasingly worried that teens are finding trouble at social-networking sites, which provide tools for messaging, sharing photos and creating personal pages known as profiles.

The aim of such sites is for users to expand their circles of friends — and critics say those circles sometimes include predators, including those previously convicted of sexual crimes.

John Cardillo, Sentinel’s chief executive, said the database will give MySpace and other sites a tool to help keep out sex offenders.

Investigators said a local Pennsylvania man tried to lure a 14-year-old girl into a sexual encounter while out on bail in another Internet sex case.

Dustin Pawlicki, 20, was arrested in September after agents from the Pennsylvania Attorney General’s Child Predator Unit found him using the MySpace Web site to send a series of sexually graphic e-mail messages to a 14-year-old girl.

Pawlicki is charged with using a computer in an electronics store to send those messages.

Pawlicki was already facing charges after being arrested in June. He was picked up when he traveled to North Huntingdon to have sex with an undercover agent that he believed was a 13-year-old girl.

Pawlicki now faces charges that could put him in jail for up to 17 years if he is convicted.

BY FRANK MAIN

MySpace.com touts itself as “a place for friends.”

But a Naperville teenager discovered the social networking Web site also is a place for sexual predators, authorities said Friday.

Gerald Wheeler, 40, is being held in Salt Lake City on federal charges of using MySpace to coax the 13-year-old girl to engage in sexual conduct.

“This coordinated effort has taken another sexual predator off the street and off line,” Illinois Attorney General Lisa Madigan said.

In July, the girl’s father contacted Naperville police and reported his daughter received obscene messages on her MySpace site and her Tagged.com account from people calling themselves Mike and Brian, authorities said.

The messages allegedly asked her to fly to New York to enter a modeling contract in exchange for engaging in sexual conduct.

With the help of her father, police found photos of the girl in sexual poses, authorities said.

Computer messages traced

Investigators traced the computer messages to an Internet cafe and gaming facility in Salt Lake City. The owner said Wheeler was a manager and the only one with access to the computer at the time the girl was contacted.

A cell phone number for “Brian” belonged to a former employee who was close to Wheeler, authorities said.

Wheeler was convicted in 1994 in Utah of attempted forcible sex abuse, a felony, and was placed on the state’s sex offender registry, records show.

“Wheeler is a prime example of why parents need to educate themselves on the Internet and pay close attention to their children’s activity while online,” Naperville police Sgt. Bill Davis said.

Kids used to hang out in vacant lots, then in malls and now, online.

BeNetSafe helps you to be a better parent by lovingly and effectively “chaperoning” your children online, just as you always have, offline.

BeNetSafe will monitor your child’s information on the Internet and provide you with detailed reports and feedback alerting you to potentially dangerous and risky behavior.

Myspace.com and other similar web sites have been in the news a lot lately. The reason that they are in the news is because kids get on these web sites and are able to post lots of personal information, and anyone can get access to that information. You may encounter argumentative teens asking, “What is the big deal mom?” or “What is the big deal dad? I’m just putting a little bit of information out there.”

The problem is this. First of all, when kids start to put information on Myspace, they are often doing so with peers standing over their shoulder or in the same room; their friends will encourage them to put more and more information there.

Secondly, teens are at an age where they trust the people that are on the other end of the computer more than they really should. There is some good research that suggests that kids are very trusting of strangers online when there is no good reason for that.

Finally, kids are at an age where they’re willing to take risks. You can talk to them about this, but they don’t see the risk in the same way that you do.

 A 25-year-old man charged with luring a 15-year-old girl over the Internet and then sexually assaulting her was released yesterday after posting $75,000 bail.

Kalani Trujillo was charged with two counts each of first-degree sexual assault and third-degree sexual assault. Trujillo posted bail yesterday and was released from custody, the city prosecutor’s office said.
Trujillo and the girl met on the MySpace.com Web site and struck up a friendship. On July 10, Trujillo picked up the girl near her home and took her to his Salt Lake home, according to an affidavit filed in Honolulu District Court.

Once at his home, the two went into Trujillo’s bedroom and began to kiss, the affidavit said. Trujillo then asked the girl to remove her clothes, which she did, and the two had sex, the affidavit said.
In Hawai’i, it is a criminal offense for anyone to have sex with minors younger than 16 if the accused is more than five years older than the minor and is not married to the minor. In Trujillo’s case, he knew that the girl was 15, the affidavit said.

The girl reported the incident to police and identified Trujillo to police from a photographic lineup, the affidavit said.
On July 28, police with a search warrant went to Trujillo’s home and arrested him. Police said they also seized an unregistered handgun, but he has yet to be charged with that offense, the prosecutor’s office said.

The House of Representatives has overwhelmingly passed the Deleting Online Predators Act, which would require public schools and libraries to block student access to commercial social-networking sites such as MySpace.com.

The measure passed 410-15 on July 26.

DOPA would require public schools and libraries receiving federal funds for Internet access to provide a “technology protection measure” for minors to protect them from harmful material on the Internet, including child pornography, material that is obscene or harmful to minors, or “commercial social networking website(s) or chat room(s) unless used for an educational purpose with adult supervision.”

As applied to libraries, the measure provides that the “technology protection measure” must protect “against access by minors without parental authorization to a commercial social networking website or chat room, and informs parents that sexual predators can use these websites and chatrooms to prey on children.”

According to the factual findings in the bill, sexual predators often “approach minors on the Internet using chat rooms and social networking websites” and that “one in five children has been approached sexually on the Internet.”

“I am extremely pleased that the House moved so quickly to pass this important legislation,” said the measure’s chief sponsor, Rep. Michael G. Fitzpatrick, R-Pa., in a press release. “This legislation is the first of its kind to address the growing use of social networking sites by sexual predators. Passage of the “Deleting Online Predators Act” demonstrates Congress’ commitment to safeguarding America’s families.”

Not everyone supports the proposed legislation. The American Library Association expressed disappointment July 26 at the House action.

“This unnecessary and overly broad legislation will hinder students’ ability to engage in distance learning and block library computer users from accessing a wide array of essential Internet applications including instant messaging, email, wikis and blogs,” said ALA president Leslie Burger in a news release.

“Under DOPA, people who use library and school computers as their primary conduits to the Internet will be unfairly blocked from accessing some of the web’s most powerful emerging technologies and learning applications,” Burger said. “As libraries are already required to block content that is “harmful to minors” under the Children’s Internet Protection Act (CIPA), DOPA is redundant and unnecessary legislation.”

Mark Uncapher, senior vice president and counsel for the Information Technology Association of America, also expressed opposition to DOPA.

“We have concerns that the legislation moved quickly without thorough committee review, particularly given existing law such as the Children’s Internet Protection Act,” Uncapher said.

CIPA, which the U.S. Supreme Court upheld from First Amendment challenge in United States v. American Library Association (2003), requires public schools and libraries to adopt an Internet safety policy that protects minors from online obscenity, child pornography and other material harmful to minors.

ITAA’s position is that DOPA provides less flexibility than CIPA and is redundant.

“We are concerned that DOPA would micromanage schools and libraries (in their) management of their E-Rate funded systems,” Uncapher added. E-Rate is a federal program that makes some technologies more affordable for eligible schools and libraries.

The question now is whether a similar measure will be introduced for similarly quick passage in the Senate. Jeff Urbanchuk, Fitzpatrick’s press secretary, said House supporters were waiting for a companion bill to be introduced in the Senate. “We do think it will happen,” he said.

MySpace.com is planning new restrictions on how adults may contact its younger users in response to growing concerns about the safety of teenagers who frequent the popular online social networking site.

The site already prohibits kids 13 and under from setting up accounts and displays only partial profiles for those registered as 14- or 15-years-old unless the person viewing the profile is already on the teen’s list of friends.

Under the changes, announced Wednesday and taking effect next week, MySpace users who are 18 or over could no longer request to be on a 14- or 15-year-old’s friends’ list unless they already know either the youth’s e-mail address or full name.

Any user will still be able to get a partial profile of younger users by searching for other attributes, such as display name. The difference is that currently, adults can then request to be added to a youth’s list to view the full profile; that option will disappear for adults registered as 18 and over. 

The partial profiles display gender, age and city. Full profiles describe hobbies, schools and any other personal details a user may provide.

But MySpace doesn’t check the truth in the profiles.

“A 12-year-old who uses MySpace told me on Friday you can always tell if someone’s older than they say they are because the first thing they ask you is your bra size,” Parry Aftab, executive director of Wiredsafety.org, said on CBS News’ The Early Show

Aftab told co-anchor Hannah Storm MySpace isn’t making enough of an effort to protect children online.

“I’m holding a summit in White Plains, N.Y., today where everybody but MySpace is coming to sit down and figure out what the we can all do, Parents, Xanga, Facebook, Bebo, [other online sites catering to teens], all of the other sites are sitting in a room with regulators and the FTC and everyone else to see what we can do to keep kids safer,” Aftab said.

Driven largely by word of mouth, MySpace has grown astronomically since its launch in January 2004 and is now second in the United States among all Web sites by total page views, behind only Yahoo Inc., according to comScore Media Metrix. The site currently has some 87 million users, about a quarter registered as minors, according to the company.

At MySpace, which was bought last year by News Corp. for $580 million, users can expand their circles of friends by exploiting existing connections, rather than meeting randomly or by keyword matches alone.

It offers a mix of features — message boards, games, Web journals — designed to keep its youth-oriented visitors clicking on its advertising-supported pages.

MySpace has recently become a target of parents, schools and law enforcement officials concerned that teens who hang out at MySpace can fall victim to sexual predators.

“MySpace has been under enormous pressure for months and the pressure is growing now that it’s being sued for by 14-year-old who was allegedly sexually assaulted by an adult who misrepresented his age,” says Magid.

The girl, in the suit filed this week, is seeking $30 million in damages. And earlier this month, a 16-year-old girl who tricked her parents into getting her a passport flew to the Mideast to be with a 20-year-old man she met through MySpace. U.S. officials in Jordan persuaded the teen to turn around and go home.

MySpace officials say the new restrictions have been long planned and are unrelated to recent events.

Besides the contact restrictions, all users — not just those 14 and 15 — will have the option to make only partial profiles available to those not already on their friends list.

All users also will get an option to prevent contact from people outside their age group. Currently, they may only choose to require that a person know their e-mail or last name first; that will remain an option to those 16 and over, even as it becomes mandatory for those younger.

MySpace also will beef up its ad-targeting technology, so that it can avoid displaying gambling and other adult-themed sites on minors’ profile pages and target special public-service announcements to them.

The changes follow a number of safety-related measures that includes the hiring of a former federal prosecutor and Microsoft Corp. executive as its online safety chief. MySpace already has developed safety tips for parents and children and devotes scores of employees to monitoring the site around the clock.

Children’s safety online shouldn’t be left solely to services like MySpace, says Aftab, who offered tips earlier this year on The Early Show.

“Parents have to be involved. Ask their kids if they have a MySpace or other social networking page, tell them you want to look at it tomorrow, giving them a chance to clean it up,” Aftab told Storm Wednesday. “If your kids aren’t listening to you, and you’ve set rules that you like, it’s time to unplug the computer.”

“I need somebody to be the parent in the house.”