Pedophiles with a how-to book! And a Mascot for pedophilia. It’s true and the book was being sold on Amazon. http://www.foxnews.com/us/2010/11/10/consumers-boycott-amazon-pedophile-guide/

This book was listed at 158,000 on the best seller list to 100 as it gained more attention an popularity. Who would it? People who want to harm our children and who use this as a mascot – http://www.escapistmagazine.com/news/view/103436-California-Police-Issue-Safety-Warning-About-Pedobear

Google Pedo Bear, see the history, the articles and images to learn how pedophiles identify each other with this mascot and support and encourage their behavior with this mascot. The Pedophile how-to book and Pedo Bear are two reasons why e-Copp is so important. Teach your kids, let us help! Use e-Copp.
Parents, teachers, schools, home schoolers, SROs… get and use e-Copp. The pedophile book and Pedo bear are reason enough, these predators are out there and are active.

What say you folks? Who will protect our kids? How does such a book jump from 158,000 to 100 on the best seller list… c’mon – the top 100, who is buying such a guide, think about it. Fight back, put e-Copp in your schools and homes!  Let’s talk about… post and reply  (any hate will be removed).

Thanks and stay safe!

This article appeared in
June 2010 Consumer Reports Magazine.

Using a weak password

Avoid simple names or words you can find in a dictionary, even with numbers tacked on the end. Instead, mix upper- and lower-case letters, numbers, and symbols. A password should have at least eight characters. One good technique is to insert numbers or symbols in the middle of a word, such as this variant on the word “houses”: hO27usEs!

Leaving your full birth date in your profile

It’s an ideal target for identity thieves, who could use it to obtain more information about you and potentially gain access to your bank or credit card account. If you’ve already entered a birth date, go to your profile page and click on the Info tab, then on Edit Information. Under the Basic Information section, choose to show only the month and day or no birthday at all.

Overlooking useful privacy controls

For almost everything in your Facebook profile, you can limit access to only your friends, friends of friends, or yourself. Restrict access to photos, birth date, religious views, and family information, among other things. You can give only certain people or groups access to items such as photos, or block particular people from seeing them. Consider leaving out contact info, such as phone number and address, since you probably don’t want anyone to have access to that information anyway.

Posting your child’s name in a caption

Don’t use a child’s name in photo tags or captions. If someone else does, delete it by clicking on Remove Tag. If your child isn’t on Facebook and someone includes his or her name in a caption, ask that person to remove the name.

Mentioning that you’ll be away from home

That’s like putting a “no one’s home” sign on your door. Wait until you get home to tell everyone how awesome your vacation was and be vague about the date of any trip.

Letting search engines find you

To help prevent strangers from accessing your page, go to the Search section of Facebook’s privacy controls and select Only Friends for Facebook search results. Be sure the box for public search results isn’t checked.

Permitting youngsters to use Facebook unsupervised

Facebook limits its members to ages 13 and over, but children younger than that do use it. If you have a young child or teenager on Facebook, the best way to provide oversight is to become one of their online friends. Use your e-mail address as the contact for their account so that you receive their notifications and monitor their activities. “What they think is nothing can actually be pretty serious,” says Charles Pavelites, a supervisory special agent at the Internet Crime Complaint Center. For example, a child who posts the comment “Mom will be home soon, I need to do the dishes” every day at the same time is revealing too much about the parents’ regular comings and goings.

October is Cyber Safety month in Ohio. It reminds me of the time I worked on a Federal Internet task force where I experienced first hand the on-line dangers that confront our children. They are extreme. While posing as a child, or an adult with access to children, or as a child picture trader, I learned of things which should scare any parent. Dangerous situations were taking place without parents’ knowledge and were happening within quiet anonymous clicks of a mouse in social networking environments.

In response to parent complaints received by the task force I worked in an undercover capacity in chat rooms or other related places online. I was always surprised by the volume of individuals who would view my profile and send me an instant message. It was staggering and my age or gender didn’t matter to these people. Worse, these numerous instant messages turned perversely depraved within just a few lines of chat. And that was just the text in the instant messages. The pictures and links sent by these individuals were truly x-rated, some horrifying.

The images were not only explicitly foul, but were of children in completely compromised circumstances of abuse. These children were exploited and victimized and often had blank facial expressions with a far off gaze in their eyes typical of victims suffering abuse. Each still photo was a crime scene. These digitized pictures are virally spread out over the internet where they are never removed. As the child victim ages they grow up knowing they are “out there” as a child victim being viewed over and over again.

The individuals sending those images to me did so thinking I was a child. They used them to me to teach me the “fun” we could have when we meet face-to-face. This is all a trick. Regardless of what the child is led to believe, no child has fun when they meet the monster who has been chatting and lying to them. The individuals invested days and weeks of “grooming” me by instant message. Grooming is virtual dating. Wikipedia defines grooming as actions deliberately undertaken with the aim of befriending and establishing an emotional connection with a child in order to lower the child’s inhibitions in preparation for abuse or exploitation. During the grooming phase the individual would say all those things to me that kids like to hear to feel special and well-liked. Once the bond was formed and molded, the suspect asks to meet the child out in the real world to do the things seen in the images.

The attempt to meet is quite sinister and occurs under a ruse. The child’s innocence is leveraged against them by the perpetrator. The perpetrator lies about who and what they really are working hard to create an image for the child to believe this is a fun friendship, a sort of mentoring to teach life experiences in a fun way. It is anything but that. Instead it is a sex crime. Usually when a face-to-face meeting takes place it results in criminal physical contact with the child. Knowing that consider these two alarming statistics from a Cox Communication study regarding children and online safety.

· 14% have actually met face-to-face with a person they had known only through the Internet (9% of 13- to 15-year-olds and 22% of 16- to 17-year-olds).

· 30% have considered meeting someone they’ve only communicated with online.

There are simple ways to protect children from such dangers. Things like placing the home computer in the busiest part of the home making parent supervision easier, parents viewing what kids are doing online, making children provide all password and user-names to the sites the children log into, being active with “snoopervision” by logging on to sites as your child to see who interacts with them, password protecting the operating system so a parent must log the child onto the system, using parental controls on web browsers, and not allowing kids to be online in the privacy of their bedrooms for long periods of time.

The best prevention is education. Teaching children how to be safe online will set the tone for their growth in the digital age and guide them in the appropriate use of computers and the Internet. Coupled with strong parental supervision much of the dark side on the Internet can be avoided by the brilliant light of knowledge and parental involvement.

“The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.”

Irish politician Edmund Burke (1729 – 1797)

Kevin Owens, President, Founder
Blue Knight Productions, Inc.
www.e-copp.com

Protect your kids be learning more below from my response in that thread.

_______________________________

It has been my experience in law enforcement that what you wrote about is true.

Parents, listen up….

Bad people (predators) will comb through social networking profiles looking for information that suits their desire and will work with or expand on that information to groom a child. For example, type in your home telephone number with the area code into Google with the hyphens, and again without the hyphens, and see what you get.  Also, Google your child’s name, especially if they are into sports.  predators do as much.

Also, predators will use search fields to refine what they are looking for, it is easier than reading through profiles.  With a little bit of information a predator can begin to watch open chats to glean more information, or use seemingly innocuous profile information of a target child to refine the target (match up the name of a school in a profile to a geographic region, then do a last name search in a phone book or public records within that region).  A predator will then track the target child by following them in various social networking sites, and/or engage them in a chat through that site or other similar online service to further the grooming (chats or online contact) or collection of information.

My law enforcement experience allowed me to pose undercover as a child and be groomed and arrest predators.  I would like to reveal more here to parents about how they work but for two reasons I won’t, 1. because I don’t want predators out there to come learn it, and 2. because law enforcement relies on predator conduct to catch them.  Suffice it to say that with a bit of computer savvy and a small bit of information a predator can move from having a little bit of information about a child  to being able to learn where that child lives or goes to school and find them in the real world. (think map point and Google earth, recall the Google search of your phone #)

Generally these travelers and groomers don’t snatch the child right off the street because they want a relationship with them.  They want the child to be a willing partner.  The predator wants to arrange a meeting with them (this is real bad and should be prevented by all means).  The predator uses the info to maintain a regular communications relationship online with the child so that if or when an attempt to meet is arranged within that communication, the childs defenses are down as the child has been lied to and believes this person is an acquaintance or friend.

Here’s the bottom line, there needs to be a much larger role of parental supervision in matters involving a child online, and there is no need for a child in a social networking environment to have any profile of any kind that reveals personal information.

And parents…. understand that some of your kids are maintaining more than one social networking presence; although they may show you their Facebook or Myspace account for your approval, there is likely to be one they don’t show you and that one is the problem.

Listen, if a predator learns how to find a child, or the home phone number, or anything that can lead them to the area or place where the child lives and goes to school, you and your home have been compromised, it affects the safety of the whole family..

Solution:  begin a much more restrictive policy in your home about being given all passwords and usernames to online services that require them.  If you do not get compliance from your child then password protect the operating system so the machine will not boot up for your child until you enter it for them, or until they give you all passwords and usernames.  Maintain and update that list!

And feel free to log on as your child and see who says what, that can be quite revealing.

Thanks for reading,

Kevin Owens
www.e-copp.com

http://ecopp.wordpress.com/

http://twitter.com/TheBlueKnight

Hello,

Good article in today’s paper.

In addition to buying your program, what software do you recommend for my kids computer.

Thank you, David Z.

and my response…….

Thanks for reading the article and for emailing us.  I appreciate your interest.

The e-Copp program is a great tool for parents and teachers as an early education and training program to teach kids up to the 4^th or 5^th grade how to be safe online.  It is a four part series of animated short that deal with the main issues of online activity.

As far as software goes what most parents are interested in is protective software, software that includes parental controls and other aspects to know where a child surf on the web and that traps all incoming and out going emails, instant messages, and chats.  In addition to software there are physical devices that capture keystrokes so a parent can review all typing done by a child.

Most computers come with some level of parental control.  In the Control Panel on Windows machines individual users can be set up and each user can have usage settings set according to a parents wishes.  Also, the Control Panel has an area for Internet usage (connectivity and/or security) that can be set.  Most search engines like Mozilla Firefox and Microsoft Internet Explorer have settings or options menus built within them to limit kids access and exposure to online content.  These search engines also have a History files to see what has been visited over time.  It is simple to instruct the computer to delete the history from the browser upon exit or shutdown.

Things get more tech savvy from here with freeware that can be downloaded to read the Internet Temporary files and .dat files so a person (parents, analysts, police) can read the totality of web sites visited by that particular computer.  Such sites include the sites intentionally visited and the sites that a user was redirected to.

A further delve into the computer takes us to the registry files.  Many people fear to go there because a wrong setting change in a registry hive of the operating system can permanently change your computer and how it operates, even disabling it requiring higher end service repairs to get the registry straightened out.  However, like anything, it can be learned and practiced and isn’t so dreadful once understood.  Knowing how to read or search the registry hives yields great information on the use of a computer.

A lot of the parental control software derives its information output from these types of files making the process easier.

I hope this answer helped, in fact, I think I will use your question and my answer in the next blog posting for e-Copp.

In the signature below are other links for your review.  We always appreciate comments and visits to the blog and being followed on Twitter.

Thanks again for your interest and question,

Best Regards,

Kevin

use e-Copp to teach your kids, we did the work, we made the lesson plans, we set up the curriculum, and we made it inexpensive.  Educate your kids!  Education and supervision is the best prevention

One case is a teacher who was convicted of sex with a student who is back teaching at another school.

Another case is a Columbus, Ohio, teacher who was found with 200,000 kiddie pron images on his computer… imagine, a teacher right in the classroom with kids.  I don’t know if he ever harmed or took advantage of a child, but it seems he fueled his desire online.   He has full access to kids, he has superior authority over those kids, he has public trust over those kids, he has leverage (through grading) over those kids, and through teacher/parent meetings he has the ability to groom parents.   Why would a teacher groom parents The reason is if his behavior (like is kiddie porn collection) comes to light there will be a hue and cry from parents such as, “really…I don’t believe it, we knew him.”  or like, “he’s not that way, we had him at our home.”  or like, “he was always nice to use when we met.”  or like, ” he was always so good with the kids”.  Ya think?

The last case is truly tragic, a 7 year old girl missing from the Orange Park area of Florida.

Cincinnati teacher convicted of sex with student is teaching in school again, http://is.gd/4uoAO. Protect kids with educations, use e-Copp

A Columbus, Ohio School teacher is arrested when FBI finds 200,000 kiddie pron images on his computer!! http://is.gd/4uopt Get e-Copp!!

e-Copp is a great program to protect kids from real dangers, & the dangers are very real, http://bit.ly/4f4RMN

Poisonous pictures can also lead to other even more serious risks.  It can begin with kids’ on-line chatting.  Children can easily develop a trusting friendly relationship with a complete stranger based on keystrokes in the comfort of their homes.  Most offenders openly solicit victims on-line through bringing up sexual topics, engaging in cyber sex or transmitting sexual pictures. This is done through the anonymity provided by the Web.  Phone encounters may progress after on-line activity and then can advance to actual physical encounters. Many cases of abuse involved face-to-face sexual encounters, some of these involving some form of sexual contact between the offender and the victim.  The offender is not considered a stranger to the child for they feel they have created a “trusting” friendship.  Many crimes occur after the offender builds that relationship on-line with the victim.

And for our young teenagers, the hip appeal to social networking sites such as My Space and Face Book are not without serious risks and parents are negligent if they dismiss their teen’s participation as nothing more than “kids being kids.”  Moms shouldn’t delude themselves into thinking that their sons and daughters are just kibitzing with their friends inside networks only secure to those pals with passwords.  Visits or browsing throughout these systems can lead them to some bizarre stuff.  Also, teens can set up two networks, one they show their parents and one that they access to outside their supervision.  Ask yourself why they would do this.  Also “friends” can become estranged and we all know that ex-friends are capable of sharing those old secrets, i.e. site access of ex-friends.  Instantly outsiders are accessing private information and downloading pictures without permission.  These personal pictures can then be altered in very inappropriate and degrading ways.  These “notebooks” are not secure and safe. Many so called “outsiders” can gain access to personal information and befriend anyone listing personal information about them.  It is why it is so important to always know who children are chatting with.

Also, parents and teens should be especially vigilant in posting those innocuous pictures of them at the beach in their bathing suits, at school in varsity jerseys, with friends, family, or honestly any photos at all.  Once those pictures are out, they can easily get lost in an electronic universe where retrieving them is unrealistic.  So for every Dad and Mom who is uncomfortable with the idea of a picture of their daughter wearing her swim suit being a screen saver for a pedophile two states over, careful oversight of what your kids post is in order.  Actually, if anyone thinks that it is only kids visiting these sites, they are wrong.  There are thousands of registered sex offenders in this country of which too many are in non-compliance.  Don’t mislead yourself that plenty aren’t regularly visiting these networking sites to “socialize.”  Older adults pose as teenagers and young teens pose as older to gain access to the web sites. Nothing is honest and almost anything goes.
With teens spending almost 15 hours a week online, parents need to maintain strict time management of their kids’ access to their computers.  Although not fool proof, screening software can help in controlling their access to some visual trash and hate speech.  But being a nosy parent is a critical behavior that could help protect your child from unhealthy imagery and the luring efforts of Internet child predators.  Don’t be afraid to look over your kid’s shoulders when they are on-line, “snoop” when they are off-line and ask questions. Have the computer situated in an open family environment. Kids are less likely to be secretive when the computer screen is in view of their family rather than in private in their bedrooms.  Consistent open channels of communications are critical for parents and kids.  By working together as a team, children and parents can present formable barriers to better protect their families.  To learn more about how to keep your children safe while using the Internet, please visit our website at www.e-copp.com.

Lisa M. Owens RN, MBA

Tom Wetzel, suburban police lieutenant

www.e-copp.com

“The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.”

Irish politician Edmund Burke (1729 – 1797).