Arizona Attorney General\nJanet Napolitano \nPHOENIX - Arizona is bracing for a sweeping new cybercrime bill which takes dead aim at Internet porn looping and computer viruses. Called the Computer Crime Act of 2000, it also defines a new cybercrime, "luring," making it a felony to solicit children online by transmitting sexually explicit material to them or to a school.
Arizona Attorney General Janet Napolitano says that if it's passed, the bill would become the "best and most comprehensive" cybercrime legislation on the books in the nation - even better than California's. The bill's co-sponsors, Republican state senators Marc Spitzer and John Verkamp, are now drumming up more support for the package.
Verkamp tells the Arizona Republic it has an excellent chance of getting through the Legislature. "We need to update all of our statutes to take in the high technology age," he tells the paper.
Napolitano says the law is needed also do deal with such problems as cyberstalking - a young Arizona man, she says, recently posted pictures of his girl friend on the Internet and sent sexually explicit e-mail under her assumed identity because he was angry at her, virtually inviting others to do his stalking for him. Napolitano says the new law would change that one real fast.
"You won't be able to avoid the stalking statutes even if you didn't actually do the stalking. If you just set it up," she said. "If you start putting stuff on the Internet, you have exponentially expanded the audience, and the danger to the victim, in my view."
Porn looping involves a Web surfer happening upon an adult Internet site and being unable to exit the site without being hit with one after another window for one or several other adult sites.
The Federal Trade Commission has likened the practice to a store taking a rival's potential customer to its own store by gunpoint and has already announced a crackdown on the practice. Adult Internet professionals have also decried the practice as doing more harm than help to the industry.
