The underage sex scandal involving a now-departed top Infoseek executive was already bad enough - especially given the Web portal's Disney ownership and the clean Web site it tries to maintain. But court papers detailing Patrick Naughton's alleged online sexual solicitations with a 13-year-old girl - and possibly others - could make the flap worse before it gets better.
Naughton had overseen e-mail, chat rooms, and other areas of GO Network, for whom he also served as an executive vice president with sister portal Infoseek. Now he faces charges of crossing state lines to solicit sex from a 13-year-old girl who turned out to be the creation of a pair of FBI agents. And the case refocuses concern on dangers children can find while surfing the Internet.
Infoseek says Naughton is no longer with the company, but Reuters says experts are claiming this case and other similar ones are more common than parents believe - and some involve illegal activities aimed to exploit minors which go undetected.
Court documents show Naughton's bid to arrange a meeting with the fictitious 13-year-old wasn't isolated - he allegedly chatted other girls online and claimed already to have met "a couple of them", the wire service says.
The documents quote Naughton as saying he told the fictitious girl he wanted to get her alone in a hotel room and have her strip for him. Apparently, he has also said he liked her lack of sexual experience, allegedly telling her to skip school for one day and meet and asking if she'd like to see a photograph of him in the nude.
Reuters says law enforcement agents posing online as young girls are usually targeted within moments of logging onto the Internet - a real and potentially growing danger for real children. However, most parents take at least some protection measures - America Online tells Reuters says 80 percent of customers with children 6-17 use parental control software AOL offers.
Even so, Reuters says, experts believe even parents who think they're vigilant sometimes can't or don't do enough - common sense errors, the wire service says, include having their tech-savvy kids put in the screening software themselves, or believe that the perception of anonymity online can't be punctured.
Naughton faces arraignment next month.
