A United Nations-led Internet child protection effort is underway in the fight against online child porn, and CNET reports the bid is getting the attention of top American technology companies, law enforcement, and education.
The UN initiative is called Innocence in Danger. CNET says it targets pedophilia and child porn and works under the auspices of a group called Wired Kids. Microsoft, AT&T, America Online, Lycos, the American Library Association, the National Education Association, the FBI, the Justice Department, the Federal Trade Commission, and the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children are said to be participating in the UN project.
CNET says it all springs from a 1998 conference in Paris after a massive European sting which hit alleged online child porn traffickers. The new group's aims include offering a clearinghouse for information about online child porn and pedophilia, CNET says, which child protection groups worldwide can share.
The Wired Kids project launches in the midst of a bristling debate on the Internet's role in sex exploitation. In the U.S. alone, the issue has divided civil liberties groups and children's rights proponents against each other.
Most recently, the issue was highlighted in the case of Patrick Naughton, the former Infoseek and Disney executive who is about to go on trial a second time in a highly publicized case involving whether he solicited underage sex on the Internet.
Naughton was convicted of possessing child pornography - undercover agents who arrested him in Santa Monica, CA last September found child porn images on his seized laptop computer, but a federal appeals court the next day struck down that part of the Child Pornography Prevention Act which covered that conviction, saying the law went too far in outlawing materials which only "appeared to be" child porn.
Naughton stands re-trial in March for allegedly arranging to meet a 13-year-old girl who turned out to be an undercover agent, and whom he claims he knew from meeting her in a Web chat room was actually a role-playing adult.
Also, the Child Online Protection Act - restricting access to online adult material - has been tied up in courts for over a year, CNET says.
