Rethinking Sex Offender Laws for Youth Texting

In Iowa, Jorge Canal is on the sex offenders registry because, at age 18, he was convicted of distributing obscene materials to a minor after he sent a picture of his penis by cellphone to a 14-year-old female friend who had requested it.

In Florida, Phillip Alpert, then 18, was charged with distributing child pornography and put on the sex offenders registry because after a fight, he sent a photograph of his nude 16-year-old girlfriend by e-mail to dozens of people, including her parents.

In most states, teenagers who send or receive sexually explicit photographs by cellphone or computer — known as “sexting” — have risked felony child pornography charges and being listed on a sex offender registry for decades to come.

But there is growing consensus among lawyers and legislators that the child pornography laws are too blunt an instrument to deal with an adolescent cyberculture in which all kinds of sexual pictures circulate on sites like MySpace and Facebook.

Porn Star Ron Jeremy Urges Parents to Protect
Children from Online Porn

Ron Jeremy, the adult film star who is ranked as America's top porn actor by the Adult Video Network, is encouraging parents to take steps to protect children from pornography when they are surfing the Internet. Jeremy is recommending the use of tools such as InternetSafety.com's Safe Eyes family Internet management software to automatically block access to online pornographic content.

"Porn is definitely not for kids. Take it from someone who has worked in the industry for years," Jeremy said. "Internet filtering is an easy way to prevent kids from being exposed to this stuff, and I think that every parent should use a product like Safe Eyes."

Operation Restore Hope swept up 44 people and 279 computers and other devices across Georgia on Tuesday as federal, state and local law enforcement officers tried to make a dent in child pornography that is spread computer to computer.

For three months agents have been tracking known child porn threads from the GBI’s offices in Cleveland. The sweeps began around daybreak Tuesday.

The images are disturbing, Keenan said.

For example, there are some in which infants are being molested and one in which “the images involve the rape of a 4-year-old male child," the director said.

“[In] previous experiences, some of the offenders have children in the home and they have been manufacturing their own child pornography,” Keenan said. “The child pornography that they are pursuing is known child pornography -- certain files or certain images.”

In another case, Keenan said agents entered a house to find that the same child seen in the pornographic images was actually in the home.

Whitaker said data shows Georgia ranks fifth in the number of “devices” used to transmit or receive child pornography. “We are only getting 2 percent of what’s out there,” he said.

New scanners break child porn laws

The rapid introduction of full body scanners at British airports threatens to breach child protection laws which ban the creation of indecent images of children, the Guardian has learned.

Privacy campaigners claim the images created by the machines are so graphic they amount to "virtual strip-searching" and have called for safeguards to protect the privacy of passengers involved.

A 12-month trial at Manchester airport of scanners which reveal naked images of passengers including their genitalia and breast enlargements, only went ahead last month after under-18s were exempted.

"They do not have the legal power to use full body scanners in this way," said Dowty, adding there was an exemption in the 1978 law to cover the "prevention and detection of crime" but the purpose had to be more specific than the "trawling exercise" now being considered.

Open or closed, porn finds a way to mobile

When mobile “adult application marketplace” MiKandi announced it was launching the first adult portal and mobile client available for Android devices, many were quick to point out that this would never happen in Apple’s walled garden iPhone. Even though Google and most certainly Verizon Wireless don’t endorse this new entrant, MiKandi was able to bring its porn to Android because it was an open platform.

That is one issue that makes mobile porn an interesting scenario. VZW and other operators claim they can’t fully embrace openness because they have to protect their customers. A child getting access to porn consistently comes up as an example they use to condemn uninhibited openness. In a closed environment, they can better control it. Not to mention the fact that, despite the business opportunity, no carrier wants to be known as the “porn pioneer.”

But now, even the ultimate walled garden, the iPhone, has inadvertently let porn aboard, making the open argument less relevant. The iPhone Sex App Store, disguised cleverly as a magic store on mobile Safari, came online yesterday on the iPhone and iPod Touch.