PROTECTING OUR FUTURE
One Child at a Time
12/06/06
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Director Mueller addresses law enforcement officials at the Project Safe Childhood conference Tuesday in Washington, D.C. |
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Talk about prevention: we’ve
helped take more than 6,000 child predators
off the streets in the last 10 years. That’s
a lot of horrific future crimes—and
untold misery—that never happened to
kids and their families.
But when it comes to the Internet—with
computing power growing and technology costs
falling by the minute—what’s
past is truly prologue.
Every day, more and more children are going
online and finding new things to do. They’re
posting pictures and personal details about
themselves to meet new friends…competing
with like-minded gamers (usually complete
strangers) around the world…even setting
up web cams—all the while often unknowingly
putting themselves at risk, oblivious to
the dark side of the web, to the predators
who lurk in the shadows.
On Tuesday, FBI Director Robert Mueller
talked about the increasingly insidious dangers
at the Project
Safe Childhood conference
in Washington,
D.C., which brought together prosecutors,
forensic examiners, police officers, and
FBI agents who work these cases.
“With heightened scrutiny in the United
States, child pornographers are going further
underground, using file-sharing networks
and encrypted websites. They are concealing
their financial mechanisms through a maze
of online payment services, using stolen
credit cards. They are traveling to foreign
countries to exploit minors. They are victimizing
more children, in more ways, at younger and
younger ages. … These are not mere
pictures or posed shots, but live acts of
molestation,” he said.
Think, for example, about how much more
you can get for your money today when it
comes to computer storage. Now think about
a child pornographer, caught not so long
ago in Chicago, using a custom-built computer
with five hard drives and several external
drives housing more than a terabyte of data—as
the Director pointed out, “the equivalent
of more than one million paperback books.” Scary.
All this is why the FBI has more
resources devoted to stopping child predators
than ever before. And why we’ve
got more initiatives with more partners
around the world dedicated to the same
mission. The Director ticked off the most
important of them:
- Our Innocent
Images National Initiative, which
pairs up 240 FBI agents with hundreds
of law enforcement partners nationwide
in undercover operations where we pose
as children or collectors to lure predators
into the open;
- A related venture, the Innocent
Images International Task Force,
which brings together our partners worldwide
at a single site to share information
on the growing cases with global angles;
- Our Regional
Computer Forensics Labs and
Computer Analysis Response Teams, experts
in finding and preserving digital evidence;
- Our Endangered
Child Alert Program,
which “uses national and international
media exposure to identify unknown predators
and victims” and has already led
to the arrest of eight wanted subjects.
What can you do?
First, get educated. Our agents are often
out talking about these issues—with
the media, with teens, with parents, with
whoever will listen. Contact our field
offices for details.
You can also tap into resources like I-Safe,
a non-profit foundation dedicated to web
safety.
Second, join us in spreading the message. Talk
to your kids. To your fellow parents. To your
friends and neighbors. You, too, can be a voice
for prevention.
Finally, to learn more about the FBI’s work, our recent cases, and
the hurdles we face, please read the Director’s
speech
in its entirety.
