The Culture of Fear_ Why Americans Are Afraid of the Wrong Things - Barry Glassner [29]
In more recent years child pornographers and pedophiles have come in handy for fear mongering about the latest variety of baby-sitter : the Internet. In the 1990s politicians and the news media have made much of the existence of pedophilia in cyberspace. Speaking in 1998 on behalf of legislation he drafted that makes it easier to convict “cyberpredators” and imprison them longer, Representative Bill McCollum of Florida made the customary claim: “Sex offenders who prey on children no longer need to hang out in parks or malls or school yards.” Nowadays, warned McCollum, child pornographers and pedophiles are just “a mouse click away” from their young prey.27
This time the panic did not rely so much on suspicious statistics as on peculiar logic. With few cases of youngsters having been photographed or attacked by people who located them on-line, fear mongers found it more convenient simply to presume that “as the number of children who use the Internet continues to boom ... pornography and pedophilia grow along with it” (New York Times). Reporters portrayed the inhabitants of cyberspace, children and adults alike, in somewhat contradictory ways. About the kids they said, on the one hand, “Internet-savvy children can also easily access on-line pornography” (New York Times). On the other hand, reporters depicted computer-proficient kids as precisely the opposite of savvy. They described them as defenseless against pedophiles and child pornographers in cyberspace. “Depraved people are reaching right into your home and touching your child,” Hugh Downs told viewers of ABC’s “20/20.”28
To judge from reports by some of the people featured in news reports, cyberspace was largely devoid of other adults who could protect children from these creeps. The Internet is “a city with no cops,” the New York Times quoted a district attorney from Suffolk County, even though law enforcement officials actually do a great deal of lurking and entrapping. Since 1993 the FBI has conducted an operation code-named “Innocent Images” in which agents assume false identities and post seductive messages on the Internet and on-line services. In one of the more highly publicized busts that resulted from the operation, a thirty-one-year-old Washington, D.C., attorney was arrested when he showed up at a shopping mall to meet a fourteen-year-old girl whom he had propositioned on-line for sex. In reality he had been corresponding with an adult FBI agent who had assumed a provocative on-line name—“One4fun4u”—and had sent the man messages stating that she’d had experience with an older man and “it was a lot of fun.” In another arrest, a fifty-eight-year-old man was snagged by agents who used the names “Horny15bi” and “Sexcollctr” and described themselves on-line as “dreaming of kinky sex.” One of them gave as her motto, “vice is nice but incest is best.”29
Cyberspace has been policed by other adults as well. Reporters for newspapers and television stations, posing as young teens or preteens, have responded to solicitations for sex, only to arrive at the agreed-on meeting place with cameras and cops in tow. Groups with names like “Cyber Angels” and “Safeguarding Our Children” collect information on pedophiles via e-mail from children who say they have been approached or molested. Members of adult vigilante groups make it a practice to disrupt Internet chat rooms where child pornography is traded and pass along information to police.30
While judicial experts continue to debate which of these intervention strategies constitute entrapment or invasion of privacy, there is an extralegal question as well. David L. Sobel, an attorney with the Electronic Privacy Information Center, framed the question succinctly. “Are we making the world a better place,” he asked rhetorically, “by tempting some of these people to commit crimes they may not