i-Jam recap: Notes from Cybercrime session

Here are several points brought out in the recent Cybercrime session at the i-Jam event in Lexington. I'm not sure if all of these will be of interest, but they were interesting enough to me (at the time, anyway) to write down:

* Louisville is labeled as the "most obscene city" in the U.S. based on analysis of several inappropriate terms searched for in metropolitan areas. These were terms such as George Carlin's seven words you can't say on television, as well as really disturbing phrases that I refuse to type here involving nudity or sexual relations with animals, the deceased, etc. Apparently the Lousville area ranked highly in the number of times these sorts of things were searched for...

* Project Safe Childhood is an initiative started by the U.S. Department of Justice to help combat sexual exploitation crimes against children. As I mentioned in an earlier post, you can get info and free public service announcements there.

* Online gaming is an emerging area of concern. Predators tend to engage children in the gaming 'world' and encourage them to drop offline and meet them in other chat areas that may not be monitored.

* There was discussion about the "cool" girl in school being the most provocative girl. Recent stories about revealing Halloween costumes came to my mind.

* This led to the issue of kids self-producing content that can be labeled as child pornography. It was carefully pointed out that they weren't talking about the "slumber party kids-in-PJs" example, but they cited an example of an underage couple that thought it would be a good idea to video themselves having some type of sexual relations. The video got posted somewhere and the authorities have tracked its retrieval hundreds of times around the world during various apprehensions of criminals with child pornography in their possession.

* A couple of points from that discussion: Kids don't realize that this content, once posted, is out there FOREVER. These kids may not realize that, once created, they themselves are in possession of child pornography and the 'friend' that gets the content and shares it with his/her buddies is guilty of distributing child pornography.

* When it is argued that their MySpace/Facebook profiles are set to private, kids need to be reminded that easy searches can be done for ways to hack these accounts and gather information, view friends and pictures, etc. NOTE: Be careful if you think you'll try to prove this point firsthand, as many of these advertised 'hacks' have spyware and trojan horse applications embedded.

* One criminal highlighed had used trojan horse software to blackmail children into unfortunate activity. He befriended the children online in a chat room and perhaps sent an innocent picture or attachment with an embedded trojan horse. Once he convinced the victim to open the file, he had access to the user's computer. This led to the capture of all sorts of information such as credit card info, bank account numbers and passwords, etc. From there, the criminal made the victim aware and threatened to bankrupt them or other things unless they complied with his demands... From the young victim's perspective, they were probably scared to tell their parents for fear of getting in trouble for chatting with a stranger in the first place. It's an unfortunate story and I share it because I hadn't really thought of things like this that were outside the realm of the stereotypical stories I had heard.

* An attendee questioned about the psychological issues these criminals had and the need to rehabilitate them. One speaker rhetorically asked us this: "How much therapy would it take to convince you to change your sexual preference?"

* One last note - in cases where state boundaries are crossed, the jurisdiction is in the state where the "bad guy" lives. That's the state where the case will be prosecuted. This 'standard' is in place to help the authorities avoid stepping on each other's toes, questioning authority or jurisdiction and to avoid duplicating investigative efforts.

It was an interesting session, albeit depressing.