Fighting computer filth with computers

EDITORIAL
 

The Bedford County Sheriff's Department shows that parents have a potent ally against computerized assaults on their children -- computerized investigations of their assailants.

    OPERATION Blue Ridge Thunder's three-month investigation of Internet crimes against children has led to the arrests of seven people from San Diego to Boston, and has put under suspicion 60 others from Texas to England.

    A probe over so wide a geographic area, relying so much on computer expertise -- must be an FBI sting, right?

    Wrong.  It's an operation of the Bedford County Sheriff's Department.  For that matter, it's an operation mainly of one deputym Sergio Kopelev, and the personal computer he works from, an operation begun when a local parent complained that her 14-year-old daughter had been solicited from Florida iver the Internet to make a pornographic movie.

    And though the department has applied for a $200,000 federal grant to continue the work, it so far has been funded with local money from fines and forfeitures amounting, says Sheriff Mike Brown, to only $2,000 or so.

    The principle is well-established that child pornography -- whose production or dissemination is illegal -- is outside the protection of the First Amendment.  Becoming well-established, too, is the principle that Internet providers cannot be held liable for the material that users e-mail or post on the Web, any more than phone companies are at fault when criminals conspire over their lines to break the law.

    Much, however, is not established, including questions specific ti the use of cyberspace as the venue for child porn.  For example, if one person conveys to another the URL of a child-porn Web site, but does not transmit the pornography itself, is it or should it be or, constitutionally, could it be illegal?  What if that person put a link to a child-porn Web site, without posting the actual pornography, on an otherwise innocuous Web site?

    From the investigative side, at what point do an investigator's e-mail solicitations for child pornography edge into creating crimes rather than solving them?  If an investigator poses in cyberspace as a child, but in fact is an adult, can anything sent to him or her be construed as contributing to the delinquency of a minor?

    Blue Ridge Thunder seems to have navigated such shoals successfully; Kopelev, for example, poses not as a minor but as a 27-year-old pedophile.  Indeed, the record of the operation to date, far from the nation's law-enforcement centers, suggests that the same technology making filth easier to spread also could make it easier to fight.