DOJ Unveils Web Safety Ads, Data-Sharing MOU
The Justice Department in partnership with the Ad Council, the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children and additional partners are now working on a new set of Internet safety commercials that will be unveiled in a few months, Attorney General Michael Mukasey said Tuesday. The ad campaign comes on the heels of the "Think Before You Post" public service announcements that urge young Web users to exercise caution before putting personal information online.
The first new ad will target potential offenders "as a warning not to download sexual images of children or to attempt to entice a minor," Mukasey told a child safety conference in Columbus, Ohio. The second ad, which will run in Spanish, aims to remind parents about the dangers children face online and the need for supervision. "We're confident that, like our previous campaigns, these ads will spread our message and that they’ll help keep our children safe," he said.
In the past, when parents thought about threats to their children's safety, they feared what might happen on the walk home from school or at the playground, Mukasey said. "Home is no longer the sanctuary that it used to be. By simply logging on to the Internet, children open themselves to new and hidden threats." Online games and chat rooms might actually be a hiding place for adult pedophiles, he said, noting that e-mail can also be turned into a tool of deceit and abduction.
Mukasey touted progress in the agency's fight against Internet criminals. In FY 2007, U.S. attorneys' offices filed more than 2,100 Project Safe Childhood indictments, a 28 percent increase over the prior year. In 2008, that momentum continued by bringing even more cases, he said. Over the same period, Justice’s Child Exploitation and Obscenity Section worked with other agencies to coordinate six massive stings that yielded over 7,000 subjects in the United States. Earlier this year, Justice also announced 43 new assistant U.S. attorney posts to help bring more cases.
During his speech, Mukasey also announced the signing of a memorandum of understanding among federal law enforcement to share criminal intelligence on child predators. With the MOU, which covers the FBI, Immigration and Customs Enforcement, the U.S. Postal Inspection Service, and the U.S. Marshals Service, the agencies hope to build on the existing Regional Information Sharing System network. To assist, Justice is awarding $800,000 to support data-sharing among all levels of law enforcement – with Internet Crimes Against Children task forces at the helm.
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