Pedophile-Proof Chat Rooms?
Can Lancaster University's Isis Project keep children safe online without invading our privacy?
| August 18, 2008 | 6
Technology's Toll on Privacy and Security Computers, databases and networks have connected us like never before, but at what cost? » August 18, 2008
Image: iStockPhoto
Czech police nab a man suspected of raping 12-year-old girls after offering them car rides via an Internet Web site. In Ohio, a 400-pound man, likewise, uses a Web site to impersonate a 15-year-old boy in order to convince a 12-year-old girl to send photographs and videotapes of herself naked. A sting operation in the U.K. shuts down a pedophile chat room Web site, and the site's leader is caught with over 75,000 pornographic images.
Social networking over the Web has helped connect millions of Internet users, but all of this online interaction can also have a serious downside: a proliferation of pedophiles who use code words to trade in child pornography or prowl chat rooms and befriend underage victims, peppering their messages with words like "kewl" and other youthful colloquialisms.
In a move that pits technology against criminals (and, some fear, privacy), a group of researchers at Lancaster University in England and law-enforcement officials at the United Kingdom's Child Exploitation and Online Protection Center (CEOP) is developing software that tracks the Web's evolving child pornography lexicon as well as predators' chat strategies to help law-enforcement agencies catch the most secretive of these criminals before they strike.
"There's a list of about 50 key words that are very indicative of child pornography," says Doug Skinner, a forensics expert who works at Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s Cyber Crimes Center in Fairfax, Va.,* and sometimes coordinates with CEOP as part of the Global Virtual Task Force. But, he says, "The terms do change."
That's why Awais Rashid, a Lancaster University computer science professor, has launched the three-year Isis Project, which uses linguistic analysis to keep tabs on these Internet-savvy pedophiles. "There's so much activity it's virtually impossible to police," he says. Currently, investigators at ICE (U.S. Department of Homeland Security) and CEOP are left waiting for a potential victim to report suspicious activity, but by then, it is often too late.
Rashid's strategy is to create automated monitoring tools that operators of chat rooms, social networks, and file-sharing networks would install on their sites. This will provide law-enforcement officials with an automatically updating dictionary of these code words, along with an alert system which will inform them when users are detected masquerading as children.
In preparation to write the software module for file-sharing networks (a prototype by the end of the year), the team sifted through an entire month of search traffic on the number one peer-to-peer file-sharing network, Gnutella, between February 27th and March 27th 2005. Because each peer participates in routing network messages to and from other peers, Rashid's team could set up a specialized client to intercept and log these queries throughout large segments of the network. Then, two specialists at CEOP analyzed 10,000 keyword searches from three separate days to determine whether they contained references to child pornography. About one in every 100 searches was for such material, and about 1.6 percent of search results received contained such material. Because of the size of the Gnutella network, which had a population of 1.81 million users that year, thousands of child-pornography related searches are being conducted every minute. For comparison, ICE arrests about 2,500 child predators in the U.S. per year.
Replies
Native Hawaiian women and the likes are the most stupid people in the world when it comes to pedophiles on Hawaiian children.
One knows this only too well, how stupid native Hawaiian women are. Pedophiles are numerous in the Hawaiian communities. Chat rooms are the dirty closets for these addictions! When native Hawaiian women and their affiliates tap into this source they become partners!
There is nothing of value, except maybe evil, but the native Hawaiian women care to protect children? Do they give a dam! Are they smart? NO!!!!
Native Hawaiian women have lowered themselves so deeply, I'm embarrased and pist off with them when they open their mouths about major world issues as their cover for the dirty boys club. There is no protection on Maoliworld from these sick psycho paths!
One needs to learn how they work with codes, in chat rooms, and native Hawaiian women in partnership!
Chapter 5 Summary:
Chapter five revolves around the remainder of Sunday morning following Tom's schooling, specifically with the morning sermon. The whole town is in attendance: Aunt Polly, Sid, Mary, Tom; the widow Douglas; Mayor and Mrs. Ward; lawyer Riverson; and a variety of other characters that remain nameless, such as the town belle, matrons, and young clerks. The church is bustling with noise as the minister begins his hymn, and Twain remarks that there was never "a church choir that was not ill-bred."
After the hymn and notices of meetings and societies have been read, the minister begins a prayer that seems excessive, or as Twain puts it: "a good, generous, prayer." The prayer pleads for the church, for the "children of the church," for the state to the President, for the "poor sailors" to the "Oriental despotisms," and continues on in this manner until a final "Amen" concludes it. Much like the prayer, the remainder of church is barely endured by Tom Sawyer, who counts the pages of the sermon but fails to listen to any of it. Tom's attentions, instead, focus on the antics of a poodle playing with a beetle. The poodle, eventually, sits on the beetle and disrupts the sermon with its distressful howling and barking, bringing the entire congregation to stifled laughter. After the chaotic disruption, the sermon continues and Sunday services conclude.
Chapter 5 Analysis:
The first idea that Twain establishes in chapter five is the centrality of the Church to the town of St. Petersburg. On Sunday morning, all of the town's "respected" inhabitants attend the Church; it is as much a social function as it is a religious one. The town of St. Petersburg is small, poor, and quiet; the church, with its cracked church bell that resounds through the town, becomes a quintessential symbol of small-town life.
Ironically, it is this quality of small-town life the centrality of the church that Twain satirizes throughout the entire novel. The minister is described as unnecessarily long-winded. The subject of his sermon is never given any importance; instead, Twain focuses on his speech and mannerisms, describing his sentences as a plunge "down from a spring-board." Even the prayer seems to drag on forever, with the minister sending his prayers out to anyone and everyone. Even the "sociables" are unable to stay attuned to the misters during his monotonous speech.
The antics between Tom, the dog, and the beetle provide comic relief to the church. What is most important, however, is the fact that the attendees pay more attention to the antics of the pinch-bug than they do to the speech given from the pulpit. When the church is "suffocating with suppressed laughter," Twain describes it as "unholy mirth." This dichotomy between the serious and the playful - the moral and the mischievous - parallels Tom's constant struggle between his need for adventure and his will to "be good."
Chapter 6 Summary:
On Monday morning, Tom finds himself in bed and wanting to avoid school that morning. Eagerly, he attempts to avoid school by "playing" sick, groaning and moaning enough to wake Sid, who is sleeping by his side. Once Aunt Polly comes to check on Tom's ailments, he tells her: "Oh Auntie, my sore toe's mortified." After Aunt Polly tells Tom to "shut up that nonsense," Tom then proceeds to tell her about his sore, loose tooth, hoping that maybe it will provide him with an excuse to skip school. Aunt Polly simply pulls out his tooth and sends Tom off to school without another word.
On his way to school, Tom stops to talk to Huckleberry Finn, the "juvenile pariah" of the town admired by all children for his aloofness and hated by all mothers for his bad manners. He comes and goes as he pleases, an orphan of-sorts who doesn't have the duty of going to school or completing chores. Huckleberry is dressed in cast-off clothes: a wide-brimmed hat, trousers with only one-suspender, baggy pants, and a worn coat. Tom, who was forbidden to play with Huck, begins to discuss the correct way to cure warts; Huck, who holds a dead cat in a burlap sack, is planning on entering a cemetery at midnight to perform a witch's ritual to cure warts. Both boys discuss the merits of various superstitions and strange chants before they agree to meet later that night to go to the cemetery together.
After trading his tooth for a tick and saying goodbye to Huck, Tom races to school. Knowing that his punishment for tardiness will be to sit on the girls' section of the schoolhouse, Tom explains his lateness by saying he stopped to talk with Huckleberry Finn, for the only vacant girls seat was next to the blonde, pig-tailed girl that Tom has fallen in love with: Becky Thatcher. After a period of flirtatious exhibition, Tom writes "I love you" on his slate, which is returned with Becky's pleasure. The two agree to stay at school for dinner so that Tom can teach Becky how to draw. The remaining time spent in class is futile, for Tom has not studied and makes errors in every area of his studies: geography, spelling, and reading.
Chapter 6 Analysis:
Here the reader is introduced to Huckleberry Finn, one of Tom Sawyer's most trusted confidants as well as what Twain calls "the juvenile pariah of the village." The son of the town drunkard, Huck abides by no authority and is envied by all of the "respectable boys" of St. Petersburg: Huck is free. The epitome of childhood and mischief, Huck lives under different social standards than other citizens: he doesn't attend church regularly, never goes to school, wears hand-me-down rags rather than Sunday school suits, and smokes a pipe. But rather than depict him as the social outcast that he was, Twain describes Huck in an almost glorified manner (Huck becomes the central figure in one of the most infamous American literary works of all time: The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn). "In a word," writes the author," everything that goes to make life precious, that boy had." According to Twain, Huck lives life to the fullest by discarding the nonsense and conformity imposed by the "sociables" of St. Petersburg.
Huck's different standard of living is exemplified by the way in which he and Tom discuss their various rituals and superstitions. Both Tom and Huck are believers of the mysterious. They believe in witches' spells, bad luck, and try to cure everyday ailments like warts by performing strange incantations. No matter how far-fetched their ideas sound, Tom and Huck discuss their secret rituals and chants with the utmost seriousness. In one sense, their belief in the unbelievable reflects their impressionability and naiveté. The two boys still think and act with a kind of immaturity, and this scene seems to remind the reader that Tom and Huck are, after all, just children.
On a more satirical level, parallels can be drawn between the superstitions of the boys and the religious beliefs of the Church. To Twain, both are "hodge-podge" and neither is believable. This connection implies that characters, such as Aunt Polly, who are portrayed as religious are just as naïve as children. Between chapter six and the previous chapters, the reader can draw the conclusion that Twain was highly critical of the Christian faith. According to biographers, Twain himself never accepted the Bible as a guide to spiritual salvation and regarded much of the organized religion as "ignorance and superstition" (Long 178).
Chapter 7 Summary:
Until dinner, Tom is restless and school and amuses himself by playing with the tick Huckleberry traded him. After a short time, Tom and "bosom friend" Joe Harper begin to fight over who is allowed to play with the tick, disrupting the classroom with a fistfight and attracting the attention of the schoolmaster. Finally noon comes, and Tom meets Becky in the empty schoolhouse after all the other pupils have gone home for dinner.
After discussing rats, chewing gum, and circuses, Tom asks Becky if she would like to be engaged to him; his definition of engagement is simply telling "a boy you won't ever have anybody but him" and then sealing it with a kiss. After whispering, "I love you" in each other's ears, the bashful Becky and Tom kiss. Inadvertently in his giddiness, Tom blunders that he was previously "engaged" to Amy Lawrence. After learning this, Becky rejects Tom and breaks into tears despite Tom's pleading. Tom attempts to win her over again by giving her his most prized possession brass drawer-knob but she throws it at the ground in anger. Heartbroken and enraged, Tom marches out of the schoolhouse. After realizing that Tom has left, Becky calls after him but is too late.