“Rent-Seeking Consultants, Inc.,” a subsidiary of the Strategies and Tactics to Annoy Neighbors (SATAN) Group, is pleased to announce its latest product for clients looking to exploit well-intentioned regulation to serve their own ends. Our new report, “Raising Rivals’ Costs Using the GDPR: A Strategic Guide to Thwarting Competition, Expanding Market Share & Enhancing Profits with Minimal Effort,” is available for immediate download for just $1,999 (discounted to just $999 for our loyal “Dante’s Ninth Circle” club members).

Over the last three decades, our experts at Rent-Seeking Consultants have dedicated themselves to the mission of advancing narrow interests at the expense of public welfare. We have done so by creatively exploiting laws and regulations that — while often implemented with the very best of intentions in mind — we recognized could be converted into a tool to advantage the few at the expense of the many.

Our motto: Where others see good intentions, we see good opportunities!

Our “Raising Rivals’ Costs Using the GDPR” report continues our latest line of new products, which aim to take Europe’s bold new privacy regulatory regime and convert it into a rent-seeker’s paradise. Our previous report outlined, “How to Pretend Compliance Costs Will Destroy Your Big Company, While Also Letting Your Shareholders Know It is Actually an Amazing Way to Crush the Competition.”

In our new report, we discuss how to weaponize the GDPR complaint process to your advantage. In this regard, some crowd-sourced efforts already exist, such as the “Ship Your Enemies GDPR” website. The site helps you take advantage of GDPR’s legal requirements by forcing rival firms to respond to as many frivolous claims as you can send their way. “We’ll help you send them a GDPR Data Access Request designed to waste as much of their time as possible,” the site notes.

More recently, angry gamers took to Reddit to devise a plan to use GDPR to harass gaming giant Blizzard. Fans were mad that Blizzard had kowtowed to the Chinese government by suspending a professional gamer who had voiced support for Hong Kong protestors. In essence, the Reddit protestors hope to use the GDPR to generate the equivalent of a DDOS attack on a company through massive, coordinated data requests. Brilliant!

We admire the spirit of these ingenious initiatives, but we aim to more fully capture the value associated with them for our clients using concerted manipulation of whatever political levers we can help you pull. How? Weaponizing complaint processes is a tactic that Rent-Seeking Consultants, Inc. has used effectively in the past. When a small handful of censorial-minded folks wanted to get the Federal Communications Commission to beef up fines and penalties for broadcast “indecency,” we helped them stuff the ballot box at the agency with form letters and fake complaints to make regulators believe the public was clamoring for greater censorship, when it reality it was just serving a very small group of people who wanted a heckler’s veto over broadcast programming. We tied those broadcasters up in courts for years with these tactics! Meanwhile, the new media operators we also represented were able to race ahead with whatever content they wanted to post on their platforms. Victory!

This led to the creation of our Scaring Consumers Really Effectively While Earning Money (SCREWEM) initiative, which eventually won the prestigious Lobbying Award for Manipulating Effectively (LAME) Award in the “Creating Needless Panic” category. Our latest report highlights how we can use that same SCREWEM system to whip up serious privacy-related troubles for your rivals using the GDPR complaint process — all while pretending that this is all in the public interest.

We hope you will consider ordering our new report, and please let us know what we can do to help our trusted clients take advantage of well-intentioned regulation to undermine the public good on an ongoing basis. Finally, with California set to impose costly new privacy mandates extraterritorially on the entire nation, you can count on us being in touch again soon about exciting new opportunities for raising rivals’ costs using the machinery of the State.

Sincerely,

I.M. Prehensile Director of Strategic Political Exploits for S.A.T.A.N.

[This has been an act of satire, but the unintended consequences of GDPR are quite real. For some hard facts about what GDPR has meant in practice, see: Alec Stapp, “ GDPR after One Year: Costs and Unintended Consequences ,” and Eline Chivot and Daniel Castro, “ What the Evidence Shows About the Impact of the GDPR After One Year .” More generally, see: “Tech Policy, Unintended Consequences & the Failure of Good Intentions.”]

In recent essays and papers, I have discussed the growth of “innovation arbitrage,” which I defined as, “The movement of ideas, innovations, or operations to those jurisdictions that provide a legal and regulatory environment more hospitable to entrepreneurial activity.” A new Economist article about “Why startups are leaving Silicon Valley,” discusses innovation arbitrage without calling it such. The article notes that, for a variety of reasons, Valley innovators and investors are looking elsewhere to set up shop or put money into new ventures. The article continues:

Other cities are rising in relative importance as a result. The Kauffman Foundation, a non-profit group that tracks entrepreneurship, now ranks the Miami-Fort Lauderdale area first for startup activity in America, based on the density of startups and new entrepreneurs. Mr Thiel is moving to Los Angeles, which has a vibrant tech scene. Phoenix and Pittsburgh have become hubs for autonomous vehicles; New York for media startups; London for fintech; Shenzhen for hardware. None of these places can match the Valley on its own; between them, they point to a world in which innovation is more distributed. If great ideas can bubble up in more places, that has to be welcome. There are some reasons to think the playing-field for innovation is indeed being levelled up. Capital is becoming more widely available to bright sparks everywhere: tech investors increasingly trawl the world, not just California, for hot ideas. There is less reason than ever for a single region to be the epicentre of technology. Thanks to the tools that the Valley’s own firms have produced, from smartphones to video calls to messaging apps, teams can work effectively from different offices and places.

That’s the power of innovation arbitrage at work. Alas, the Economist article ends on a sour note, arguing that “innovation everywhere is becoming harder” because tech firms are becoming too big and anti-immigrant policies (especially in the US) are turning away some of the best and brightest minds. The latter is a real problem and one that is of the Trump Administration’s own making. By turning away the next generation of exciting innovators and limiting exciting start-up opportunities, America is shooting itself in the foot by undermining competitiveness and our competitive advantage among nations more generally. Which speaks to the first point made in the Economist article: If we want more competition to the big dogs, we need a lot more puppies. We’re not going to get them with backwards immigration policies. But nor will we get them by hobbling the biggest tech innovators. We shouldn’t be punishing success; we should be praising it.

We should recall Joseph Schumpeter’s essential insights in this regard. First, never underestimate how, in his words, “an untried technological possibility” can usher in one wave of “creative destruction” after another. Many critics talk about today’s “tech titans” (like Google, Facebook, Apple, and Amazon) as if they have always stalked the land. In reality, if you jump back in time just 15 years, it was Microsoft, MySpace, AOL Time Warner, Blackberry, and Motorola which allegedly possessed unassailable market power. And then creative destruction rolled into town. It happened before and it can happen again.

Schumpeter’s second insight was even more crucial and closely linked to his first. As I described it in a previous essay:

[Schumpeter] explained that uneven entrepreneurial gains — even supranormal short-term profits — must be tolerated if innovation is to occur. Innovators will only take risks if they can expect the potential for big gains from it. Attempts to curtail those potential benefits through hasty regulatory interventions or antitrust threats will sap the entrepreneurial spirit from the marketplace, limit technological innovation, and diminish the possibility of greater market dynamism and consumer choice over the long-haul. “In this respect,” Schumpeter concluded, “perfect competition is not only impossible but inferior,” precisely because it would sabotage “the most powerful engine of that progress … those entrepreneurial profits which are the prizes offered by capitalist society to the successful innovator.”

Thus, if you want still more disruptive innovation and creative destruction, you absolutely cannot sabotage entrepreneurs by eliminating the quest for the prize of profitability. Innovators need to know that when they take big risks, big rewards are possible. If they see innovative acts punished, they will look elsewhere. Indeed, that’s one reason that innovation arbitrage happens with increasing regularity today.

That doesn’t mean we throw out antitrust law entirely. There can still be circumstances where market power is abused and needs to be addressed, but simply making big profits does not automatically qualify as an abuse of consumer welfare.

Every once and awhile it’s worth taking a step back and looking at the long view of how Internet policy developments have unfolded and consider where they might be heading next.  We’ve reached such a moment as it pertains to efforts to police the Internet for copyright piracy, objectionable online content, privacy violations, and cybersecurity.  We’re at an interesting crossroads in this regard since the prospects for successful cracking down on copyright piracy and pornography appear grim.  Seemingly every effort that has been tried has failed.  The Net is awash in online porn and pirated content.  I am not expressing a normative position on this, rather, I’m just stating what now seems to be commonly accepted fact.

In the meantime, the United States is in the process of creating new information control regimes and this time its access to personal information and cybersecurity that are the focus of regulatory efforts.  The goal of the privacy-related regulatory efforts is to help Netizens better protect their privacy in online environments and stop the “arms race” of escalating technological capabilities.  The goal of cybersecurity efforts is to make digital networks and systems more secure or, more profoundly as we see in the Wikileaks case, it is to bottle up state secrets.

These efforts are also likely to fail.  Simply stated, it’s a nightmare to bottle-up information once it’s out there.  It doesn’t make a difference if that information we are seeking to control is copyrighted content, hate speech, dirty pictures, defamatory speech, secret diplomatic cables, or personal information.  Information is the blood that runs through the veins of the Internet and once it’s out it is pretty much Game Over. Commenting on the recent Wikileaks debacle over the release of diplomatic cables, Wall Street Journal columnist Daniel Henninger noted that “There is one certain fix for the WikiLeaks problem: Blow up the Internet. Short of that, there is no obvious answer.”  The same thing is increasingly true for these other types of information flows.

Now That’s A Lot of Information

As I pointed out in my recent essay, “Privacy as an Information Control Regime,” efforts to control information today are greatly complicated by problems associated with (1) convergence, (2) scale, (3) volume, and (4) unprecedented individual empowerment / user-generation of content.  It’s the volume problem that I want to spend a bit of time on here today.

As I noted in that previous essay, the sheer volume of media and communications activity taking place today greatly complicates regulatory efforts. In simple terms, there is just too much stuff for policymakers to police today relative to the past.

Let’s put some hard numbers on this problem.  IDC’s 2009 report, “The Digital Universe Ahead — Are You Ready?” provides the following snapshot of the data deluge:

• Last year, despite the global recession, the Digital Universe set a record.  It grew by 62% to nearly 800,000 petabytes.  A petabyte is a million gigabytes.  Picture a stack of DVDs reaching from the earth to the moon and back.
• This year, the Digital Universe will grow almost as fast to 1.2 million petabytes, or 1.2 zettabytes.
• This explosive growth means that by 2020, our Digital Universe will be 44 TIMES AS BIG as it was in 2009.  Our stack of DVDs would now reach halfway to Mars.

And here’s a little something from the Global Information Industry Center’s report on “How Much Information?”:

In 2008, Americans consumed information for about 1.3 trillion hours, an average of almost 12 hours per day. Consumption totaled 3.6 zettabytes and 10,845 trillion words, corresponding to 100,500 words and 34 gigabytes for an average person on an average day. A zettabyte is 10 to the 21st power bytes, a million million gigabytes. These estimates are from an analysis of more than 20 different sources of information, from very old (newspapers and books) to very new (portable computer games, satellite radio, and Internet video). Information at work is not included.

(How about that caveat: information at work is not included!!)

To put all these petabytes and zettabytes in some context, here’s a chart that appeared in an Economist essay back in February entitled, “All Too Much: Monstrous Amounts of Data“:

These are mind-boggling numbers.  As the Economist chart suggests, it’s hard to even fathom what “yottabytes” entails, but that’s what’s next.

Anyway, let’s return to the privacy wars and think about the volume problem in that context. Today we’re hearing proposals to regulate online services (advertising networks) or software (web browsers) to clamp down on the flow of information.  The so-called “Do Not Track” mechanism is one potential solution that has been floated in the regard.

This reminds me of the illusive search for a “simple fix” or silver-bullet solution to online pornography.  The PICS /ICRA experience is instructive in this regard. That would be the W3C’s Platform for Internet Content Selection and Internet Content Rating Association.  For a time, there was hope that voluntary metadata tagging and content labeling could be used to screen objectionable content on the Internet.  But the sheer volume of material to be dealt with made that task almost impossible.  The effort has been abandoned now.  Of course, it’s true that effort didn’t have a government mandate behind it to encourage more widespread adoption, but even if it would have, does anyone really think all porn or other objectionable content would have been labeled and screened?

Similar problems await information control efforts in the privacy realm, even if a mandated Do Not Track mechanism required the re-engineering of web browser architecture.  Those who think Do Not Track would slow the “arms race” in this arena are kidding themselves.  If anything, a Do Not Track mandate will speed up that arms race.  Take a look at how well The CAN SPAM Act worked in practice if you want another example.

Selective Morality

Now, let’s pretend for a moment that I am wrong about all this in the privacy space and that the FTC and Congress somehow find a workable mechanism to control flows of personal information and can clamp down accordingly.   Again, I don’t believe it will happen, but if it did, doesn’t that mean it’s equally likely that the same mechanism would be used to crack down on speech, expression, copyrighted content, state information flows, or whatever else?

Perhaps that’s not a bad thing from your perspective, but what I find entertaining about this debate is how the folks who support an aggressive information control regime for privacy purposes generally also oppose  information control efforts as it pertains to speech, expression, copyright, or state secrets.  There’s a bit of selective morality at play here.  When it comes to personal information, the attitude seems to be that we must ‘pay any price, bear any burden,’ even going so far as to property-tize personal information flows.  In every other case, however, the attitude seems to be: Let information flow.

Regardless of one’s disposition on these matters, my point here is more simple: the information will flow.  Indeed, I think it is safe to say that there is a strong and growing negative correlation between the aggregate volume of data flowing across digital networks and the ability of policymakers to control those information flows. The recent Wikileaks release has made that new fact of life more evident to the world, but the ongoing IP wars might also hold some lessons for us in this regard.

Consider the thoughts of Sydney-based consultant Mark Pesce, who compares the two experiences.  He writes:

We’ve been here before.  This is 1999, the company is Napster, and the angry party is the recording industry.  It took them a while to strangle the beast, but they did finally manage to choke all the life out of it – for all the good it did them.  Within days after the death of Napster, Gnutella came around, and righted all the wrongs of Napster: decentralized where Napster was centralized; pervasive and increasingly invisible.  Gnutella created the ‘darknet’ for filesharing which has permanently crippled the recording and film industries.  The failure of Napster was the blueprint for Gnutella. In exactly the same way – note for note – the failures of Wikileaks provide the blueprint for the systems which will follow it, and which will permanently leave the state and its actors neutered.

And it is likely a blueprint for what will happen in the privacy arena as well.

Conclusion

Again, I want to be clear that the point of this essay has not been to endorse or celebrate copyright piracy, widespread porn, privacy violations, release of state secrets, etc.  We’ll all have differences of opinions on these matters.  But there’s simply no getting around the fact that all these problems are all likely here to stay and, barring extreme crackdowns, it’s very hard for me to imagine how government might reverse that tide.

In the extreme, I suppose we could follow the Chinese mode and firewall off digital networks, effectively nationalize ISPs, and then pay citizens to inform on each other about various transgressions.  Or, we could impose punishing forms of liability on digital intermediaries — effectively deputizing online middlemen and making them servants of the State.  But such extreme solutions would have nightmarish ramifications for the future of the Internet and digital communications networks.  We have to ask ourselves how far we want to go to control information flows.

The Economist magazine has just released an important feature article entitled, “Sex Laws: Unjust and Ineffective.” In an indirect way, the article makes a point that I have been trying to get across in my work on this issue: If you want to keep your kids safe from real sex offenders, we need to scrap our current sex offender registries and completely rethink the way we define and punish sex offenses in this country.  That’s because, currently, a significant percentage of those people listed in sex offender registries pose almost no threat to children, making it difficult for us to know who really does pose a threat to our kids and what we should do about them.

Simply stated, we’ve dumbed-down the notion of “sex crimes” in this country. As a nation, we have foolishly come to equate almost all sex offenses equally.  While sex offender registry laws vary from state to state, many basically say that that two teens caught engaging in consensual oral sex in high school belong on the same list alongside child rapists. That is insanity. And it leaves many in the public, especially parents, thinking that the whole world is full of predators lurking on every corner just waiting to snatch, rape, and kill their children. [ For the actual facts, see the appendix I have included down below: “Is America Suffering from a National Child Abduction Epidemic”?]  In reality, as The Economist feature story points out, the truth is quite different:

Every American state keeps a register of sex offenders. California has had one since 1947, but most states started theirs in the 1990s. Many people assume that anyone listed on a sex-offender registry must be a rapist or a child molester. But most states spread the net much more widely. A report by Sarah Tofte of Human Rights Watch, a pressure group, found that at least five states required men to register if they were caught visiting prostitutes. At least 13 required it for urinating in public (in two of which, only if a child was present). No fewer than 29 states required registration for teenagers who had consensual sex with another teenager. And 32 states registered flashers and streakers. Because so many offences require registration, the number of registered sex offenders in America has exploded. As of December last year, there were 674,000 of them, according to the National Centre for Missing and Exploited Children. If they were all crammed into a single state, it would be more populous than Wyoming, Vermont or North Dakota. As a share of its population, America registers more than four times as many people as Britain, which is unusually harsh on sex offenders. America’s registers keep swelling, not least because in 17 states, registration is for life.

Georgia has more than 17,000 registered sex offenders. Some are highly dangerous. But many are not. And it is fiendishly hard for anyone browsing the registry to tell the one from the other. The Georgia Sex Offender Registration Review Board, an official body, assessed a sample of offenders on the registry last year and concluded that 65% of them posed little threat. Another 30% were potentially threatening, and 5% were clearly dangerous. The board recommended that the first group be allowed to live and work wherever they liked. The second group could reasonably be barred from living or working in certain places, said the board, and the third group should be subject to tight restrictions and a lifetime of monitoring. A very small number “just over 100” are classified as “predators”, which means they have a compulsion to commit sex offences. When not in jail, predators must wear ankle bracelets that track where they are.

Let’s repeat a few key numbers here: 674,000 registered offenders, “more populous than Wyoming, Vermont or North Dakota.”  Those are the kind of numbers that send sensationalistic media outlets and average parents alike into a tizzy. Rarely does anyone stop to ask what those numbers mean or who these people are on the sex offender registries. But, as The Economist notes, when you dig below the surface and start taking a serious look at who these people are and what they have done to land on the list, a very different story emerges. We’re polluting these lists with petty offenders (flashers and streakers) and people who should have been dealt with in different ways (like teens who were caught in the act).

What about the real bad guys?  As the Georgia Review Board found, only 5% of those on their sex offender registry were “clearly dangerous” and “should be subject to tight restrictions and a lifetime of monitoring.”  These would be your true scum of the Earth; the sick fiends who really have preyed on children or raped repeatedly.  Here’s a question I want answered about these scum: Why do we need a sex offender registry for them at all? Why are they not behind bars for life?  Why don’t we cut off their privates!  I am deadly serious here.  If anyone raped one of my children, I would go after him and snip his manhood myself… slowly… with a dull, rusty blade.  Any yet we release these people to re-offend. And then we put them on a list. A list that had teens on it who made a stupid mistake in high school in the back of car and got caught. DOES THIS MAKE ANY DAMN SENSE???  (And yes, I am shouting when I use all caps!  Because I am sick and tired of this nonsense.)

Here is the sobering fact to consider: a 2003 Department of Justice study reported that the average sentence for child molesters was approximately seven years and, on average, they were released after serving just three of those seven years. That is an extremely troubling statistic. If you have young children in your home, it is even more upsetting. When our government is putting people who viciously hurt innocent children behind bars for just seven years and then letting them out after only three, then our government has failed us at a very fundamental level.

Worse yet, policymakers then point fingers at everyone else and scold Internet companies and ISPs for not doing enough to protect children from predators, all the while conveniently ignoring the government’s own failed policies that allow those predators to be on the streets and behind keyboards in the first place!  It is not “market failure” at work when child predators are lurking online; it is government failure in the extreme. We are never going to solve this problem until we hunt down the real bad guys and lock them up for a long, long time.

In the meantime, however, as Lenore Skenazy argues, parents might want to just “burn your sex offender maps” because they instill a sense of dread and panic in us about the world around us based simply on the large number of people on them — even though they tell you little about who is an actual threat to your child.  I have parents in my neighborhood who tell me they won’t let their kids ride their bike down the sidewalks in our very safe and fairly affluent neighborhood in McLean, Virgina because they have heard there are sex offenders in the area. I ask them if they have ever examined those “offenders” to see what they are on the list for.  They haven’t bothered.  I have.  Not one of the sex offenders in my area had anything to with sex crimes against children.  Strangely, most of the sex offenders in my area are listed as just  being convicted of “sodomy.”  I always wonder, was that consensual sodomy that occurred when it was still a crime in Virginia? (That is, before the Supreme Court struck down such laws in the 2003 case of Lawrence v. Texas). If so, that’s not a crime in my book and those people do not belong on any sex offender list.  Of course, if it was actual rape, that’s a very serious crime and it deserves conviction. Either way, these are not sex crimes against children even though that’s the impression many parents have when parents see or hear about these sex offender registries.  So, when only a small percentage of those on the lists are the ones we truly need to fear (the child molesters and rapists), isn’t there a better solution? Like: LOCK THEM UP AND THROW AWAY THE KEY!  Or, if we are not going to do that, at least create a separate registry for these more serious offenders. Call it the “Scum of the Earth List” and make these people were bright neon monitoring bracelets and anklets so we can see them.

At a minimum, we need follow the advice Human Rights Watch has set forth, as The Economist summarizes:

Human Rights Watch urges America to scale back its sex-offender registries. Those convicted of minor, non-violent offences should not be required to register, says Ms Tofte. Nor should juveniles. Sex offenders should be individually assessed, and only those judged likely to rape someone or abuse a child should be registered. Such decisions should be regularly reviewed and offenders who are rehabilitated (or who grow too old to reoffend) should be removed from the registry. The information on sex-offender registries should be held by the police, not published online, says Ms Tofte, and released “on a need-to-know basis”. Blanket bans on all sex offenders living and working in certain areas should be abolished. Instead, it makes sense for the most dangerous offenders sometimes to face tailored restrictions as a condition of parole.

To clarify my own views: I think lists of serious sex offenders (again, if we aren’t locking them up for longer periods) should be made public, but the lesser offenses (like cases of consensual teen sex in high school) should be kept private so it doesn’t stigmatize those people for life and drive the average public batty in the meantime.

We need to bring some sanity back to America’s sex laws.  And we need to do if for the children. Our kids are not going to be safer (or saner) by artificially inflating sex offender rolls with people who don’t belong on the list in the first place.  That just leads to fear, confusion, and a misplaced sense of justice. We need to punish the true scum more aggressively, and then find more sensible approaches to deal with others.  And let’s get out of the business of putting teenagers on these lists altogether.  That’s just nuts.

A final reason I care deeply about setting things right on this front is because concerns about online child safety — and overblown fears about child predators in particular — are leading to many calls for increased Internet regulation. Down below, I have pasted in an excerpt from my “Parental Controls & Online Child Protection” report in which I explain why this “technopanic” mentality about kids and the Internet is unwarranted.

Appendix: Is America Suffering from a National Child Abduction Epidemic? [ excerpt from “Parental Controls & Online Child Protection,” by Adam Thierer, PFF, ver. 4.0, 2009.]

Debates about online child safety are often driven by fear — fear of bad guys lurking online and waiting to snatch up our children. Indeed, there have been a handful of highly publicized cases of minors being contacted and later abducted or abused by child predators on social networking sites.[1] Such cases do not mean that a national epidemic of Internet-related child abductions is occurring, however. The reality is quite different. As Internet safety expert Larry Magid has noted:

Contrary to what some people might imply, most kids who become victims of online sex predators are not abducted. They are lured after being groomed by their predators. And, though any case is tragic, the fact is that such crimes are relatively rare considering the millions of children and teens that go online every day. Despite thousands of arrests of would-be predators caught up in sting operations, tragic cases like this don’t appear to occur very often.[2]

Indeed, generally speaking, abductions by strangers “represent an extremely small portion of all missing children [cases].”  That conclusion was a central finding of the 2002 National Incidence Studies of Missing, Abducted, Runaway, and Thrownaway Children (NISMART), a study conducted by the Department of Justice’s Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention.[3] Although the survey is several years old and suffers from some data and methodological deficiencies, it remains the most comprehensive survey of missing and abducted children in the United States.

The NISMART survey broke down juvenile abductions into two categories—family versus non-family. It found that the vast majority of kidnapping victims were abducted by family, friends of the family, or people who had a close relationships with (or the trust of) the minors. Only 115 of the estimated 260,000 abductions—or less than a tenth of a percent—fit the stereotypical abduction scenario that parents most fear: complete strangers snatching children and transporting them miles away.[4] And Lenore Skenazy, author of Free-Range Kids: Giving Our Children the Freedom We Had Without Going Nuts with Worry, notes that, “the chances of any one American child being kidnapped and killed by a stranger are almost infinitesimally small: .00007 percent.”[5]

Despite those findings, public policy debates and media reports remain preoccupied with the horror stories about abductions by random strangers, leaving the impression that the problem is much larger than the more serious issues of family or acquaintance abductions.[6]

Research has shown that this conclusion is also true of child abuse and sex offenders in general, not just abductions. As psychologist Anna C. Salter, author of Predators: Pedophiles, Rapists, and Other Sex Offenders, points out, “[Sex offenders] are part of our communities, part of our network of friends, worse yet, sometimes part of our families.”[7] And former FBI special agent Kenneth V. Lanning, author of Child Molesters: A Behavior Analysis, notes the following:

The often forgotten piece in the puzzle of the sexual victimization of children is acquaintance molestation. This seems to be the most difficult manifestation of the problem for society and the law to face. People seem more willing to accept a sinister stranger from a different location or father/stepfather from a different socioeconomic background as a child molester than a clergy member, next-door neighbor, law-enforcement officer, pediatrician, teacher, or volunteer with direct access to children. The acquaintance molester, by definition, is one of us. He is not just an external threat. We cannot easily distinguish him from us or identify him by physical traits. These kinds of molesters have always existed, but society and the criminal-justice system have been reluctant to accept the reality of these cases.[8]

Clearly, the problem of family and acquaintance abductions and sex abuse predated the rise of the Internet, and it will unlikely be diminished by age verification of minors on social networking websites or other websites. But the argument could be made that abductions by strangers — while exceedingly rare — could be reduced even further by age-verifying minors or adults before they enter certain sites.

This potential reduction may be true, but it is important to remember that predators can’t magically reach through a computer screen and grab our kids. Predators must meet them somewhere in the physical world (i.e., a mall, park, playground, etc.). The danger of the Internet is that it allows predators to groom minors over a protracted period, while doing so from a distance. However, the fact that they are doing so from a distance—and over electronic communications networks, no less—means we have actually gained some important advantages in our effort to combat child predation. Many of the predators leave digital tracks for us to follow. Thus, to the extent that disturbing things are happening online or being facilitated by the Internet in any fashion, at least there is a digital record of those activities or crimes. The electronic tracks have made it easier to recover children or to track perpetrators on many occasions.[9]

Of course, digital records have also made it easier to catch minors engaging in foolish behavior after they post information or photos about their actions online.[10] In past generations, parents often warned their kids to behave themselves in public or else “it will go down on your permanent record.” It was largely just a scare tactic, because there really was no permanent record of the mundane activities of youth. Today, however—for better or for worse—the Internet is becoming “your permanent record.” No doubt, this raises some serious, long-term privacy concerns, but the one positive aspect is that the existence of electronic records makes it easier for parents, website operators, or law enforcement officials to deal with online troublemakers of all varieties.[11] That is why education is essential to make sure both kids and their parents understand that serious consequences are associated with what they post online.

[2] Larry Magid, Abductions by Online Predators Rare, San Jose Mercury News, Oct. 22, 2007,  www.connectsafely.org/articles–advice/commentaries—staff/abduction-by-online-predators-rare.html

[3] Andrea J. Sedlak, David Finkelhor, Heather Hammer, and Dana J. Schultz, National Estimate of Missing Children: An Overview, National Incidence Studies of Missing, Abducted, Runaway, and Thrownaway Children (NISMART), Oct. 2002, at 7,    www.missingkids.com/en_US/documents/nismart2_overview.pdf

[4] A recent study of cases about missing children in Ohio revealed a similar trend. Of the 11,074 documented missing child cases in 2005, only five involved abduction by strangers compared with 146 abductions by family members. Ohio Missing Children Clearinghouse, 2005 Annual Report, at 4; www.ag.state.oh.us/victim/pubs/2005ann_rept_mcc.pdf

[5] Lenore Skenazy, Free-Range Kids: Giving Our Children the Freedom We Had Without Going Nuts with Worry (San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass, 2009), at 16.

[6] Indeed, one recent study suggests that perception has replaced reality in the minds of many in the press and general public, who have increasingly come to believe that stranger abductions account for most missing child incidents. A 2006 analysis of New York Times articles about kidnappings, by Glenn W. Muschert, Melissa Young-Spillers, & Dawn Carr in the Justice Policy Journal, argued that “the Times disproportionately focuses on stereotypical kidnapping incidents, while social science data suggest that familial abductions are far more prevalent.” And abduction estimates made by some activists were also “highly exaggerated,” they found. Unsurprisingly, for those reasons, the authors note that various public opinion polls have revealed that most people believed that abductions by strangers accounted for most missing child cases even though the exact opposite was true. Glenn W. Muschert, Melissa Young-Spillers, & Dawn Carr, 3 Justice Policy Journal, No. 2, Fall 2006, at 4-6.

[7] “Sex offenders only very rarely sneak into a house in the middle of the night. More often they come through the front door in the day, as friends and neighbors, as Boy Scout leaders, priests, principals, teachers, doctors, and coaches. They are invited into our homes time after time, and we give them permission to take our children on the overnight camping trip, the basketball game, or down to the Salvation Army post for youth activities.” Anna C. Salter, Predators: Pedophiles, Rapists, and Other Sex Offenders (New York: Basic Books, 2003), at 5, 76.

[8] Kenneth V. Lanning, National Center for Missing & Exploited Children, Child Molesters: A Behavior Analysis, 2001, www.missingkids.com/missingkids/servlet/ResourceServlet?LanguageCountry=en_US&Pageid=469

[9] See Mark Sherman, Chat Rooms Help FBI Hunt for Pedophiles, USA Today, May 15, 2006, www.usatoday.com/tech/news/2006-05-15-fbi-chat-rooms_x.htm

[10] Wendy Davis, Teens’ Online Postings Are New Tool for Police, Boston Globe, May 15, 2006, www.boston.com/news/nation/articles/2006/05/15/teens_online_postings_are_new_tool_for_police; Andrew L. Wang, “Teen Blog Watch is On,” Chicago Tribune, May 23, 2006.

[11] Eric Tucker, Police Departments Turning to YouTube to Catch Suspects, Boston Globe, Feb. 24, 2007, www.boston.com/news/local/rhode_island/articles/2007/02/24/police_departments_turning_to_youtube_to_catch_suspects