Sen. Amy Klobuchar just released a letter to Facebook demanding the site require “a prominent safety button or link on the profile pages of users under the age of 18″—akin to the so-called “panic button” app launched earlier this week by the UK’s Child Exploitation & Online Protection Centre (CEOP). She doesn’t seem to realize that this app is available to all Facebook users, not just those in the UK. But her focus on empowerment tools and education is admirable, and it’s certainly a fair question to ask what sites like Facebook and MySpace are doing in these areas.

Unfortunately, Klobuchar’s letter also engages in blatant fear-mongering:

Recent research has shown that one in four American teenagers have been victims of a cyber predator.  And when teens experience abusive behavior online, only ten percent discuss it with their parents and even fewer report the misconduct to law enforcement.  It’s clear that teenagers need to know how to respond to a cyber attack and I believe we need stronger reporting mechanisms to keep our kids safe.

Klobuchar doesn’t actually cite anything, so it’s not clear what research she’s relying on. The 25% statistic is particularly incendiary, suggesting a nationwide cyber-predation crisis—perhaps leading the public to believe 8 or 9 million teens have been lured into sexual encounters offline. Perhaps the Senator considers every cyber-bully a cyber predator—which might get to the 25% number. But there are two serious problem with that moral equivalence.

First, to equate child predation with peer bullying is to engage in a dangerous game of defining deviancy down. Predation and bullying are radically different things. The first (sexual abuse) is a clear and heinous crime that can lead to long-term psychological damage. The second might be a crime in certain circumstances, but generally not.  And it is even less likely to be a crime when it occurs among young peers, which research shows constitutes the vast majority of cases. As Adam Thierer and I noted in our Congressional testimony last year, there are legitimate concerns about cyberbullying, but it’s something best dealt with by parents and schools rather than prosecutors (like Klobuchar in her pre-Senate career).

Second, a series of official taskforces have concluded that the cyberpredator technopanic is vastly overblown. NTIA’s Online Safety and Technology Working Group final 2010 report concluded that “several studies, including some funded by the U.S. Department of Justice, have shown that the statistical probability of a young person being physically harmed by an adult who they first met online is extremely low,” (OSTWG Report at 10-11). Harvard’s 2009 Berkman Center Internet Safety Technical Task Force report concluded:

cases [of adult to child sexual encounters on social networks] typically involved post-pubescent youth who were aware that they were meeting an adult male for the purpose of engaging in sexual activity…. the risk profile for the use of different genres of social media depends on the type of risk, common uses by minors, and the psychosocial makeup of minors who use them…. Youth identify most sexual solicitors as being other adolescents (48%; 43%) or young adults between the ages of 18 and 21 (20%; 30%) and that youth typically ignore or deflect solicitations without experiencing distress.

A number of other task force reports have reached similar conclusions, all agreeing that education and empowerment are the answer. In particular, a 2008 study found that use of popular social networking sites such as MySpace and Facebook does not appear to increase their risk of being victimized by online predators. In particular, the study noted that the 500 arrests made nation-wide for Internet-initiated sex crimes accounted for just 7% of all statutory rapes”—i.e., for adult-on minor sex.

The letter goes on to ask about Facebook’s Internet safety page (she could have just Googled “Facebook Safety” and found it and its wealth of resources) and whether Facebook has a report abuse system—see the “Report Abuse” button at the bottom of any profile, page or group, which produces this dialogue box for user profiles:

And this box for pages:

MySpace has similar reporting mechanisms (and this form) and resources for kids & parents. Both sites employ hundreds of people to respond to such requests, decide when to take down content, and when to bring in law enforcement—which is a pretty big commitment from sites that don’t charge users a penny.

If the good Senator or her staff had had Googled (or Binged) “Facebook safety advisory board,” she would have found a number of press releases about the group, which Facebook launched last December to interface with child safety experts.

Again, it’s a fair question whether Facebook could do even more than it’s already done. For example, the “report abuse” link could probably be moved to a more prominent location on the page. But with its incendiary rhetoric and easily answered questions, Klobuchar’s letter seems intended more to make headlines and score political points than to really move the ball forward on her stated objective, which we should all share: enhancing education and empowerment solutions. Playing fast and loose with the facts—and throwing more fuel on the fire of a technopanic in the process—is unwise and unconstructive.

On June 29th, The Progress & Freedom Foundation (PFF) and the Family Online Safety Institute (FOSI) will co-host a National Press Club briefing entitled “Sending an Online Safety Message to Congress.” This event will feature a discussion about the recently released report of the Online Safety and Technology Working Group (OSTWG), “Youth Safety on a Living Internet.”  OSTWG — a congressionally-mandated blue ribbon working group — analyzed the state of online child safety and offered policymakers and parents a wide array of recommendations for how to keep kids safe and secure in today’s “always-on,” interconnected world. [For more background on OSTWG and our final report, see this post.]  Several OSTWG leaders will be on hand to discuss the report and outline the next steps that need to be taken on this front. Here are the details.

To Register: Space is limited, so an RSVP is required to attend. Please register here.

The Online Safety and Technology Working Group (OSTWG) has just released its final report to Congress entitled, “Youth Safety on a Living Internet.”  As I mentioned here last year, this government task force was established by the “Protecting Children in the 21st Century Act,” (part of the ‘‘Broadband Data Improvement Act’,’ Pub. L. No. 110-385) and its mission was to review and evaluate:

• The status of industry efforts to promote online safety through educational efforts, parental control technology, blocking and filtering software, age-appropriate labels for content or other technologies or initiatives designed to promote a safe online environment for children;
• The status of industry efforts to promote online safety among providers of electronic communications services and remote computing services by reporting apparent child pornography, including any obstacles to such reporting;
• The practices of electronic communications service providers and remote computing service providers related to record retention in connection with crimes against children; and,
• The development of technologies to help parents shield their children from inappropriate material on the Internet.

The task force included over 30 experts from academia, industry, advocacy groups, and think tanks. It was my great honor to be a member of OSTWG and to serve as the chair of 1 of the 4 subcommittees. The four subcommittees addressed: data retention, child pornography reporting, educational efforts, and parental controls technologies. I chaired that last subcommittee on parental controls.

Our conclusions will not be surprising to those who have read previous online safety task force reports, which I have summarized in 2009 white paper, “Five Online Safety Task Forces Agree: Education, Empowerment & Self-Regulation Are the Answer.”  Generally speaking, we concluded that there is no silver-bullet technical solution to online child safety concerns. Instead – and again in agreement with previous research and task force reports – we have concluded that a diverse toolbox and a “layered approach” must be brought to bear on these problems and concerns. Here’s how we put it in the report:

• There’s no one-size-fits-all, once-and-for-all solution to providing children with every aspect of online child safety. Rather, it takes a comprehensive “toolbox” from which parents, educators, and other safety providers can choose tools appropriate to children’s developmental stages and life circumstances, as they grow. That toolbox needs to include safety education, “parental control” technologies such as filtering and monitoring, safety features on connected devices and in online services, media ratings, family and school policy, and government policy. In essence, any solution to online safety must be holistic in nature and multi-dimensional in breadth.
• To youth, social media and technologies are not something extra added on to their lives; they’re embedded in their lives. Their offline and online lives have converged into one life. They are socializing in various environments, using various digital and real-life “tools,” from face-to-face gatherings to cell phones to social network sites, to name just a few.
• Because the Internet is increasingly user-driven, with its “content” changing in real-time, users are increasingly stakeholders in their own well-being online. Their own behavior online can lead to a full range of experiences, from positive ones to victimization, pointing to the increasingly important role of safety education for children as well as their caregivers. The focus of future task forces therefore needs to be as much on protective education as on protective technology.
• The Internet is, in effect, a “living thing,” its content a constantly changing reflection not only of a constantly changing humanity but also its individual and collective publications, productions, thoughts, behaviors, and sociality.

I encourage everyone to check out the entire report, which I have also embedded down below. I very much hope policymakers will heed the advice found in this and the previous task force reports, which have uniformly found that only such a layered, multi-dimensional approach to online child safety can be effective. The three key prongs to that strategy — or what I call the “3-E Strategy” — are education, empowerment and law enforcement efforts.

Importantly, OSTWG accomplished our charge without resorting to the “moral panic” tone that some have adopted when approaching these issues and concerns. While there are serious challenges and concerns surrounding discussions about child safety, it’s important to acknowledge the important benefits of new media and communications technologies to us and our children. We have done so in this report.

We also were careful not to try to unsettle any settled First Amendment law. One of the most regrettable developments of the past 15 years is that so much time has been wasted passing and then litigating legislative and regulatory enactments that have been so clearly unconstitutional under the First Amendment. If the time and resources that were squandered in those legal skirmishes would have instead been plowed into education, empowerment, and enforcement-based efforts, it could have made a lasting difference.

More generally, we should always remember the sage advice offered by the Supreme Court in 2000: “Technology expands the capacity to choose; and it denies the potential of this revolution if we assume the Government is best positioned to make these choices for us.” OSTWG has charted a sensible way forward in the final report that should hopefully avoid those problems. It is my hope that policymakers take our findings and recommendations seriously and adopt the sort of constructive, practical approach we have outlined in this report.

Finally, I want to send out a big THANK YOU! to Hemanshu Nigam and Anne Collier, who very ably and patiently co-chaired the OSTWG. They did a terrific job herding a lot of cats and bringing this report to a successful completion. Well done Hemu and Anne!

Online Safety and Technology Working Group Final Report http://d1.scribdassets.com/ScribdViewer.swf

Today’s Online Safety Technical Working Group (OSTWG) meeting included some heated debate about whether online intermediaries should be doing more to assist law enforcement to help track down child predators and those producing and distributing child pornography. (It’s not clear whether or when NTIA will actually put the archived video or a transcript online at this point).

Most interesting was the third panel of the day (agenda), which devolved into a shouting match as Dr. Frank Kardasz (resume) of the Arizona Internet Crimes Against Children (ICAC) Task Force basically accused Internet intermediaries of being willing accomplices in crimes of sexual abuse against children—and suggested that they could be charged as co-defendants in child porn prosecutions. A few industry folks in the room expressed their outrage at such slander. A retired law enforcement officer perhaps put it best when he said that he had never dealt with an ISP that didn’t sincerely want to help law enforcement stop this monstrous crime.

Apart from those pyrotechnics, and a superb morning presentation by the Pew Internet Project’s Amanda Lenhart about “Social Media & Young Adults,” the most interesting part of the day concerned data retention mandates. Even as a debate rages in Washington about how much collection and use of online data should be permitted, Dr. Kardasz suggested online service providers should be required to hold user data for 5 years. A number of attendees noted the staggering costs of such a mandate given the sheer volume of information shared every day by use, especially for startups for whom building monitoring and compliance infrastructure can be a significant barrier to entry. Of course, practical objections are always answered with practical counter-solutions—in this case, several attendees asked why we couldn’t just provide tax incentives or stimulus money to defray such costs. One attendee joked that we’d have to devote the entire state of Montana just to house all the necessary server farms.

But the strongest objection came from John Morris of the Center for Democracy & Technology, who rightly noted that no amount of government subsidies for data retention could prevent leakage of sensitive private data. For this reason and because of the basic civil liberties at stake whenever the government has access to large pools of data about its citizens, Morris argued that we need to strike a balance between how we protect children & the values of free society. Dave McClure of the US Internet Industry Association (USIIA) seconded this point powerfully: If such vast data is retained, it will be abused.

Then the riposte from advocates of data retention mandates: Aren’t online intermediaries already retaining huge amounts of consumer information? If they can do that, why can’t they retain the data we need to track down child predators and child porn distributors?

John Morris and the ACLU’s Chris Calabrese patiently explained just how different these two kinds of data retention really are. Advertisers don’t care who you are—just what you’re likely to be interested in. So it simply isn’t worth the cost for them to retain the massive logs of data tracking every site a user has been to and when, or even tying that information to an IP address. All the advertiser wants is to be able to correlate information about likely interests with a cookie that uniquely identifies a computer (which likely, but not necessarily, corresponds to a user). I couldn’t have explained this difference better myself!

They didn’t specifically get into this example, but even a company like Phorm, which offers behavioral advertising based on inspecting packets sent back and forth by an Internet user doesn’t actually retain the kind of “digital dossier” of a user’s browsing activity that some advocates of increased data regulation fear–or that law enforcement wants. Instead, Phorm examines certain kinds of pages visited by users (e.g., no HTTPS or email) and looks for keywords (excluding sensitive things like phone numbers, social security numbers and credit card numbers) that suggest the user might be interested in a particular marketing category. The data about where the user has visited is then discarded, leaving only the marketing categories matched to that user’s unique ID (e.g., dog-owner, fly-fisher).

So even when it comes to the much-feared “Deep Packet Inspection,”what advertisers want is profoundly different from the kind of data retention mandates proposed by Kardasz and others in law enforcement. Moreover, given the costs entailed in data storage and processing, the mere fact that something is theoretically possible doesn’t mean advertisers are willing to pay for it just to try to tell you about their product! That critical point has been missing from most of the ongoing conversation about regulating “targeted” advertising, which tend to focus on the theoretical possibility of a particular data collection/use/aggregation practice rather than whether it’s actually being done or even whether it would make economic sense to do so. So I’m glad to see John Morris and Chris Calabrese making these vital points.

I don’t mean to pull a “gotcha!” on them as representatives of two organizations that have also been outspoken in calling for restrictions on the private use of data (especially since I can’t do justice them by quoting them precisely here without a transcript of the event or the ability to go back and listen to this fascinating exchange again). I’m sure they would respond that the potential for abuse still exists when private companies collect data about users for advertising purposes: Some companies might collect so much data that it could be tied back to a particular user and cause actual harm if released, which is always a possibility. That would be a fair response, but it would at least place us in a constructive debate between reasonable people about the costs and benefits of data sharing and whether government regulation is really the best way to address privacy concerns.

The important point is that they recognize the difference in kind between the collection of limited amounts of data for advertising purposes and the kind of comprehensive data mandates proposed by Kardasz and others. If nothing else, that difference means that one can take a principled stance—as I do—against data retention mandates as a governmental invasion of our privacy but also in favor of reliance on user empowerment, education, targeted enforcement of existing laws, etc. as less restrictive alternatives to government regulation of private data use, just as with parental control and empowerment over parentalist censorship.  As Adam Thierer and I have argued, because there are significant costs to regulation for consumers, free speech and culture, any government mandates should be narrowly tailored to addressing real, demonstrable harms rather than vague, unsubstantiated fears or amorphous concepts like “dignity interests.”

The other critical part of our “layered approach” to privacy concerns is building a higher “Wall of Separation Between Web and State.” Concretely, that means opposing such onerous data retention mandates and reforming ECPA—a subject mentioned only at the end of today’s meeting. In the comments I filed recently on the Notice written by CDT for the FCC, I praised CDT’s work in this area and look forward to working with them (and the ACLU and groups like EFF) on that cause in the future, despite our differences on private data use regulation.

Emerson once said that we should do the thing we fear, and then death of fear is certain. Similarly, parents that fear their child’s use of technology can use technology themselves to monitor, filter and block their children’s Internet use.

I’m a member of the NTIA Online Safety and Technology Working Group (OSTWG) along with TLF’s Adam Thierer (Mr. President of PFF). Adam organized our third meeting was on parental controls, child protection technologies and content rating methods.  He organized a wealth of speakers to discuss tools available from ISPs, tools existing in operating systems, browsers, and search, and settings that exist in some social networking websites.

Here are the highlights:

• Safety experts praised AOL’s parental tools that don’t report to parents every site that a child visits. Child abuse, contraception, and other sites are the kinds that many people feel children have legitimate privacy (and in abusive situations even safety concerns for their lives) surrounding the sites they visit.
• A representative from the Department of Education asked about “best practices” — a good idea in concept but given the diversity of online sites and services easier said then done.
• It is common to categorize children into age groups for parental controls but there’s data lacking about how children understand advertising and what is the harm, if any.
• Age groups: 7 and below–white list only. 7-12–no white list only but lots of restrictions. 13-17–very permissive, lots of sites accessible. 17+–only porn images blocked.
• Google will soon be launching a national media digital literacy citizenship campaign.
• FTC will release its virtual worlds report on Dec 10. There is an OECD conference on e-commerce on Dec 8-10.
• “Report abuse” icons on websites are often themselves abused and result in false positives and false reporting. Uniform buttons won’t work.
• The FCC wants to know why the V-Chip uptake has not been greater and has been ineffective (can comment on the FCC’s NOI).
• Carrie James, a Harvard researcher, has a report that shows that a higher percentage of kids that play online video games are more ethical than their peers that do not (due to the community that’s created playing games).

Next time we’ll be discussing data retention issues and what this means for child safety.

My friend Larry Magid, the co-director of ConnectSafely.org (with Anne Collier) and founder of SafeKids.com, has a sharp new piece up at CBS News.com entitled, “Stop Cyberbullying with Education,” in which he rightly points out how “we need to be careful with legislation that would outlaw cyberbullying.”  He points out that although cyberbullying is “not an epidemic and it’s not killing our children”:

Bullying has always been a problem among adolescents and, sadly, so has suicide. In the few known cases of suicide after cyberbullying, there are other contributing factors. That’s not to diminish the tragedy or suggest that the cyberbullying didn’t play a role but–as with all online youth risk, we need to look at what else was going on in the child’s life. Even when a suicide or other tragic event doesn’t occur, cyberbullying is often accompanied by a pattern of offline bullying and sometimes there are other issues including long-term depression, problems at home, and self-esteem issues.

He goes on to provide some solid advice:

identifying the reasons kids are acting as bullies can go a long way toward preventing it as can educational programs that stress ethics and cyber citizenship (“netiquette”). It also helps kids to know what to do if they are victims of bullying. At ConnectSafely.org (a site I help operate) we came up with a number of tips including: don’t respond, don’t retaliate; talk to a trusted adult; and save the evidence. We also advise young people to be civil toward others and not to be bullies themselves. Finally, “be a friend, not a bystander.” Don’t forward mean messages and let bullies know that their actions are not cool. If your child is a victim of cyberbullying, don’t start by taking away his or her Internet privileges. That’s one reason kids often don’t talk about Net-related problems with parents. Instead, try to get your child to calmly explain what has happened. If possible, talk with the parents of the other kids involved and, if necessary, involve school authorities. If the impact of the bullying spills over to school (as it usually does), the school has a right to intervene.

And Larry cautions against rushing into legislative solutions that would criminalize the problem and throw the book at kids instead of adopting a more sensible education and counseling approach to the problem.  This is very much in line with the approach Berin Szoka and I set forth in our recent PFF white paper, “Cyberbullying Legislation: Why Education is Preferable to Regulation.”  While some truly troubled teens who instigate truly awful cyber-bullying attacks might deserve some time in the juvenile justice system, that shouldn’t be our first option for all kids involved in incidents. Anyway, read Larry’s essay.

Full disclosure:  Larry and I are currently serving together on the new, congressionally-mandated Online Safety Technology Working Group. (OSTWG)

In an earlier post, I mentioned an important new online child safety task force report that has just been released from the “Point Smart. Click Safe.” Blue Ribbon Working Group. It’s a great report and I encourage you to read the whole thing. It was my great pleasure to serve on this task force, and as we started finalizing our conclusions and recommendations, I started thinking about how much of what we were finding and recommending was consistent with what past online safety task forces had also concluded.

By way of background, over the past decade, five major online safety task forces or blue ribbon commissions have been convened to study online safety issues. Two of these task forces were convened in the United States and issued reports in 2000 (“COPA Commission”) and 2002 (“Thornburgh Commission“). Another was commissioned by the British government in 2007 and issued in a major report in March 2008 (“Byron Review“). Finally, two additional online safety task forces were formed in the U.S. in 2008 and concluded their work, respectively, in January (“Internet Safety Technical Task Force“) and July (“Point Smart. Click Safe.“) of 2009. [And yet another task force — the Online Safety Technology Working Group — was recently formed and has now gotten underway.]

In a new PFF white paper, ” Five Online Safety Task Forces Agree: Education, Empowerment & Self-Regulation Are the Answer,” I walk through a chronological summary of each of these past task forces [click on covers of each report below to read them in their entirety] and highlight some of the similar themes and recommendations from them.

Altogether, these five task forces heard from hundreds of experts and produced thousands of pages of testimony and reports on a wide variety of issues related to online child safety. While each of these task forces had different origins and unique membership, what is striking about them is the general unanimity of their conclusions. Among the common themes or recommendations of these five task forces:

• Education is the primary solution to most online child safety concerns. These task forces consistently stressed the importance of media literacy, awareness-building efforts, public service announcements, targeted intervention techniques, and better mentoring and parenting strategies.
• There is no single “silver-bullet” solution or technological “quick-fix” to child safety concerns. That is especially the case in light of the rapid pace of change in the digital world.
• Empowering parents and guardians with a diverse array of tools, however, can help families, caretakers, and schools to exercise more control over online content and communications.
• Technological tools and parental controls are most effective as part of a “layered” approach to child safety that views them as one of many strategies or solutions.
• The best technical control measures are those that work in tandem with educational strategies and approaches to better guide and mentor children to make wise choices. Thus, technical solutions can supplement, but can never supplant, the educational and mentoring role.
• Industry should formulate best practices and self-regulatory systems to empower users with more information and tools so they can make appropriate decisions for themselves and their families. And those best practices, which often take the form of an industry code of conduct or default control settings, should constantly be refined to take into account new social concerns, cultural norms, and technological developments.
• Government should avoid inflexible, top-down technological mandates. Instead, policymakers should focus on encouraging collaborative, multifaceted, multi-stakeholder initiatives and approaches to enhance online safety. Additional resources for education and awareness-building efforts are also crucial. Finally, governments should ensure appropriate penalties are in place to punish serious crimes against children and also make sure law enforcement agencies have adequate resources to police crimes and punish wrong-doers.

The consistency of these findings from those five previous task forces is important and it should guide future discussions among policymakers, the press, and the general public regarding online child safety.  As I note in the paper, the findings are particularly relevant today since Congress and the Obama Administration — including 3 federal agencies (NTIA, FCC, & FTC) are actively studying these issues. So, in light of all that, I hope this short paper can shed some light on the collective wisdom of the past task forces. While more study of online child safety issues is always welcome — including additional task forces or working groups if policymakers deem them necessary — thanks to the work of these five task forces, we now have better vision of what is needed to address online safety concerns.

Five Online Safety Task Forces Agree [PFF – Adam Thierer] http://d.scribd.com/ScribdViewer.swf?document_id=17181137&access_key=key-z6cxfgrjkqaqtxbix&page=1&version=1&viewMode=

The first meeting of the Online Safety Technology Working Group (OSTWG) took place today and I just wanted to provide interested parties with relevant info and links in case they want to keep track of the task force’s work.  As I mentioned back in late April, this new task force was established by the “Protecting Children in the 21st Century Act,” (part of the ‘‘Broadband Data Improvement Act’,’ Pub. L. No. 110-385) and it will report to the Assistant Secretary of Commerce for Communications and Information at the U.S. Department of Commerce’s National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA).

I’m happy to be serving on this new working group and I am particularly honored to be serving as the chairman of 1 of the 4 subcommittees. The four subcommittees will address: data retention, child pornography, educational efforts, and parental controls technologies. I am chairing that last subcommittee on parental controls.  The task force has about 35 members and we have a year to conduct our research and report back to Congress.  Here are some relevant links from the NTIA website that provide additional details about this task force:

• Online Safety and Technology Working Group Background
• Meeting Webcast Archive (RealMedia)
• June 4, 2009, Public Meeting Agenda

Of course, this is certainly not the first task force to explore online safety issues.  There was the COPA Commission (2000), the “Thornburgh Commission” report (2002), the U.K. “Byron Commission” report (2008), the Harvard Berkman Center’s Internet Safety Technical Task Force (2008), and the NCTA-iKeepSafe-CommonSenseMedia “Point Smart, Click Safe” working group, which is due to issue its final report shortly.  [Full disclosure: I was a member of that last two task forces as well.]  I’m currently working on a short paper that attempts to summarize the remarkably similar findings of these important child safety working groups.  Generally speaking, they all concluded that education and empowerment, not regulation, were the real keys to moving forward and making our kids safer online.

Today, the U.S. Department of Commerce’s National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) announced the members of the new Online Safety and Technology Working Group (OSTWG).  I am honored to be among those chosen to participate in this new task force and I look forward to continuing the work started last year with the Harvard Berkman Center’s Internet Safety Technical Task Force (ISTTF), which I also served on.   I was very proud of the work done by the ISTTF and the impressive final report that Prof. John Palfrey crafted to reflect our findings.  I am eager to investigate these issues further and take a look at the latest research and technologies that can help us better understand how to protect our kids online while also protecting the free speech and privacy rights of Netizens.

The new NTIA working group, which was established under the “Protecting Children in the 21st Century Act,” will report to the Assistant Secretary of Commerce for Communications and Information on industry-implemented online child safety tools and efforts. Within a year of convening its first meeting, the group will submit a report of its findings and make recommendations on how to increase online safety measures.

Below the fold I have listed the complete roster of OSTWG task force members.  I very much looking forward to working with this outstanding group.  And I’m happy to report that my TLF blogging colleague Braden Cox will be joining me on this task force!

Ms. Parry Aftab, WiredSafety Ms. Elizabeth Banker, Yahoo! Inc. Mr. Christopher Bubb, AOL Ms. Anne Collier, Net Family News, Inc./ConnectSafely.org Mr. Braden Cox, NetChoice Coalition Ms. Caroline Curtin, Microsoft Mr. Brian Cute, Afilias U.S.A. Mr. Jeremy Geigle, Arizona Family Council Ms. Marsali Hancock, Internet Keep Safe Coalition Mr. Michael Kaiser, National Cyber Security Alliance Mr. Christopher Kelly, Facebook Mr. Brian Knapp, Loopt, Inc. Mr. Timothy Lordan, Internet Education Foundation Mr. Larry Magid, SafeKids.com/ConnectSafely.org Mr. Brian Markwalter, Consumer Electronics Association Mr. Michael McKeehan, Verizon Communications, Inc. Dr. Samuel McQuade, III, Rochester Institute of Technology Ms. Orit Michiel, Motion Picture Association of America, Inc. Mr. John Morris, Center for Democracy & Technology Mr. Jonathon Nevett, Network Solutions, LLC Mr. Hemanshu Nigam, MySpace/Fox Interactive Media Ms. Jill Nissen, Ning, Inc. Mr. Jay Opperman, Comcast Corporation Mr. Kevin Rupy, United States Telecom Association Mr. John Shehan, National Center for Missing & Exploited Children Mr. K. Dane Snowden, CTIA – the Wireless Association Mr. Adam Thierer, Progress & Freedom Foundation Ms. Patricia Vance, Entertainment Software Rating Board Mr. Ralph Yarro, The CP80 Foundation

• denotes co-chairs of the task force