Internet Safety Summit 9-21-07 Keynote Part 1 September 21, 2007
Posted by Matthew Woolums in Conference Sessions, Edubloggers.trackback
I’m attending an Internet safety summit and was pleased to meet Bud Hunt, also known as Bud the Teacher. Nice to meet someone whose work I’ve followed online.
Our first speakers were US Attorney for the District of Colorado Troy Eid and Deputy Attorney General for the State of Colorado, Tom Raynes. http://www.ago.state.co.us/InternetSafety/SafeSurfing.cfm was provided as a page with safety resources. Mr. Raynes describes the Internet as the playground of today, and calls for that playground to be a safe (and fun) environment.
In Colorado, first offenders for child pornography are sentenced to an average of 6 years in prison.
Phil Bremmer (sp?) reminded us that unless we keep up with technology use patterns by our children we won’t be effective in the effort of Internet safety.
Troy Eid described tracking a single child pornographic image as it is traded online just in the boundaries of Colorado. Turns out it was housed on 50,000 servers. An expert group had only predicted around 5,000.
The students responsible for the Colorado iCrew podcast on iTunes were presented with video iPods. Nice to see their work rewarded.
I hope you liked the conference and felt it was useful to you. It was our first endeavor of hosting a conference.
I would like to clarify that the average offender getting 6 years in Colorado is in the federal system. The average offender in the state system gets probation. We need to work hard to change this. Classification of those crimes were increased last year, but the penalties have not followed. Just this week I had a guy sentenced that I arrested and was convicted of 150 counts of possession and got 6 months in county jail for it. Unfortuantely there was no federal nexius to prosecute it on that side.
Thank you for your clarification. I was typing notes pretty quickly and missed the distinction between local and federal prison terms.
The conference was well presented and offered an interesting mix of resources. I have several talking-points to bring back to my district about this very important issue.
Matthew