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Almost 5 years ago, the Marsh Law Firm was instrumental in enhancing the federal civil legal rights of children who are victims of child pornography. Borrowing from intellectual property law, our firm helped draft, introduce and pass—in just seven months—a comprehensive update to a long-forgotten federal law which gives victims the right to sue anyone who produces, distributes or possess their child sex abuse images. Masha’s Law provides statutory damages of $150,000 for each violation of federal child pornography provisions and was incorporated into the Adam Walsh Child Protection and Safety Act signed by President Bush on July 27, 2006.

In 2008, Florida passed a state version of Masha's Law. Now Kansas has joined the effort by passing a state law which is modeled on the federal law we helped write.

The bill provides a recovery for actual damages of at least $150,000. In order to bring a civil action against a producer, promoter, or intentional possessor of child pornography the plaintiff must prove that while he or she was under the age of 18, he or she was the victim of an offense that resulted in a conviction, that offense was used in the production of child pornography, and the victim suffered personal or psychological injury as a result.

Civil action may be pursued through private counsel or by the Attorney General at the victim’s request. The bill also creates a three year statute of limitations.

Legislators and courts have long recognized what common sense makes clear - children depicted in child abuse images[1] are harmed not only by the sexual abuse captured by the images, but also by the subsequent distribution, possession, and viewing of the images of their abuse.[2] Legislators and courts have similarly recognized the importance of awarding restitution to victims who are harmed by crime to help make them whole, and to aid in their recovery.[3] Thus, it seems a straightforward proposition that children depicted in child abuse images should be awarded restitution from their offenders, including those offenders who possess and view their abuse. In fact, this simple supposition seems to underpin the statute governing restitution in cases involving sexual exploitation.[4]

Despite the logic, justness, and legality of affording restitution to the victims in child abuse images, federal courts differ greatly in their approach to the restitution rights of these victims[5] in the context of possession cases. As discussed below, over the last year alone, courts have awarded these victims full restitution, partial restitution, di minimus restitution, or even no restitution at all. These differences in outcome can be attributed, at least in part, to varied legal interpretations of the governing restitution statute, 18 U.S.C. § 2259. This article provides a brief overview of the current state of the law, and suggests that a court-based or legislative solution is urgently needed to avoid further victimization of these victims.

According to a FOXNews.com exclusive investigation, inspired in part by this blog's April 20th post Wikipedophilia:

Wikipedia has become home base for a loose worldwide network of pedophiles who are campaigning to spin the popular online encyclopedia in their favor and are trying to lure more people into their world, an investigation by FoxNews.com confirms.

Chat room posts show a clear effort by pedophiles to use Wikipedia, which can be accessed unfiltered in public schools across the country, to further their agenda. Message board posts often include links to specific Wikipedia articles that the participants say need to be edited to "normalize" pedophile behavior in the public eye and to recruit more pedophiles into their community.

“Pedophiles have campaigned to push their point of view that 'pedophilia is OK and doesn’t hurt children' on Wikipedia,” says Xavier Von Erck, director of the online pedophile watchdog organization Perverted Justice Foundation and Wikisposure.com, its offshoot project devoted to tracking pedophiles and pedophile activism on Wikipedia. “This has been a problem since Wikipedia started.

A series of FOXNews.com exposés last month resulted in a shakeup at the top levels of Wikipedia as administrators tried to deal with the growing controversy surrounding pornographic images that appear on the online encyclopedia and its associated websites.

After much pressure from within the Wikipedia community, co-founder Jimmy Wales was forced to relinquish his top-level control over the encyclopedia's content, as well as all of its parent company's projects.

According to FOXNews.com, though he remains the chairman emeritus of the Wikimedia Foundation, Wales is no longer able to delete files, remove administrators, assign projects or edit any content. Essentially he has gone from having free reign over the content and people involved in the websites to having the same capabilities of a low-level administrator.

Insider sources and publicly available internal listserve discussions revealed that Wikimedia editors rebelled against Wales' attempts to remove pornographic images from the nonprofit's websites. Those images were the subject of heated discussion within the community since their existence was revealed by FoxNews.com on April 27.

Hundreds of listserve discussions among Wikimedia board members, administrators and editors reveal the eruption of a heated and chaotic debate over whether to delete the images, which legal analysts say may violate pornography and obscenity laws.

On May 7, FoxNews.com reported exclusively that Wales had personally deleted many of the images from Wikimedia's servers, and that he'd ordered that thousands more be purged. Now many of those images have been restored to their original web pages.

For more on these stories visit:

EXCLUSIVE: Shakeup at Wikipedia in Wake of Porn Purge

EXCLUSIVE: Pedophiles Find a Home on Wikipedia

ChildLaw Blog posts on Wikipedia

The ACLU filed a federal lawsuit today against Pennsylvania school district for searching a student's confiscated cell phone without probable cause and punishing her for storing semi-nude pictures of herself on the device. The school subsequently turned her phone over to George Skumanick Jr., at the time the Wyoming County district attorney, who threatened to file felony child pornography charges against the girl unless she took a class on sexual violence.

The Third Circuit recently threw out the prosecutor's case.

"Students do not lose their privacy rights at the schoolhouse door," said Witold Walczak, the ACLU of Pennsylvania's Legal Director and one the student's lawyers. "School administrators have no more right to look through personal photographs stored on a student's cell phone then they have the right to rummage through her purse, read her diary and mail, or view her family photo album."

In January 2009, a teacher confiscated the cell phone of N.N., a 17-year-old senior, for using a cell phone on school grounds in violation of school policy. Later that morning, Principal Gregory Ellsworth informed N.N. that he had found "explicit" photos stored on her cell phone, which he turned over to law enforcement. He then gave her a three day out-of-school suspension, which she served. According to the student handbook, the first offense for misuse of a cell phone is a ninety-minute Saturday detention and the confiscation of the phone for the rest of the day.

The photographs, which were not visible on the screen and required multiple steps to locate, were taken on the device's built-in camera and were never circulated to other students. N.N. appeared fully covered in most of the photographs, although several showed her naked breasts and one indistinct image showed her standing upright while fully naked. The photographs were intended to be seen only by N.N.'s long-time boyfriend and herself.

"I was absolutely horrified and humiliated to learn that school officials, men in DA's office and police had seen naked pictures of me," said N.N., who graduated in 2009. "Those pictures were extremely private and not meant for anyone else's eyes. What they did is the equivalent of spying on me through my bedroom window."

A few days later, N.N. and her mother received a letter from then-District Attorney George Skumanick threatening felony child pornography charges if she did not complete a five-week re-education course on violence and victimization offered by the DA's office and the Victim's Resource Center. According to the suit, N.N. reluctantly agreed to take the course rather than face prosecution.

"Ironically N.N. was forced to take a class about victimization by the very people who were victimizing her," said Jacob C. Cohn of Cozen O'Connor, one of N.N.'s lawyers.

The lawsuit, filed in the U.S. District Court for the Middle District of Pennsylvania, charges that the search of the cell phone and the punishment for the content of the photographs violated N.N.'s rights under the First and Fourth Amendments to the U.S. Constitution and the Pennsylvania constitution. It seeks to have all electronic and hard copies of the photographs destroyed.

Sometimes one thing leads to another and then another and then ultimately purgatory. That's exactly where Wikipedia is finding itself after a tip on ChildLaw blog led to this FoxNews.com story which led to action by Congress and now this. According to FoxNews.com:

The parent company of the online encyclopedia Wikipedia is rapidly purging thousands of explicit pornographic images from its websites as it prepares to announce a new policy regarding sexually explicit content in response to reporting by FoxNews.com.

The move came as FoxNews.com was in the process of asking dozens of companies that have donated to Wikimedia Foundation -- the umbrella group behind Wikimedia Commons and its Wiki projects, including Wikipedia -- if they were aware of the extent of graphic and sexually explicit content on the sites.

Among the donors to Wikimedia Commons who were contacted by FoxNews.com were Google, Microsoft's Bing, Yahoo!, Open Society Institute, Ford Foundation, Best Buy, USA Networks and Craigslist Foundation.

These images were and in some cases still are easily accessible to anyone, including school children, many of whom receive unfiltered access to Wiki projects in schools across the country. A child doing homework research on the educational website could easily stumble upon pornographic photos — including close-ups of genitalia and people having sex and masturbating. There's even a “nude children” category.

Check out the entire late breaking story here at FoxNews.com!

A report issued yesterday by attorneys hired by the Lower Merion School District found that the collection of images stemmed not from an effort to spy on students but from "the district's failure to implement policies, procedures and recordkeeping requirements and the overzealous and questionable use of technology by IS personnel without any apparent regard for privacy considerations or sufficient consultation with administrators."

The report also criticized leaders and several members of the IS department as "not forthcoming with the Board, administrators and students about what TheftTrack could do and how they used it," citing incidents demonstrating "an unwillingness ... to let anyone outside of the IS Department know about TheftTrack's capabilities."

The report said the tracking system was intended to help recover stolen computers and the district used it successfully for that purpose. But it said the district also used the system for missing computers and for unknown purposes and left it activated for long periods in cases "in which there was no longer any possible legitimate reason" for capturing images.

The report faults administrators who had information about the program with not having appreciated the privacy concerns raised.

The most interesting part of the report confirms the allegation by student Blake Robbins and his family about alleged privacy violations over webcam images taken at home without their knowledge.

The report says Robbins turned in his laptop with a broken screen and was issued a loaner on Oct. 20, but school officials quickly moved to retrieve it due to outstanding insurance fees. So the tracking program was activated from Oct. 20 to Nov. 4 and captured 210 webcam photographs and 218 screen shots, the report said.

Although a technician confirmed on the first day of tracking that the laptop was "now currently online at home," another official in the same department instructed him to keep the tracking on and later told investigators he thought he needed authorization to terminate it, the report said.

On Oct. 30, the report said, a technician saw a computer screen shot that "included an online chat that concerned him." After consulting with a superior, he allowed school officials to look at the images.

Although the school principal said none of the images should be discussed with Robbins or his parents because they involved off-campus activities, Vice Principal Lindy Matsko decided about a week later it was "appropriate to discuss certain seemingly troubling images" with them, the report said.

In the civil lawsuit, Robbins said Matsko approached him and warned that school officials, based on webcam photos, suspected him of selling drugs. Robbins, 15, denies the drug allegation and said Matsko mistook Mike & Ike candies for illicit pills.

Robbins family attorney Mark Haltzman told reporters at the meeting that he and his clients were "thankful that we've been vindicated ... about all the misuse going on," but he added he was concerned that the full story had not yet been revealed.

The report notes Robbins "was not disciplined as a result of any images captured from his laptop."

FoxNews.com was recently informed that the day after the Wikipedophilia post appeared on this blog, Sen. Sherrod Brown, D-Ohio, sent a copy of Wikipedia co-founder Larry Sanger's letter to the FBI. Rep. Steve Austria, R-Ohio, sent a copy of the same letter to the FBI on April 27. Perhaps this is the kind of bi-partisanship we've all been waiting for. Stay tuned for updates which are posted here on FoxNews.com.

An interesting side note: Wikipedia apparently got its start in the world of online pornography. According to an article on Wikipedia:

Bomis (pronounced /ˈbɒmɨs/ to rhyme with "promise") is a dot-com company founded in 1996. Its primary business is the sale of advertising on the Bomis.com search portal. It was founded by [the current head of Wikipedia] Jimmy Wales and Tim Shell, and provided support for the free encyclopedia projects Nupedia and Wikipedia.

On the Bomis.com site, Bomis creates and hosts web rings around search terms popular among male users. The rings are currently categorized broadly as "Babe", "Entertainment", "Sports", "Adult", "Science fiction", and "Other". The "Adult", "Babe", and "Entertainment" categories are the most frequently updated and the most popular. Revenue from search-related pages is generated from advertising and affiliate marketing.

Bomis ran a website called Bomis Premium at premium.bomis.com until 2005, offering customers access to premium, X-rated pornographic content.

Until mid-2005, Bomis also featured the Bomis Babe Report, a free blog, publishing news and reviews about celebrities, models, and the adult entertainment industry. The Babe Report prominently linked to Bomis Premium and frequently posted updates about new models joining Bomis. Bomis has also operated nekkid.info, a free repository of selected erotic photographs, and continues to host The Babe Engine, "a precision babe search engine", which indexes photos ranging from glamour photography to pornography.

Bomis is best known for having supported the creation of the free-content online encyclopedia projects Nupedia and Wikipedia. Bomis hosted Nupedia in 2000, and Larry Sanger was hired to manage and edit that project.

For a while, Bomis provided web servers and bandwidth for these projects, paid Sanger in his role as project editor-in-chief (until he left the projects in 2002), and owned key items such as the associated domain names. However, as the costs of Wikipedia rose with its popularity, Bomis' revenues declined as result of the dot-com-crash, a general reluctance to display advertising on the site—together with a desire from the Wikipedia community to reflect the spirit of openness and neutrality central to Wikipedia—suggested an alternative ownership model.

The Wikimedia Foundation was formally announced on June 20, 2003. All intellectual property and domain name assets were transferred or donated over to the foundation because it was registered as a non-profit organization, but the server hardware was not transferred. Bomis CEO Tim Shell became the Vice Chair of the Board of Trustees. Larry Sanger had left the project by this time, but Jimmy Wales retains a role on the board of the Foundation, along with users elected from the Wikimedia community. In December 2006 Tim Shell was replaced by Jan-Bart de Vreede. The Foundation now funds the operation of Wikipedia (and its sister projects) primarily through donations from readers.

Read the full post about Bomis on Wikipedia here (as long as it lasts).

Yesterday, FOXNews.com published this story online entitled "Wikipedia Distributing Child Porn, Co-Founder Tells FBI." Now both the Wikimedia Foundation and one subject of the exposé, Erik Möller, have responded.

According to the Wikimedia blog:

The story repeats serious falsehoods and offers information taken grossly out of context, resulting in what amounts to a deliberate misrepresentation of reality.

The Wikimedia Foundation is appalled and angry that Erik’s employment with us has resulted in him becoming a target, and we believe that recklessly maligning him is indefensible

On the topic of allegedly illegal materials on Wikipedia and our projects: The Wikimedia Foundation obeys the law. In the weeks since Sanger’s published allegations, the Wikimedia Foundation has not been contacted by the FBI or any other law-enforcement agency with regard to allegedly illegal content on any Wikimedia projects.

Read the full post here. Wikipedia Deputy Director Erik Möller also responded to the FOXNews.com report on his blog:

Today, past defamatory allegations based on an anonymous smear letter which distorted and misrepresented early online comments and writings of mine, were resurrected by Fox News. I want to say definitively: I do not defend nor support acts of sexual violence against children and have never defended pedophilia in any way. Any claims to the contrary are false and a deliberate distortion of my views. Any repetition of those claims is, at best, reckless and irresponsible.

I’ve remained silent on these issues until now, so not to give credence and visibility to these falsehoods. But now, it seems obvious to me that the issue may be regularly revived, and therefore, I want to set the record straight. The experience of being defamed in this fashion has been highly traumatic and distressing to me.

. . . . 

Two years ago, a Silicon Valley gossip blog operated by Gawker Media, called Valleywag, began a smear campaign against Wikipedia and the Wikimedia Foundation which runs it. Following attacks focused on the personal life of Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales, in May 2008 the blog ran a series of posts by Owen Thomas which defamed me by calling me a “defender of pedophilia”, deriving its claims from articles and comments I wrote in 2000 and 2001, mixed with malicious fabrications and insinuations.

The defamatory claims which originated in that blog were repeated in a small number of other blogs without deeper reflection. They were not picked up by mainstream media at the time.

The defamation campaign by Gawker was deeply hurtful to me. At the time, I also met with an attorney specializing in defamation, who assessed the claims and confirmed his opinion that they constituted legal defamation, but who also made it clear that trying to have the posts taken down would be very expensive and time-consuming. It was also obvious that any legal action would serve to amplify the visibility of the original posts, and would drive traffic to Valleywag.

I had no reason to believe that Valleywag would engage in a responsible dialogue: quite the opposite. And I didn’t want to increase its public profile. Therefore, I decided then that it was best to ignore the claims, rather than responding to them. It may not have been the right decision, but at the time I believed it was the best among many bad options available to me.

. . . . 

At this point, I believe it’s preferable to have a full response to these defamatory claims on the record, rather than letting them go unchallenged. If you write about this situation, I would ask you to provide a reference to this response where relevant, and to avoid linking directly to the defamatory claims in question, both to avoid perpetuating the libel, and to avoid further driving page views to its publishers.

I have no problem being called out for things that I believe. Even attacking me based on things I wrote in my late teens or early twenties without giving me a chance to weigh in is, while not fair play, forgivable. But defaming me based on deliberate, malicious misconstruction of old writings , attributing claims to me which I have never made, describing me as a person who would defend sexual violence against children - that is completely beyond the pale, it is shocking, and it is unforgivable.

Nature of the defamatory claims

The key defamatory claims originally made by Gawker include:

1.  That I am a “defender of pedophilia”:

Pedophilia is a mental disorder which causes adults to be sexually attracted to children. Pedophiles who act upon these impulses commit abhorrent acts of sexual violence against children. I have not defended pedophilia in any of my writings.

2.  That I have argued that “non-violent child pornography does no harm”:

I have never made such an argument. This claim is apparently based on the malicious insertion of the word “child” into a heading from an article which stated “non-violent pornography does no harm”, based on an interpretation of a German-to-English machine translation. Child sexual abuse is an abhorrent crime, and the depiction of child sexual abuse, and the trade in such depictions, are rightly criminalized.

3.  That I “oversee editorial operations” at Wikipedia, or otherwise control its content:

Wikimedia’s projects are governed by volunteer communities. Individual Wikimedia Foundation staff members, including myself, do not control or direct editorial changes. I am not sure why Valleywag made that claim, which it presumably knows to be false. I can only assume its goal was to amplify excitement and outrage about the story, by implying that I was personally influencing Wikipedia’s articles on controversial topics.

Gawker Media made several other insinuations and defamatory claims in its posts which are so over-the-top that they are barely worth rebutting; one post attributed an edit to the Wikipedia article about child sexual abuse to me which was made well before my first edit to it, based on an incorrect reading of the edit history. That post was completely false.

My writings about sexuality

My writings about sexuality focus on the core topics of pleasure/affection, pornography, censorship, and children’s sexuality. Not a single article I published either as a journalist or as a blogger focuses on the topic of pedophilia. There’s a reason for that: I have never had any interest in the topic.

Indeed, in order to support the claim that I am a “defender of pedophilia”, the anonymous defamer had to dig deep into my writings. Nine years ago, at the age of 22, I wrote an article titled “Defending the Right to Pleasure“. The article has nothing to do with pedophilia; it doesn’t mention the issue. To find a snippet worth quoting, the defamer had to dig further into the comments section of the article, where I wrote a 3,000 word response addressing various comments.

Pulling from this long, carelessly written comment, the anonymous smear letter, followed by Gawker and later Fox News, quoted three sentences out of context: “What is my position on pedophilia, then? It’s really simple. If the child doesn’t want it [sexual contact], is neutral or ambigious [sic], it’s inappropriate.” It omitted the sentence immediately following: “This excludes most adult/child sexual contact, but only little child/child contact.”

If you read the entire piece, the context of the comment and the article are clear: They argue for a less zealous approach to policing consensual sexual relationships among young people of comparable age.

. . . . 

I have consistently defended the right of children of comparable age to engage in consensual, harmless sexual interactions with each other - what’s commonly called “playing doctor”, and also safe sex among teens. I have never defended the “right” of pedophiles to abuse children; child sexual abuse is a crime, and there is no such right. Children also don’t have the ability to consent to sexual activity with pedophiles, and such activities are sexual violence against children by definition.

All my writings (including the above comment in context) are consistent with this view. One particularly pertinent article that I wrote about the topic of children’s sexuality is called “Gefaehrliche Doktorspiele” (”Dangerous doctor games”), which describes the results of several weeks of journalistic research I had done into the criminalization and pathologization of consensual child sexual activity. Many of my views on the topic are also well-reflected by Judith Levine’s excellent book “Harmful to Minors: The Perils of Protecting Children from Sex”.

Sexual violence against children, like all violence against children, is abhorrent. 9 years ago, as a 22-year-old student, I wrote about these topics with an eye to issues and questions that gave me pause - the implied consensus that children are asexual creatures, that sexuality is a switch that is flipped on with adulthood, that non-violent adult pornography is harmful to minors, etc. I didn’t believe those things then, and I don’t believe them now.

The difference between then and now is that those topics are no longer the focus of anything I write about or do. If I did write about them today, I would take greater care to reassure any reader that I, too, believe that sexual violence against children is a horrific crime inflicted upon the weakest members of society. I have always believed that, and any suggestion to the contrary is false.

Make sure to read Mr. Möller's full response here.

I've been sitting on this story for quite some time waiting for something significant to make it relevant. Now that time has come. About two years ago, rumors started floating around about Wikipedia's involvement with child pornography and the pedophile agenda. First there was a row about this image on Wikipedia depicting child nudity.

Then there was the long-standing allegation by Perverted Justice that:

Pedophiles have long sought to use Wikipedia to justify and promote their agenda. They organize together in order to create Wikipedia accounts and then seek to use Wikipedia's all-inclusiveness to promote their point of view. When pointed out, Wikipedians themselves often don't believe that there is an organized campaign to subvert the user-edited encyclopedia in order to promote the pedophile agenda.

Well now these allegations have risen to a new level. Last week, Wikipedia co-founder Larry Sanger reported the site's parent organization to the Federal Bureau of Investigation, saying he believes the Wikimedia Commons "may be knowingly distributing child pornography."

According to Sanger:

The clearest instances I found (I did not want to look for long) are linked from [the pedophilia page] and [the lolicon page]. I don’t know if there is any more, but I wouldn’t be surprised if there is-the content on the various Wikimedia projects, including Wikipedia and Wikimedia Commons and various others, are truly vast.

You can see on [the history of the category page] that the page has existed for three years. Considering that Eric Möller, a high-level Wikipedia manager, is well known for his views in defense of pedophilia… surely the existence of this page must have come to the attention of those with the legal responsibility for the Wikimedia projects.

Erik Möller was recently elevated to Deputy Director of the Wikimedia Foundation which controls Wikipedia. In 2000, long before his Wikipedophilia days, Möller gave a speech in Nuremberg entitled “Kinder sind Pornos” which means “children are pornography.” Even in Google’s rough translation, the gist is clear enough: Möller argues that nonviolent child pornography does no harm.

Other sites have also discussed Möller's seeming fixation on child sexuality and child pornography. According to the blog Cyde Weys:

Erik Möller has a rather . . . deep interest in child sexuality, and some “interesting” positions on it to boot.

I’m not the first to pick up on this, either. Valleywag quotes Erik as saying “What is my position on pedophilia, then? It’s really simple. If the child doesn’t want it, is neutral or ambiguous, it’s inappropriate.” Obviously, that’s leaving something important unsaid — namely, are children really mature enough to decide if they do want sex; and if they say they do, does that make it appropriate?

But there are some other things that haven’t come to light yet. I’ll just list them off and let his words speak for themselves.

Erik created the Wikipedia article on Child Sexuality in 2003, and it was definitely not a stub article (Wikipedia’s parlance for short, introductory articles intended to be expanded upon by others).

He inserted the following text into the article on Human Sexual Behavior:

"It is generally acknowledged that children are capable of feeling sexual pleasure, even if they are not yet able to engage in sexual intercourse with each other, and/or are not yet biologically able to reproduce."

In the article on Homosexuality and Morality, he writes:

“A small minority believes that children are capable of consenting to homosexual acts with older men, but all major pro-homosexual groups have rejected that view.”

And he has a rather curious definition of pedophilia:

"Again, someone who sexually abuses a minor is not necessarily a pedophile (”exclusively” ”attracted” to ”preadolescents” — emphasis on every word), but may simply be acting out of opportunity. The title “pedophiles and pederasts” is redundant — pedophilia ”includes” pederasty. This does not in any way mitigate the definitional problems of this article."

Now that judicial opinions, newspapers and scholarly reports increasingly cite to Wikipedia, it doesn't take too much imagination to believe that individuals with agendas see Wikipedia as a perfect vehicle to promote their viewpoint. Anonymous editors and anonymous contributors with anonymous oversight, little or no authoritative peer review, and almost universal knee jerk acceptance make Wikipedia a powerful and dangerous place.

As we cede more and more control of our intelligence to the Googles and Wikipedias of the world, we need to remember that sophisticated invisible forces can easily manipulate our view of reality. Just who is editing and controlling Wikipedia? There's more than just the Lower Merion School District in your child's bedroom. Wikipedophilia might be the most dangerous threat of all.

Finally the truth about Lower Merion's use of remote monitoring software on student laptops: On Monday, the District's lawyer admitted that the school system captured 56,000 images of students, although thankfully "none of the images appeared to be salacious or inappropriate."

Back in February, the District's website declared that they only activated the software to locate lost, stolen or missing laptops: "The district has not used the tracking feature or webcam for any other purpose or in any other manner whatsoever," the Web site said.

Conclusion: there must be an awfully lot of missing laptops in the richest school district in Pennsylvania and one of the richest school districts in the country. Actually, maybe that's how everyone is getting so rich. They're fencing school laptops! This gives the story a whole new angle.

Let's see, there are 1500 students at Lower Marion High School, divided by 56,000 "investigatory images," means that each student stole about 37 computers. With MacBook Pros running about $1100 each, I'd say that each student in the LMSD received over $40,000 by fencing school computers. Parents with multiple students in high school could be making well into six figures with this scheme, easily offsetting school taxes, payments on luxury autos and mortgages.

And remember those parents who signed a petition demanding that all lawsuits against the school district be dropped? They definitely know they've got a good thing going. Why mess it up with a lawsuit which might lead to this scam leaking out?

Let the school peek at whatever they want to. As long as we can keep moving these "lost, stolen or missing" laptops on eBay, the District will be fully justified in capturing tens of thousands of images, the parents will get rich, and all the students at LMSD will keep their fancy cars, homes and vacations.

It's a win-win situation for everyone! Why give it away for free by sexting? Make the District work to "recover their lost, stolen or missing" laptops.

(These are high rez images too! Check out this image of Harriton High student Blake Robbins which his parents say was made surreptitiously by a school-issued laptop. No chance that the District will miss one mole on the crooks' nose with pix like these!)

Any kid that has a problem with this set up will get sent to Luzerne County where corrupt judges got cash bribes for sending juvenile delinquents to a private detention facility. From Masha Allen's adoption by a pedophile, to Luzerne County's cash for kids, to LMSD's pedo laptop recovery program - there's just something about Pennsylvania folks. My advice, keep your webcam's covered and your doors locked.

For more on this story, check out the Philadelphia Inquirer

The National Association to PROTECT Children, which describes itself as "a national pro-child, anti-crime membership association. . . . committed to building a powerful, nonpartisan force for the protection of children from abuse, exploitation and neglect," recently issued this rare rebuke of the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children:

The National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC) paid its CEO over $1.3 million in salary and compensation in 2008, the St. Petersburg Times reported last week, in an article now drawing fire from the group.

"In 2008, the latest year for which records are available, [Ernie] Allen made $511,069 as head of the center and its international affiliate. He also received $787,126 in deferred compensation and underfunded retirement benefits, as well as $46,382 in nontaxable benefits — a total of $1,344,567," reports Susan Taylor Martin, a veteran investigative reporter.

NCMEC claims that the additional $787,126 it paid Allen in 2008 was for "retirement benefits that have accumulated for more than 20 years." Martin also reports that "the center's 350 employees include 11 who are paid more than $125,000."

Martin asked Sandra Mioniutti of Charity Navigator, which calls itself, "the nation's largest and most-utilized evaluator of charities," about NCMEC's practices. "I think it doesn't pass the smell test with donors... said Mioniutti. "It's very hard for people to wrap their arms around huge salaries, especially right now when we're in a recession.''

The article provoked a rare official response on the issue from the National Center.

"Mr. Allen’s involvement with NCMEC goes beyond the traditional CEO. He was one of the co-founders of both NCMEC and ICMEC. Mr. Allen serves as the full-time chief executive and manages two nonprofit organizations with separate boards of directors, one domestic and one global, and he played a significant role in building both organizations," NCMEC says in the statement on its website. (For a list of the NCMEC Board of Directors, click here.)

"Key facts and information that were provided to Ms. Martin were omitted and the resulting story contained inaccurate and misleading information," claims NCMEC.

Government Salary?

A second issue raised by the St. Petersburg Times is also provoking a defensive response from the Center. The paper's story runs under the headline, "Quasi-governmental missing kids center enjoys key exemptions from federal rules," raising questions about NCMEC's legal status and salaries that dwarf normal government pay scales. Allen's base salary of $511,069 is greater than President Obama's, and nearly three times the salary for a U.S. Senator (source).

"The National Center for Missing & Exploited Children (NCMEC) is not a government agency..." responds the group. "NCMEC is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization. It is an information clearinghouse. It assists law enforcement, but does not engage in law enforcement action itself." At NCMEC's 20th anniversary "Tribute to President Ronald Reagan" in 2004, the agency described itself as "a public-private partnership, taking the best of both worlds to better protect America's children."

But NCMEC's legal status is not that simple.

Often referred to as "Congress' Nonprofit," NCMEC operates in a gray area between government and the private sector. Attorney and author Andrew Vachss (a PROTECT National Advisory Board member) calls the agency "the Blackwater of Child Protection."

"Why should we be outsourcing what the government's supposed to do in child protection?" asks Vachss. "Why should this be in private hands?"

By special statutory authority, the ostensibly private Center has access to secure law enforcement databases, warehouses illegal child pornography images and even has federal agents working under its roof. Federal law also gives NCMEC the power to compel private industry to deliver evidence of suspected online crimes, which is then forwarded to law enforcement, effectively making the Center an operational middle man in thousands of criminal investigations.

NCMEC's power and funding have often come at the expense of law enforcement, as Congress starves law enforcement agencies while funding the Center lavishly. When NCMEC took over a critical child pornography database for identifying victims from the FBI, Bureau officials explained sheepishly that "they had the people and we didn't." However, NCMEC says in its official statement that it "is not subject to the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA)," making it impossible for citizens to determine how effectively or quickly thousands of child victims are now being searched for, identified and located.

Many in the law enforcement world resent the power and funding Congress has given to NCMEC and fear its political influence. "I'd rather piss on a Mafia boss' shoes than piss off NCMEC," one former child pornography investigator told PROTECT. That sentiment is whispered among law enforcement nationwide.

Scrutiny Unlikely

It's unlikely, however, that revelations of NCMEC salaries will trigger official action against a massive agency that one top Justice Department official recently called politically "wired."

"It's widely understood on Capitol Hill that openly criticizing or challenging NCMEC is off-limits," says PROTECT executive director Grier Weeks. "Their untouchable status weakened a little after the Foley scandal [Rep. Mark Foley headed NCMEC's Missing and Exploited Children's Caucus], but criticism is still spoken in code and prefaced with effusive disclaimers.

"As far as expecting low- or mid-level bureaucrats at Justice to challenge the Center on issues like million-dollar salaries, forget about it."

NCMEC operates under a $30 million annual "cooperative agreement" with the U.S. Department of Justice. It raises approximately $10 million more a year from private entities, including companies that it has quasi-regulatory power over (see Microsoft settlement, Cuomo prosecution threat).

"The question raised by the St. Petersburg Times is not so much about NCMEC's accountability," says Weeks. "That is what it is. This is about the federal government's accountability. It would be hard to argue at this point that NCMEC is not a re-branded government agency operating outside the bounds of normal government accountability--one free to aggressively influence the political, legislative and budgetary process."

The New York Times editorialized today about sexting:

Schools across the country are understandably concerned about students “sexting” — sending sexually suggestive photos and text messages by cellphone. But a Pennsylvania school district went too far when it referred several female students for criminal prosecution after their images showed up on other students’ phones and they refused to participate in an antisexting education program. A federal appeals court was right to rule last week that parents had the right to block the district attorney from prosecuting the girls.

In the fall of 2008, officials in the Tunkhannock Area School District discovered nude and seminude pictures of female students on cellphones belonging to other students. After they found out that male students had been exchanging these images, the officials turned the phones over to the district attorney to investigate.

The district attorney wrote to parents of at least 16 students, who either owned the confiscated phones or appeared in the photos, threatening to prosecute the students on child pornography charges. If the students enrolled in an education program covering sexual harassment, sexual violence and related issues, he said, they would not be charged.

The parents of three girls refused to enroll their daughters. The parents of one girl, who was photographed speaking on a phone in a white bra, said she was simply being a “goof ball.” Another girl was seen in a towel, looking like she had gotten out of the shower.

These parents sought a temporary restraining order to block the district attorney from bringing criminal charges against their daughters, which the court granted. The cases against two students were dropped and the United States Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit, in Philadelphia, has since upheld the lower court. It said the third student and her parents are likely to succeed with their constitutional claims.

The prosecutor’s threat to bring charges, the appeals court ruled, would be retaliation for the exercise of protected constitutional rights — the parents’ 14th Amendment right to parental autonomy, and the child’s First Amendment right against compelled speech. Students in the program are required to write about how their actions were wrong.

The court said the prosecutor was trying to retaliate, rather than simply enforce the law, because there was so little basis for believing the three students had engaged in illegal activity — that they ever possessed the images or were involved in transmitting them.

Schools have a strong interest in maintaining an appropriate learning environment, indeed a duty to do so. But as students use more — and more elaborate — forms of technology, school officials will need to do a better job of upholding decorum without creating felony prosecutions out of misbehavior that should be handled by parents.