Area police training to patrol Web sites

By Carrie J. Sidener

Published: July 25, 2008

Social networks like MySpace and Facebook give people a chance to connect with friends and share their lives, but they can also be used to commit crimes.

There is little training available for law enforcement officers to investigate crimes like cyber bullying, solicitation, harassment and worse, said Investigator John Romano of the Lynchburg Police Department.

That’s why Romano and his partner Barry Stephens, a computer crimes investigator with the Virginia State Police, partnered to teach police how to investigate crimes involving social networking.

“No one really teaches social networking to law enforcement,” Romano said.

Their business, Cyber Associates Training Seminars, held its first training seminar for investigators last week, teaching officers from the Lynchburg Police Depart- ment, the Liberty University Police Department, the Mecklenburg County Sheriff’s Office, and the FBI.

The problem is that some children post so much information about themselves that predators can use it to both groom children and to find them, Stephens said.

“There are an awful lot of things people are putting out there,” Stephens said.

Cindy Kozerow, crime prevention specialist for the Lynchburg Police Department, said she took the class to help advise parents of the dangers their children can face on the Internet.

“Everything that can be used for good can also be used for wickedness,” Kozerow said.

Many children don’t understand just how vulnerable they are when posting personal information, Kozerow said.

One teen communicated with a police officer posing as a 13-year-old over a week’s time and those conversations gave the officer enough information to track the child down.

The officer went to the child’s house and told the parents how he was able to find them. Imagine if that man had been a pedophile instead of a police officer, she said.

“A parent would not open the door and let anyone walk up the stairs and into their child’s room, but that is exactly what you are doing when you let a child have the Internet in their bedroom. When it comes to the Internet, we are either blissfully unaware or woefully
inadequate in protecting our children.”

That’s becoming a problem since millions of teens use social networks. More crimes relating to these sites are being reported to law enforcement — everything from cyber bullying to harassment to solicitation and other more dangerous crimes.

The Internet has more than 200 social networking sites, but one dominates.

MySpace has about 80 percent of the market share for these types of sites and is second only to Yahoo in the U.S. It boasts 260,000 new users per day. And since personal information isn’t verified, the person who posts on an account could be 13 or 113 years old.

“We are just getting inundated,” Romano said. “When you get educated you realize just how much is out here.”

Young women are prostituting themselves on craigslist.org. People are acting out violent and sexual acts against others on a virtual reality Web site called secondlife.com. Information posted in places like myspace.com and facebook.com is being used to track people.

The seminar gave officers a scenario to investigate where a young woman goes missing. Using information culled off the social networking sites, they tracked a suspect.

The scenario isn’t that far off from a landmark case involving social networking in Virginia in 2005.

Taylor Behl was 17 when she left for her first year of college at Virginia Commonwealth University. On Sept 5. 2005, Behl disappeared.

Using her MySpace page, investigators were able to determine a suspect among her online friends.

Investigators learned of a relationship with 38-year-old Ben Fawley. Through both hers and Fawley’s MySpace and Facebook pages, investigators were able to establish a link and eventually find her body buried near his family’s farm in Mathews County.

Fawley was convicted of Behl’s murder the following year. In the course of the investigation, police also found Fawley with child pornography.

“People leave an online trail on social networks,” Romano said. “It gives you an idea of how sick and twisted this can be.”

Keeping children safe online takes parental involvement. Here are a few tips:

- Keep the computer in a common area like the kitchen or family room. That way you can keep an eye on what your children are doing online.

- Use the Internet with your children. Learn about new technology so you can keep up.

- Talk to your children about online habits. If they use social networking sites, tell them why it’s essential to keep personal information — like name, address, Social Security number and others — to themselves. Remind them not to share that information about others either.

- Teach them to be cautious about sharing other information, like the name of their school, sports teams, clubs, where they work or hang out or other information that someone can use to identify them offline.

- Make sure your child’s screen name doesn’t say too much about them. Explain why it is dangerous to use their full name, age or hometown.

- Use privacy settings to control who can access and post to your child’s Web site. You may approve of friends from school, clubs, or community groups, but not strangers.

- Children should only post information that you and they are comfortable with others seeing and knowing.

- Remind your children that once they post information online, it’s there forever. Even if they delete information from a site, older versions exist on other computers.

- Teach your child to trust their instincts. If they feel threatened or uncomfortable by something online, they need to tell you. Then report the incident to the police or the social networking site to prevent someone else from being victimized.

- If you are concerned about your child’s online behavior, search the blog sites they visit to see what they are posting. Search by their name, nickname, school, hobbies, grade or area where you live.

— Information provided by http://www.ikeepsafe.org. More information on Internet safety can be found at http://www.getnetwize.org, http://www.wiredsafety.org, http://www.safekids.com, http://www.isafe.org, and http://www.netzsmartz411/org.