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Students Get Cyberwarning From Attorney General

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By STEPHEN THOMPSON | The Tampa Tribune

Published: October 30, 2007

ST. PETERSBURG - Attorney General Bill McCollum came to Northeast High School today, regaling students with Internet horror stories, playing a game with them called "Pick the Perp" and showing video dramatizations, including one titled "Sara's Underwear."

The one-hour presentation at the school auditorium was part of McCollum's statewide Cyberspace Education Initiative, which is designed to help middle and high school students protect themselves against online predators.

McCollum warned the crowd of more than 200 students about the pitfalls of cyberspace communication on sites such as MySpace. Sometimes people are not who they say they are, and pictures or even screen names often can entice pedophiles to try and engage you online, McCollum said.

"I'm not telling you not to have a MySpace site, but be careful what you put up there," McCollum said.

McCollum repeated the story of a 13-year-old girl who met a man online and eventually was held hostage by him for four days. He brutalized her so severely that she has blocked much of what happened from her memory, he said.

Then there is the story of a Bay County lawyer who pretended to be a girl to persuade 11 teenage boys to make and share explicit pictures of themselves. The lawyer then downloaded them. He eventually was convicted of possession and production of child pornography.

In playing "Pick The Perp," McCollum asked the crowd to pick from among four photographs those the students believed were "perps," or perpetrators. The point of the exercise was to show appearances often are misleading in cyberspace.

"These creeps go up there, and they don't look it," McCollum said. "They look pretty good."

As for the photographs Internet users decide to post on their profiles, McCollum warned that once in cyberspace, those pictures often are impossible to retrieve.

Also, suggestive screen names can lure predators, and those that indicate age or location can give criminals an edge, he said.

In the video "Sara's Underwear," a girl who has posted at least one picture of herself, apparently in her underwear, walks through her day while those who have seen the picture do double takes or make cutting remarks.

"Think before you post," McCollum said.

Reporter Stephen Thompson can be reached at (727) 451-2336 or spthompson@tampatrib.

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