Trinity Mount Ministries

Showing posts with label online. Show all posts
Showing posts with label online. Show all posts

Wednesday, November 15, 2017

Make a CyberTipline Report (NCMEC)

In March 1998, using hardware, software, and programming assistance donated by Sun MicroSystems, NCMEC launched the CyberTipline® to further NCMEC’s mission of helping to prevent and diminish the sexual exploitation of children. The CyberTipline provides the public and electronic service providers (ESPs) with the ability to report online (and via toll-free telephone) instances of online enticement of children for sexual acts, extra-familial child sexual molestation, child pornography, child sex tourism, child sex trafficking, unsolicited obscene materials sent to a child, misleading domain names, and misleading words or digital images on the Internet. NCMEC continuously reviews CyberTipline reports to ensure that reports of children who may be in imminent danger get first priority. After NCMEC’s review is completed, all information in a CyberTipline report is made available to law enforcement.

In furtherance of NCMEC’s mission, the CyberTipline allows NCMEC to engage with the Internet industry on voluntary initiatives to help reduce the proliferation of child sexual abuse images online. NCMEC uses the information submitted to the CyberTipline to create and tailor NCMEC’s safety and prevention publications that are provided to educators, parents and the public to help to prevent future victimization.

More than 12.7 million reports of suspected child sexual exploitation have been made to the CyberTipline between 1998 and June 2016.

Members of the public are encouraged to report information regarding possible child sexual exploitation to the CyberTipline.

Friday, July 17, 2015

Do Your Homework Before Sharing “Missing Person” Posts:

by 

You see a post on Facebook or Twitter from someone you interact with online. They’re not a close friend, family member or someone you work with.
It’s someone you met through Twitter, an online game, or they belong to one of your Facebook groups, but you’ve never met them in person.
They’re saying their wife or son is missing. Could you let them know if you see their missing family member?
What do you do?

Do Your Homework

If you’re on social media, it may seem natural to quickly spread the news or share the post. You want to help others and social media makes it easy.
But do you have all the facts?
As Kimberley Chapman points out in Be Careful About “Missing Person Posts”:
It’s one thing to circulate a current Amber Alert, ensuring that all of the information is there, that it comes from a proper source (ie don’t just reshare, CHECK THE LINKS), and that the answer is to call police, not just a random number.
And be sure to update your post when the issue is resolved.
But when someone you don’t know personally asks you to contact them about their missing family member, and they don’t provide:
  • Date
  • Location
and they ask you not to call police, think twice.
You may not know the full back story.
The family member may have escaped an abusive relationship. Or they may have changed their identity and left the area.
Is the person really missing?
Always check the story. Follow up on any links provided.

Be Responsible

You want to share posts from police looking for abducted or missing persons.
If you see the person or know something about someone who is missing or abducted, always call the police.
Be suspicious of posts about a missing person with no mention of date or location.
Rather than spreading the information, contact the police. It may be a legitimate request, but always contact the police to confirm.

Tuesday, June 23, 2015

The Dark Web: A haven for pedophiles beyond the Internet

by Jerome Elam

WASHINGTON, June 6, 2015 – It was November of 2014 in the quiet suburban neighborhood as the light of an early Saturday morning began to peek through the clouds and the day found its beginning. The quaint three-bedroom home on the corner blended in with the rest of the neighborhood, as the freshly painted beige exterior glistened in the early morning sun. The neatly trimmed yard was littered with the toys of young children, and a brown mini van missing a hubcap was parked in the driveway.

Suddenly the screech of tires broke the landscape of silence as three black Chevy Suburbans with blacked windows came to an abrupt halt in front of the house. A group of men wearing black body armor and matching helmets formed a line behind two others holding a large black battering ram as they the disengaged the safety of their automatic weapons. As the group advanced on the front door, a loud crash echoed as the force of the battering ram met the front door and splinters of wood rained down on the group.

Inside the house a middle-aged man sat at a computer in the darkness as images of young children flashed across the screen and the video streamed across the secret network that made him invisible to the rest of the world. Seconds later, he was lying on the floor handcuffed, and law enforcement agents carefully began to collect the evidence they needed to bring down a global ring of pedophiles.

The investigation had taken over a year and had led agents into the darkest depths of a world few know about, a world where terrorists, drug dealers and pedophiles roam freely. Known as “the Dark Web,” it is a series on non-indexed sites around the world that create an abyss 500 times larger than the Internet you and I surf every day.

Tor is free software that allows a user to browse, send e-mail and chat anonymously. It also allows users access to the “Dark Web.” A 2014 study by University of Portsmouth computer science researcher Gareth Owen discovered a startling 80 percent of the traffic to sites on the Dark Web were associated with child pornography.

In an interview with CBS News, Greg Virgin, who formerly worked with the National Security Agency and is now a cyber security consultant to children’s rights groups commented, “It was just an awful realization, discovering there were tens of thousands of people who are not only trading child pornography, but planning to exploit children.”

On the Dark Web, pedophile “shopping” sites advertise children for sale as well as take “orders” for specific age groups. Virgin said, “We found one site where users openly advertised the ages of the children they were interested in. The average youngest age they were seeking for girls was zero years old. And the average age for boys was one.”

A 2014 Business Insider article by James Cook that documents a pedophile fundraising site for child exploitation videos further emphasizes the growth of child exploitation on the Dark Web. Pedophiles created a twisted form of the popular fundraising tool “Kickstarter,” which collected funds to exploit children and then share the videos on the Dark Web for free.

The FBI is rumored to have taken down several of the servers used by pedophiles on the Dark Web in 2013. But, according to Virgin, “”The demand is picked up very quickly by other sites, and the sites are replaced very quickly, usually by a stronger, better site.”

The Dark Web is a Rubik’s cube of depravity. For those who know how to unlock its many hidden doors, there is no limit to the horrific nightmares children are forced to live. Internet browsers such as Internet Explorer and Google Chrome scan roughly 5 percent of the space that is reached by Tor, which plunges deeply into the hidden world. Internet privacy enthusiasts attempt to deflect criticism of the use of Tor and the presence of child exploitation on the Dark Web by saying the numbers are inflated.

A computer hacker who spoke under the condition of anonymity noted, “There are doors within the Dark Web hidden so well that only a handful of experts could find them, and even then it would take some time to uncover the warren of passageways deep beneath the surface.”

Tor began with a much nobler purpose that still finds its place in the expanding landscape of illicit users on the Dark Web. It was envisioned as a way to allow journalists and those living under oppressive governments a means of communication that would protect their identities and their lives.

Created by the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory, Tor began in the 1990s as a way for the U.S. Intelligence Community to communicate securely. In 1997, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) further developed Tor and in 2004, the Naval Research Laboratory released the code for Tor under a free license. In 2006 a non-profit called “The Tor Project” was created by a group of computer scientists in Massachusetts that maintains Tor in association with several other organizations.

Law enforcement has been fighting back against those who exploit Tor for darker purposes. In 2013, Irish authorities arrested 28-year-old Eric Eoin Marques, who is thought responsible for Freedom Hosting, an anonymous hosting company rife with child exploitation.

After Marques’ arrest, a panic rushed through the pedophile community, when the U.S. National Security Agency released a virus onto the Freedom Hosting website to track and uncover the pedophiles lurking on the Dark Web. Numerous child exploitation forums were deleted in response to law enforcement’s infiltration of their twisted domain, and warnings temporarily drove pedophiles further underground.

The Dark Web interests law enforcement not only because of its large community of pedophiles but also because organized crime, terrorists, money laundering and the illegal drug trade have proliferated in its dark abyss.

For example, the infamous “Silk Road” site provided a marketplace of illicit drugs for sale on the Dark Web. Run by an administrator known only as the “Dread Pirate Roberts” (named after the character in the William Goldman novel and later movie “The Princess Bride”), the site drew the public ire of New York Sen. Chuck Schumer. The FBI arrested Ross William Ulbricht after an elaborate sting operation caught him logged on to the Silk Road site as the Dread Pirate Roberts himself.

The Dark Web has become an arena where the cat and mouse game between authorities and those who exploit a child’s innocence continues. The National Center for Missing and Exploited Children reports that as of January 2015, its CyberTipline received more than 3.3 million reports of suspected child sexual exploitation since it was launched in 1998. Memex, a powerful new search engine developed by DARPA has given U.S. law enforcement the ability to root out the elusive miscreants who trade in the most depraved corners of the Dark Web.

We face a desperate struggle as child exploitation continues to grow at an unprecedented rate. Law enforcement needs everyone to learn how those who exploit our children operate. It is only when we have all joined together in the fight to save our children that we will finally eradicate these parasites of the innocent.

As a survivor of child sex trafficking, childhood sexual abuse and childhood sexual exploitation, I understand the continuous cycle of abuse each victim suffers. As a child I was abandoned by irresponsible and abusive parents, left to fend for myself, stripped of the tools that every child needs to function in the world and saved from a darker ending only by the unconditional love of my great-aunt.

I have struggled my entire life with the effects of my early loss of innocence. Overcoming it has been my greatest triumph, but it only became possible through the love and caring of those who held human compassion in the highest regard and dedicated themselves to the rescue of those standing at the edge of the abyss.

My sincerest hope is that I can save one child from suffering the hell I endured. Then I can leave this life with a sense of accomplishment. I hope you will all join me in the fight to protect our children from sexual predators before the next child is stripped of innocence.

To learn more about how you can help stop those who exploit a child’s innocence and report suspected child sexual exploitation, visit the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children website http://www.missingkids.com/cybertipline/ or call the CyberTipline at 1-800-843-5678. Working together we can save the next child from a lifetime of ravaged innocence and stolen hopes and dreams.

Source: The Dark Web

Friday, October 14, 2011

How to Ensure Online Safety for Your Kids:

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How to Ensure Online Safety for Your Kids

from wikiHow - The How to Manual That You Can Edit

Your teenagers might squander lots of time on Social Networking Sites or/and virtual world sites. Parental Controls software can readily aid parents to ensure Social Networking Websites security for teens. However, do you know what your teens are up to on Twitter? Social Networking Sites are becoming stylish. These sites are fabulous sites for teenagers to communicate with relatives using computers and have transformed the way of communication.

Steps

  1. Know more about the Internet and the SNS.
  2. Talk to your kids about the dangers and risks.
    • Many a time, kids disclose too much classified information, talk about improper topics that may get them into trouble, or otherwise put themselves in danger by what they surf online. Parental Controls program is supplied to related parents to deal with problems relating to Social Networking Websites and community websites. Once you possess the basics of [Parental Monitoring][1] application, you'll be better able to aid your teens to stay harmonious when they communicate online.
  3. Use anti-virus and parental control software to ensure online safety for your kids.
    • Tweens give out too much secret information such as home address, telephone number, which could give rise to critical issues - susceptibility to Internet thefts and violence of privacy. Parental Monitoring software is supplied to facilitate parents to review teens' Internet activity and select what couldn't be viewed by your teens.
  4. Watch for danger signs. Warnings that indicate your teenagers can be at risk online.
    • 1. Spend plenty of time online, especially at night
    • 2. Reluctant to leave the room
    • 3. Isolate from friends and family members
    • 4. Improper links found on the computer
    • 5. Receive mails from strangers
    • 6. Turn the computer monitor off quickly when parent enters the room
  5. Minimize the risk to them as much as possible.
    1. Consider talking with your kids, let them know what they couldn't browse on the Internet, and potential risks. Create your own SNS account and share the online experience with your kids and be their guide.
    2. Make some rules on their network activity, amount of time spending on the Internet. And tell them not to use real information such as photo, name and address in personal profile.
    3. Use Parental Control Monitoring programme to record teens' Internet activity.
    4. Routinely review your teens' SNS profile, and clean up sensitive information. Check their friend lists and clean up suspected pals.
  6. Watch for signs of your children being bullied. If you see that they are, do the following:
    • Once your children were bullied, take copies as evidences for future law enforcement use using parental monitoring program, and report to the relevant departments, National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, and Police Department.
  7. Purchase authentic safety and parental monitoring application to secure your computer against computer pedophiles, ensuring cyber safety for your teenagers and the whole family.
  8. Come up with a Proposal for your teenagers
    1. Do not disclose true info such as name, family address
    2. Tell your parents at once if you were bullied by Network predators
    3. Use privacy settings of Social Networking Websites, think carefully before accept a person as a friend
    4. Do not click any weird hypertext links which may lead to account theft and etc
    5. Do not chitchat with any one with cam without your parents' guide
  9. Keep yourself educated. Parents ought to maintain themselves up-to-date on the news of SNS by learning online educational sites, and inform teens about appropriate online usage, if your teens are not that careful, they may become victims of infringement of privacy, and predator. And teens have to be got informed of the parental control monitoring if needed.

Related wikiHows


Sources and Citations

Article provided by wikiHow, a wiki how-to manual. Please edit this article and find author credits at the original wikiHow article on How to Ensure Online Safety for Your Kids. All content on wikiHow can be shared under a Creative Commons license.

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Saturday, August 20, 2011

PORN HARMS! Harm to Children from Online Exposure:

PORN HARMS!
The porn industry is very damaging to individuals, families and society as a whole. Please visit this website and read about just how damaging and harmful porn really is:
Research - Harm to Children from Online Exposure to Hardcore Adult Pornography. Research By PornHarms on July 5, 2011:
http://www.pornharms.com/
www.pornharms.com