KSU's Continuing Education adds classes to keep kids safe on the 'net

  In January, the institute will add classes for parents on protecting children and home
  computers. Husband-wife team Marty Allison and Lois Payton, corporate computer
  trainers and parents of a 16-year-old, have more than enough experience to teach
  "Keeping Your Children Safe on the Internet." They learned the hard way. Someone
  phoned their daughter at the fast food shop where she worked, said he was a manager
  and asked for her e-mail address. Soon she was getting sexually explicit e-mail from
  a stranger who said he was 26. His letters showed that he knew what she looked like
  and where she worked.

  Thinking it was a joke or a lark, she answered his questions. She even showed the
  messages to her friends and gave them his email address. Not until her parents
  discovered this correspondence and asked, "Do you have any idea what you have gotten
  into?" did she find out that anyone she e-mailed could track down her home address in
  10 minutes on the Internet. Fortunately, she never met her stalker in person, as far as she
  knows. But the police have not caught him. Cobb County Police Detective Gary Lowe
  the family to some chilling statistics. A recent study showed that one in five teens have
  been sexually solicited on the Internet.

  "We started this campaign to inform parents," Allison said. "If teens get in with one of
  these sexual preditors and no one knows about it, they disappear across state lines and
  end up in body bags." In August, he and his wife established www.safeteenetwork.org,
  a clearing house of cyberstalker information for parents.  At home, they installed spy
  software that records their daughter's instant messaging, chatrooms, passwords, and
  Web pages. "I let her know," Allison said. "We sat down and had a long talk. It really
  shook her up when she found out all the consequences that could be involved."

  "People can't relate to it until it happens to them," Detective Lowe said.  He found a local
  teen who threatened in a computer "chat" to bomb a school. In another case, a man who
  killed his wife and daughter had written in his computer about his murderous plan three
  months earlier. Cobb County is the only metro police department with a squad dedicated
  to high-tech crimes, he said. "From drug dealers e-mailing each other, cyberstalkers
  lurking in Internet chat rooms to cyberespionage, criminals are turning to technology to
  hide from detection," Akin said.

  For course information, see http://cybercrime.ksu.edu. 
                     

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