WASHINGTON — Last year, Congress passed the Protecting Children in the 21st Century Act,which called for yet another committee to study Internet safety. By statute, the Online Safety and Technology Working Group is made up of representatives of the business community, public interest groups and federal agencies. I’m on the committee as co-director of the nonprofit ConnectSafely.org.  ConnectSafely co-director and NetFamilyNews editor Anne Collier serves as co-chairman along with MySpace cheif security officer, Hemanshu Nigam.

The group, which reports to the Department of Commerce’s National Telecommunications and Information Administration, is totally unfunded. The government wasn’t even able to buy us lunch, let alone plane tickets to Washington. But I’m not complaining. It’s an honor to have even a small role in helping to shape national Internet safety policy.

To be honest, I was a bit skeptical when I first heard about the working group, wondering why we needed yet another committee to look at this topic. In 2000, the “COPA Commission,” created by the Children’s Online Protection Act of 1998, issued a very comprehensive report, and last year I was privileged to serve on the Internet Safety Technical Task Force — created by attorneys general of nearly every state.

The task force issued a report debunking myths about Internet safety, concluding that kids are more at risk from other kids than from so-called Internet predators. That finding was rejected by several of the state attorneys general who received it. South Carolina Attorney General Henry McMaster said the report’s findings were “as disturbing as they are wrong,” adding that “the conclusions in this report create a troubling false sense of security on the issue of child Internet safety.”

But I think the report was both accurate and insightful. It recognized that Internet safety is too complicated to be reduced to sound bites and sensationalist TV shows, and that most of the kids who get in trouble online also get in trouble offline. The Internet may amplify dangers, but it doesn’t create them. › Continue reading…