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August 31, 2004
Australia Police to Trap Cyberspace Pedophiles
Tue Aug 31, 1:31 AM ET
CANBERRA (Reuters) - Australian police acting as part of an international "cyber cop" network will be able to trap pedophiles who use the Internet to "groom" or lure children for sex, under new laws passed by parliament on Tuesday.
Justice Minister Chris Ellison said it was important that children were better protected from online sexual deviants and that the Internet did not become a pipeline of depravity.
"The grooming offences will enable the Australian Federal Police to interact with and arrest Internet predators before they abuse children and before they use Internet chatrooms to expand their evil web," Ellison said in a statement.
Australian police are forming a global taskforce with crime squads from Britain, the United States and Canada to patrol Internet chatrooms in a crackdown on pedophile rings as the problem grows.
Under the new Australian laws, adults caught using the Internet to procure children younger than 16 for sex face up to 15 years in jail, while people using the Internet to access or transmit child pornography face up to 10 years prison.
"It is vital that as our children become more technically adept, they are protected from those who use the Internet and mobile phones for predatory and abusive ends," Ellison said.
Around 80 percent of child pornography seized by police in Australia is distributed over the Internet.
Last year, Microsoft's MSN Web portal shut down chatrooms in nearly every country where it operated, saying they had become a haven for pedophiles and spam-peddlers.
Posted by Nealus at August 31, 2004 09:52 AM
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