If California is any indication, the second wave of cyberfear washing through state legislatures could pack a considerably smaller wallop than the first.
Indeed, a cyberpredation bill now languishing in the state Senate seems unlikely to raise any of the constitutional alarms set off by a 1996 New York law criminalizing indecent online communications with children.
"We're neutral on the bill," said Valerie Small Navarro of the American Civil Liberties Union's Sacramento lobby. "It may be unenforceable, but essentially it's only modifying part of the penal code that's already on the books."
Expected to pass the Legislature and go to Governor Pete Wilson any day now, California's proposed cyberlure law offers a lesson in the sort of modest proposal that may well be a model for efforts to protect children online in the wake of the Supreme Court's June decision to overturn the Communications Decency Act.
Part of the 1996 Telecommunications Act, the CDA was passed amid a hubbub of fear generated by legislators unfamiliar with the medium. After passing around a blue book filled with images of smut pulled off the Internet, Congress set out to protect the nation's children and criminalized a broad class of indecent online communications. But the Supreme Court slapped the law down, declaring that the Internet deserved the highest level of First Amendment protection, not least because it was virtually impossible to reliably determine any Net user's age.
Meanwhile, lawmakers coast to coast became alarmed by the new phenomenon of cyberpredation. Where pederasts once trolled playgrounds and school yards for prey, they now teleport straight into the family living room. In New York, assistant district attorney Jeanine Pirro, who watched a New York version of the CDA struck down by a New York federal court earlier this year, proclaimed that "a computer is the best weapon a pedophile can have."
Pirro's fears were not totally off the mark. There are documented cases of successful cyberseduction. According to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, some 60 to 70 adults have gone online and lured minors into sex. Only last month, a 35-year-old California man was convicted of wheedling sex from a 15-year-old Florida girl he lured to Sacramento. The wheedling medium? The Internet.
And while the California cyberpredation law was never brought to bear in the case, it was designed exactly for such instances, said Mark Reeder, chief of staff for the Long Beach assemblyman who drafted the bill. "If the bill had been signed, that guy would have been convicted of using the Internet to seduce a minor."
Unlike other attempts to limit online speech, however, the California law was carefully honed down from its original expansive version, which criminalized all seductive online communications with minors, to its current version, which criminalizes such chatter only when the speaker knows he or she is communicating with a minor.
"It was already a crime to lure minors into sex using the phone and mail systems," he said. "We just extended the law to conform with current technologies."
