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Frequently Asked Questions
What are pornographic images of children?
Under federal law, child pornography1
is a visual depiction of a minor engaged in sexually explicit conduct.2
In addition to federal law, each of the 50 states
and the District of Columbia has laws modeled after the federal statutes.
Sexually explicit conduct includes various forms
of sexual activities such as intercourse, bestiality, masturbation,
sadistic or masochistic abuse, or the lascivious exhibition of the genitals.3
It is illegal to possess, distribute, or manufacture
these images.
If you are unclear about whether the sites you
have come across meet the standards of the law, please do not hesitate to report them to www.cybertipline.com.
NCMEC will review the site, determine whether it is a pornographic image of a child, and then forward it to
the appropriate law-enforcement agency.
I viewed pornographic images of children, what should
I do?
NCMEC, in conjunction with the Federal
Bureau of Investigation, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (formerly
the U.S. Customs Service), and the U.S. Postal Inspection Service, has
developed an online reporting form for individuals who wish to report
child sexual exploitation.
This reporting form can be found at http://www.cybertipline.com.
When you access this page, you will find a form with several questions
to answer regarding the incident.
For instance if you come across images depicting
the sexual exploitation of a child on the Internet, we ask that you
provide us with the web-site address, which is also known as the URL
and stands for Uniform Resource Locator; the offender's E-mail address,
if possible; and the time and date that you found the images. The more
information you can provide, the more helpful the information is to
law-enforcement authorities.
What should I do if I accidentally receive or download
pornographic images of children?
If you downloaded such images, please
follow the steps noted below because these images are illegal and may
be needed for evidence.
- Do not mail these images to law enforcement
- Make sure you call or visit the proper law-enforcement
authority and ask how they would like to handle this evidence
- After speaking with the proper law-enforcement
authority and hearing the steps they would like you to take, follow
their instructions
- After you have complied with their instructions,
do not forget to delete the images from your computer including from
both the "Trash" and "Cache" areas
My 13-year-old son received an E-mail with an image of
adult pornography, is this illegal?
An incident such as this may be illegal;
however, there are some stipulations to this. Please make a CyberTipline
report at www.cybertipline.com
and save the E-mail in which the image was attached. Please include the
full expanded "Header" information in your CyberTipline report.
Where do I report seeing adult pornography sites?
The CyberTipline is not the forum to report
adult pornography sites. If, however, you have any doubt that there are
illegal images of children on the site, please make a CyberTipline
report.
Report adult obscenity that does not include
children to Morality in the Media at www.obscenitycrimes.org.
I viewed a text advertisement for pornographic images
of children but I did not see images, should I still report it?
A text advertisement describing pornographic
images of children is illegal. Follow the same steps you would if you
found pornographic images of children on the Internet.
Please make a CyberTipline
report and provide us with the URL, the offender's E-mail address if
possible, and the time and date that you found the images. The more
information you can provide, the more helpful the information is to
law-enforcement authorities.
How do spammers and online stalkers find me?
Spammers, those who send unsolicited "junk" electronic mail
(E-mail) to promote products or services, are not looking for you—they
are looking for a million of you. Their goal is to contact as many people
online as possible so that they can generate as many responses as possible.
Children are especially at risk because they are less likely to watch
their "CyberSteps" and more likely to communicate in chatrooms and with
unknown individuals.
Spammers can find you in many ways including
Member profiles and online white and yellow pages. There are
various web sites that allow users to create profiles and search for
members with similar profiles. Spammers use these sites to collect
E-mails according to interests. Other sites serve as people- or business-finder
web sites. Those white and yellow pages contain addresses from various
sources that often share contacts. For example one service provider
will add E-mail addresses to a major E-mail address search engine
by default, making new addresses available to the public.
Chatrooms. Spammers harvest names from chatrooms, as it allows
them to "target" their mailing lists.
Web pages. Spammers have programs that "spider" through web
pages looking for E-mail addresses.
Web, E-mail, and paper forms. Some sites request various details
via forms (e.g., guest books and registration forms). Spammers
can get E-mail addresses from those either because the form becomes
available on the world wide web or the site sells/gives the E-mail
lists to others.
Surfer's web browser. Some sites use various tricks to extract
a surfer's E-mail address from the web browser, sometimes without
the surfer noticing it. One example of this is making the browser
fetch one of the page's images through an anonymous connection to
the site. In order to access the page, some browsers give the E-mail
address the user has configured into the browser as the password for
that account.
Chain letters and hoaxes. This method means the spammer uses
a hoax to convince people to give him or her valid E-mail addresses.
For example some spammers use chain letters with promises of free
gifts to you and anyone the letter is forwarded to as long as it is
copied to the spammer. They often claim to be associated with large
reputable businesses.
Newsgroup or USENET postings. Spammers regularly scan newsgroups
for E-mail addresses using ready-made programs designed to extract
the addresses of anyone who is a member of that newsgroup.
Mailing lists. Spammers regularly attempt to get the lists
of subscribers to mailing lists because some mail servers will give
those upon request.
"Finger daemons." If one were to "finger query" asking for
john@host, a list of information would be provided including login
names for all people named John on that host. A query for @host will
produce a list of all currently logged-on users (if the "server" allows
this).
"Ident daemon." Some unix computers run a daemon, a program
which runs in the background, initiated by the system administrator,
intended to allow other computers to identify people who connect to
them. When a person "surfing" from such a computer connects to a web
site or news server, the site or server can connect back to the person's
computer and ask that daemon for the person's E-mail address.
Domain contact points. Every domain has one to three contact
points—administration, technical, and billing. The contact point includes
the E-mail address of the contact person.
Cookies. In addition to extracting E-mail addresses from web
sites by the methods described above, many web sites and E-newsletters
use "cookies" to track your every move on their site. A cookie is
a unique identifier that a web server places on your computer. It
is a serial number for you personally that can be used to retrieve
your records from their databases. It's usually a string of random-looking
letters long enough to be unique. They are kept in a file called cookies
or cookies.txt or MagicCookie in your browser directory/folder. Cookies
can learn your preferences by asking questions at their site, and
that information can be placed in cookies and used as a basis for
offering you, or not offering you, future information. Cookies can
be used to track where you travel on a site or what choices you make
in response to options as you travel through a site. Any web site
that knows your identity and has a cookie for you could set up procedures
to exchange their data on you with other companies that buy advertising
space from them, thus synchronizing the cookies they both have on
your computer. This possibility means that once your identity becomes
known to a single company listed in your cookies file, any of the
others might know who you are every time you visit their sites. The
result is that if a child goes to a soft-porn web site and signs up
to win a trip, that child's name could be sold to other soft- and
hard-core porn sites as well as to travel agencies.
There are many convenient and legitimate uses
for cookies. For instance they allow "mass customization" of
the content on web sites and cannot pass viruses from the server to
your hard drive. The information in the cookie is not a program and
is never executed as code.
Cookies cannot be used to get information from your hard drive that
the server did not place there. They cannot capture an E-mail address
from your browser, and they cannot steal credit-card numbers. They
cannot capture personal information about you, unless you volunteer
such information at a site, for example, in response to an offer of
some kind. If you do volunteer personal information, that information
could show up in a cookie and can be used with the information about
you that is collected using cookies.
There are legitimate Internet resources that can be misused.
Once someone has your E-mail address there are legitimate Internet
resources that can be misused to find additional information about you.
For instance by inputting an E-mail address and conducting a "reverse
lookup" on a people-finder, a stalker can find your full name, home
address, and telephone number. With that information, people can use
a mapping tool on the Internet to determine where you live and exactly
how to get to your house.
In addition they can conduct web and newsgroup searches to see if you
have a web site, are on a web site, or have posted any messages to newsgroups.
In essence, within one hour, a stalker may be able to find such information
as your name, home and business addresses, home and business telephone
numbers, preferences and hobbies, and even information about your family
and neighbors.
Adapted from "How Do Spammers and Online Stalkers Find
You?" in The Front Line, August 2001, Volume XXXXIV, page 8-9.
Copyright © 2001 National Center for Missing &
Exploited Children. All rights reserved.
What happens to my report after I submit it to NCMEC?
Every report is analyzed by staff in the
Exploited Child Unit and is provided to the Federal Bureau of Investigation,
U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (formerly the U.S. Customs Service),
U.S. Postal Inspection Service, and/or state/local law enforcement when
such jurisdiction can be determined. Each of the agencies can review the
reports and determine if further action is needed.
Does NCMEC investigate my report?
NCMEC is not a law-enforcement agency
and does not have the authority to investigate and arrest perpetrators.
As indicated in the previous question, however,
each report will be analyzed by staff members in the Exploited Child
Unit and provided to the Federal Bureau of Investigation, U.S. Immigration
and Customs Enforcement (formerly the U.S. Customs Service), the U.S.
Postal Inspection Service, and/or state or local law-enforcement for
their review and to determine if further action is needed.
Will I be contacted about the outcome of my report?
Reporting persons are not contacted regarding
the final outcome of reports. If a reporting person desires to be updated
about the status of a report, it is advised that law enforcement be contacted
directly as the ECU does not handle the reports beyond initial intake
and analysis.
Persons reporting unsolicited E-mail or pornographic
images of children will only be contacted if additional information
is needed.
Reporting persons are often contacted about other
incident types to verify information provided, such as in a case of
reported extrafamilial sexual exploitation, and explain what the reporting
person's next steps should be, especially in a situation where there
is potential or immediate risk to a child.
Thus it is always a good idea to include your
contact information in the CyberTipline report. Please leave your name,
your home and work telephone number, the time you would like to be contacted,
and an E-mail address.
How do I help keep my children safer online?
Safety tips for families whose elementary-school-aged
children and teenagers use computer online services are available in
the publications noted below.
You will need the Adobe® Acrobat®
Reader to view these files. Download a free copy of the Adobe
Acrobat Reader.
Please visit www.NetSmartz.org
for more information about Internet safety for your family.
Download These Publications
Child
Safety on the Information Highway
Teen
Safety on the Information Highway
For more information regarding these and other
NCMEC publications, please visit Featured
Publications and More
Publications on the home page.
End Notes
1As stated by Janis Wolak, Kimberly Mitchell, and David Finkelhor
in Internet Sex Crimes Against Minors: The Response of Law Enforcement
(Alexandria, Virginia: National Center for Missing & Exploited Children,
November 2003, page vii), “The term ‘child pornography,’ because it implies
simply conventional pornography with child subjects, is an inappropriate
term to describe the true nature and extent of sexually exploitive images
of child victims. Use of this term should not be taken to imply that children
‘consented’ to the sexual acts depicted in these photographs; however,
it is the term most readily recognized by the public, at this point in
time, to describe this form of child sexual exploitation. It is used in
this [document] to refer to illegal pictorial material involving children
under the standards developed by statute, case law, and law-enforcement-agency
protocols. It is hoped that a more accurate term will be recognized, understood,
and accepted for use in the near future.”
218 U.S.C.A. 2252.
318 U.S.C.A. 2256.
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