In February of this year, the Washington Post ran a story that made Americans aware that with all the strides that have been made to keep criminals away from children online, the effort is far from over. The previous summer, detectives arrived at a high rise building in Arlington County to arrest a suspected pedophile who had been traced to an apartment from his online trading of child pornography.

When detectives arrived at the apartment, they found an elderly woman who lived alone. It did not take long to realize that the problem was her wireless router which, obviously, one of her unscrupulous neighbors had tapped into in order to conduct his online pedophilia. Anybody in any apartment in the elderly womans 10 story building could have accessed the internet through the womans router. The detectives had to go back to the drawing board on this crime.

The authorities were aware that one of the neighbors probably were uploading photographs of nude children via the womans router, and doing so made the perpetrator virtually untraceable.

There are almost 46,000 WiFi access points across the nation. Quite a few of these are free. Hundreds of thousands of people are logging in to wireless networks every day from places like restaurants, rest stops, hotels, and in some cases, even park benches. Although the majority of those people are simply checking their e-mail and surfing the Web or shopping online, authorities said an increasing number of criminals are taking advantage of the anonymity offered by the wireless signals to commit a raft of serious crimes -- from identity theft to the sexual solicitation of children.

"We're not sure yet how to combat that," said Kevin R. West, a federal agent who oversees the computer crimes unit in North Carolina's State Bureau of Investigation. "Free wireless spots are everywhere, and it makes it easy for people . . . to sit there and do their nefarious acts. The fear is that if we talk about it, people will learn about it and say, 'I can go to a parking lot, and no one will catch me.' But we need to talk about it so that we can figure out how to solve it."

Most newer computers come equipped with a wireless card, and many users of even older models are buying wireless cards for their machines. Anyone with this device can access the Internet from any of the public WiFi "hotspots," as they're called. People with wireless cards who live in close proximity to others who have unsecured wireless routers can also access the internet through their neighbors?networks. This renders offenders of internet crimes almost untraceable, and causes major headaches for law abiding citizens.

"It's frustrating for officers," said Todd Shipley, director of training services at the National Consortium for Justice Information and Statistics. "If a suspect is going from coffee shop to coffee shop and using free signals to commit crimes, the police probably aren't going to catch him. That's the reality."
Authorities say that businesses and cities that offer free connections need some way to track the users, such as filtering measures that could scan to see who is accessing the network.

West tells about a recent case, where a truck driver used free wireless signals at motels across the country to post and view pornographic images of children at a web site. By pure luck, the man was caught, West says. When the suspect got online from his home computer, authorities were able to trace his computer's Internet Protocol address, or the unique set of numbers assigned to every computer that uses the Internet. That number, which serves as a virtual street address, often leads authorities to the offender's physical residence.

"Otherwise he would've slipped through the cracks," West said. "We wouldn't have been able to identify him."

Nowadays, the Internet is as much a part of an officer's arsenal as his gun and handcuffs. A growing number of officers are being assigned to patrol cyberspace. Across the nation, 46 multi-jurisdictional Internet Crimes Against Children task forces have been created to carry out online sting operations aimed at ensnaring sex offenders, because a man tapping away on a computer in Delaware might very well be soliciting a child in California. Every week, federal and local authorities cast their nets.

Those assigned to the task forces patrol the virtual streets for pedophiles and others who are attempting to commit crimes against children. Using tracking devices, the officers trace a suspect's IP address. But as technology improves, so also do the tactics of criminals. Closing cases is more difficult if the IP address originated from a wireless signal because it often leads back to the owner of the network instead of the criminal, much like the case where the officers were led to the home of the elderly woman. The network's owner's only "involvement" might have simply been possessing an unsecured network.

The problem is going to get worse, authorities said. Every day, more homes, businesses and entire jurisdictions are outfitted with wireless networks, creating an almost seamless patchwork of available Internet connections to anyone with a laptop and the desire to get online.

"This is part of the future . . . and we're working to catch up and educate the public," said Capt. Tommy Turner of the Virginia State Police.

For information about keeping your kid safe on the internet, visithttp://www.geocities.com/questionmarque/parents_peace_of_mind.html

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