11/08/07 Keeping the Internet Safe

Keeping the Internet Safe. I'm Greg Martin with today's Line On Agriculture. Everyone is on the internet. From the inner-city to the most remote farms in the western U.S., internet access is almost always available. And everyone is on it from pre-schoolers to grandparents. It's a wonderful invention that has revolutionized the world of information but there are many dangers that lurk in the circuits of the internet. Last month, Washington State Attorney General Rob McKenna proclaimed it Internet Safety Month. McKenna has taken up the internet safety banner. MCKENNA: There's so much more pornography and other inappropriate material available on the internet to everybody unless your parents have put filters in place and taken certain steps  and a lot of what we see on the internet is really very disturbing and needless to say highly inappropriate for young people and frankly for adults too in some cases. I mean we are talking about an explosion of child pornography for example because of the internet and how easy it is to disseminate child porn. And it's not just inappropriate material that is lurking out there. Identity theft is rampant and in some cases very easy if certain precautions aren't taken. McKenna says parents should play a major role. MCKENNA: It is important that parents pay attention to internet security just as they are careful about who their kids are going and seeing when they walk out the front door. Every parent teaches their child not to talk to strangers. They ask their child, who are you going to be with, how long are you going to be gone  they take common sense precautions when the child walks out of the house. Far too few parents take the same kind of precautions when it comes to interactions of their children with strangers and others on the internet. Chatrooms and social networks like MySpace, Facebook and many others need to be monitored since they can be an open invitation to negative influences on your kids. But McKenna says many of these activities can be safe. MCKENNA: There are m ore opportunities through social networking. That is not to say that every child that uses a social networking site is going to be harmed. I think a great deal of what happens is benign and I think a lot of young people exercise common sense and their normal instincts to protect themselves kick in. But nevertheless because there are tens of millions of kids on the internet and there are tens of thousands of predators on the internet, there is a greater amount of exposure. McKenna again says the parental role is extremely important in keeping your kids safe on the internet. We'll talk with more with Attorney General Rob McKenna about the internet next week. That's today's Line On Agriculture. I'm Greg Martin on the Northwest Ag Information Network.