Internet can be trap, Shurtleff says

MURRAY — Utah Attorney General Mark Shurtleff brought a small animal trap to Hillcrest Junior High School Monday. He placed it on the desk of a ninth-grade student.

"Would you click on that twice?" he rhetorically asked the girl.

Shurtleff, along with the Boys and Girls Club, used the trap to illustrate the dangers of what could happen to teens who double click the mouse of their computer to access certain chat rooms on the Internet. Using a pen, Shurtleff got the iron claws of the trap to snap shut with enough force that it would have caused serious physical injury if it had clamped on a hand.

Shurtleff used a computer class at the school, near 5300 S. 100 East, to introduce NetSmartz, an Internet safety program aimed at educating students statewide about Internet predators.

"There's some pretty bad guys out there," Shurtleff told the group of 14- and 15-year-olds. "When you're talking to people (online), they aren't always who they say they are."

The attorney general's Internet Crimes Against Children Task Force is constantly busy trying to catch mostly older men trying to lure young boys and girls into meeting them for sexual purposes, he said. An estimated 1 in 5 children will be sexually solicited online, according to the Boys and Girls Club.

"We have so many arrests, it's mind-boggling," Shurtleff said. "We're doing what we can to catch these dirt-ball freaky guys."

But the best protection against Internet predators will come from educating children who are chatting online.

The NetSmartz program teaches juveniles such safety tips as refraining from posting personal information online such as age, address or school. Jordan Hansen, with NetSmartz, said kids who post pictures of themselves on myspace.com pages even need to watch what they are wearing so personal identifying information — such as school affiliation — isn't revealed unintentionally.

"Nobody can protect you but yourselves," said Josh Braun with the Murray Boys and Girls Club.

As uncomfortable as it may seem, Braun said students with private myspace accounts should give their parents their passwords so they can keep track of their "friends" list and who is trying to stay in contact with them.

"You would never meet me in a dark alley," the bald-headed, long-goateed Braun told the students. "But I guarantee I can get all of you to talk to me in a chat room."