Campaign helps decipher danger for kids on Internet Attorney General Peg Lautenschlager announces a state and national campaign to protect children from internet predators during a news conference Wednesday (photo by H. Marc Larson). By Anna Krejci News-Chronicle Wisconsin Attorney General Peg Lautenschlager announced Wisconsin's participation in a nationwide, public service announcement campaign designed to alert parents and children of threats posed by cyber child abusers during a news conference at Green Bay West High School on Wednesday. The Justice Department's Internet Crimes Against Children Task Force has partnered with the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children and the Ad Council to promote it. Television commercials use the voice of actress Jamie Lee Curtis. One ad shows pictures of deserted places, such as an empty playground, before showing a young person typing at a home computer. It compared the risk to a child being alone in deserted places as potentially being the same to a child seated at a home computer where the child could be solicited for sexual activity by an online child abuser. Even though society has been aware of threats posed by the unsupervised use of a computer, the Help Delete Online Predators campaign is the first national, multimedia campaign on the issue, according to the Ad Council. The threats are not invisible to parents, said Eric Szatkowski, special agent of the state's Division of Criminal Investigation. "They're not ignorant, they just need to be educated," he said. Green Bay police chief Craig Van Schyndle, said parents in Green Bay are disadvantaged to protecting their children from child abusers who initiate contact with a child online. "Many of the students and children are more computer intelligent than their parents," he said. Szatkowski, who works undercover to reveal such child abusers, outlined safety precautions parents can take to protect their children. "Keep the computer in a common area of the house," he said. Doing so is more conducive to parental supervision, which is needed in conjunction with Internet content filters, he said. Filters can cater to children of varying ages. Szatkowski emphasized parents should know where children have access to the Internet outside their own home. Children of all ages from homes with or without computers are vulnerable, he said. "Kids can be victimized if they come from the upper class, middle class or lower class," he said. "The common denominator is the computer and access to the Internet." If a child tells a parent they have been propositioned for sexual activity over the Internet, Szatkowski said parents should not remove Internet privileges, but rather reiterate safety precautions, such as withholding personal information from online conversations. Lautenschlager said children are more vulnerable to Internet predators than thought because predators can befriend minors by telling them what they want to hear when their parents are telling them otherwise. Some minors who are less social tend to spend more time on the Internet, she said. "You add all that up and you have a recipe for disaster," she said. She referred to "secret conversations," or acronym-laden Internet dialogue, as tools child abusers use to lure children to them. To those familiar with sending instant messages on the Internet, A/S/L, LOL and BRB have meaning. West High School ninth-grader Tim Deviley identified the acronyms as "age/sex/location," "laughing out loud" and "be right back." But even Deviley didn't recognize LMIRL, which stands for "let's meet in real life." Parents might not know the acronyms either. According to a parent survey paid for by the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, five percent or less of parents surveyed knew the commonly used acronyms. The campaign is circulating pamphlets deciphering acronyms, such as NIFOC, meaning "naked in front of computer." Of the children aged 10-17 who used the Internet regularly in 1999, one out of five were sexually propositioned, according to the NCMEC. Deviley said he feels safe talking to strangers over the Internet because he said he is not going to let anything more come of it. "I wouldn't go meet some weird guy," he said. Sarah Solway, ninth-grader, said children are vulnerable to varying degrees when it comes to interacting with a child abuser, depending on what safety precautions they practice; however, constantly being reminded of precautions becomes tiresome. "Sometimes it's annoying because you know (how to protect yourself), but I guess they're just trying to be protective," Solway said.