In my last column, I described the arrest of Dr. X, an 83-year-old former college president, counselor and minister, by a small-town police sergeant for agreeing to meet a supposed 16-year-old boy with whom he had discussed sexual issues in an America Online chat room. Dr. X, who says he agreed to the meeting as part of counseling the boy, is charged with "indecent solicitation of a child."

The "16-year-old" turned out to be a police officer from Channonhan, Ill., population 8,000, who had gone to great lengths to arrange this meeting with a reluctant Dr. X.

As I noted last week, child pornography is booming throughout the Internet. Law enforcement agencies have been unable to combat this onslaught. Instead, they present the illusion of enforcement by periodically offering up a few foolish, often nearly senile AOL chat room surfers as sacrifices. This way, the public can sleep peacefully, believing the problem is under control.

Philip Jenkins, distinguished professor of history and religious studies at Pennsylvania State University and author of Moral Panic - Changing Concepts of the Child Molester in Modern America (Yale University Press, 1998), is just completing an ambitious study of child pornography and child predators/molesters. With the development of an open, global computer network, professional pornographers and predators are serving up a veritable smorgasbord of illicit products.

Predators Real and Imagined

Since even viewing child pornography is illegal, Jenkins had to study the taboo subject while never allowing illegal images to be processed by his computer. Still, he was able to find his way into chat rooms, bulletin boards and Web sites where he could read descriptions of child pornography and monitor the words of pedophiles and predators.

In an article in the Centre Daily Times of State College, Pennsylvania, describing a case almost identical to that of Dr. X., Jenkins wrote that in the vast majority of cases involving the arrests of individuals caught trying to set up offline assignations with supposed children who turn out to be Federal Bureau of Investigation agents or local cops, ". . . the men caught in these stings pose very little danger precisely because they are so incompetent, so lax in security."

Real predators know better, Jenkins said. The discussions in the chat rooms where "the serious pornographers and pedophiles discuss these matters" focus heavily on examining the kinds of slipups that result in people being arrested, he said. They almost never trade child porn online, knowing that the other party might be a cop.

"Virtually all child porn arrests derive from novices breaking this rule," Jenkins said.

For the same reason, he said, the hard-core predators never interact - virtually or physically - with "children" they meet online. "No serious or experienced Internet predator would do any of the things that [Dr. X] is accused of doing, which just seems like an invitation to be caught," Jenkins wrote.

Keystone Cops vs. Savvy Perverts

There has been significant achievement in privacy enhancement, triggered in large measure as a defense against the seemingly insatiable appetites of governments, police agencies and businesses to know everything about us - and to allow nothing about "them" to see the light of day.

These "cloaking technologies" are designed to stymie government and police agencies.

There are inexpensive programs such as "zero-knowledge" protocols that enable users to create pseudonyms for chatting anonymously, to send e-mail that has been encrypted, and to mask the identity and locations of their computers so the senders are obscured. Other tools include ChatBuddy, which enables a user to choose pseudonyms for conversations on Internet Relay Chat; Eraser, which permanently removes all traces of files from a hard drive; IDzap, which removes sensitive information that Internet-based businesses attempt to pry from the machines of Web surfers; and PrivacyX.com, which secures and encrypts e-mail.

There is more and better stuff on the way. Steganography - the ability to hide secret messages in other messages, so that the secret's very existence is concealed - is a new twist on an old concept. Nontransferable, self-destructing e-mail is another option.

In other words, child pornographers and hard-core pedophiles have a virtual arsenal of legitimate technologies for evading police detection. They know how not to get caught.

Harder Targets

Illinois offers a good example of how law enforcement agencies snow the public with the illusion of enforcement. The prosecutions of online pedophiles are handled by the Illinois High-Tech Criminal Investigations Unit, which includes a team of four prosecutors in the state attorney general's office, two forensics experts, civilian employees and an investigations unit made up of sworn police officers. All this firepower has resulted in prosecuting fewer than eight cases per year for the last three years. Most of the defendants have been, like

Dr. X, foolish or naëve AOL users, not dangerous criminals.

It's one thing for Illinois and other states to devote millions of dollars to enticing aging fools out of chat rooms and into jail, but it's quite another to deal with the challenge of dangerous online criminals, whether they be predator pedophiles or money launderers. It remains to be seen how long citizens and taxpayers will be sated by this clumsy sleight of hand being passed off as effective enforcement.