While Congress considered the nation's financial bailout plan, other significant bills protecting children were being debated, including the Protect Our Children Act of 2008 (POCA) and Keeping the Internet Devoid of Sexual Predators Act (KIDSPA).

The POCA law will increase funding for fighting child pornography by providing law enforcement with $320 million over the next five years, force the Department of Justice to develop a way to fight child pornography, and provide forensic and other resources to help state law enforcement protect children.

PROTECT, the National Association to Protect Children, a children's advocacy group, fought hard for the bill by testifying before Congress, as did talk-show host Oprah Winfrey, who encouraged her viewers to send letters to their state's senators supporting the bill.

Problematic Provisions

The Center for Democracy and Technology (CDT), which promotes democratic values and liberties, believes there are some problems with POCA and some holes in KIDSPA.

John Morris, general counsel and director of CDT's Internet Standards, Technology and Policy Project, said Congress insisted on adding parts of another bill the SAFE Act before the bill would pass. He disagrees with a provision outsourcing investigative responsibilities to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC). He believes the trend in Congress to outsource law-enforcement functions to private groups leads down a dangerous path.

Morris echoed the thoughts of Greir Weeks, PROTECT director, who testified before Congress on the same issue. "It would be inappropriate at best to house a database containing records on hundreds of thousands of U.S. citizens and millions of crimes in private or corporate hands, or to outsource such a core law-enforcement function," Weeks said. "We encourage you to exercise close oversight of the Department of Justice as it makes these decisions over the coming year."

Another problem provision, according to Morris, is a blacklist that NCMEC runs with Internet service providers.

"Although the program might have been desirable (and probably avoided constitutional concerns because NCMEC is private), now that Congress has authorized the program it runs smack into the clear constitutional prohibition against a governmental blacklist of content under a long line of 'prior restraint' cases," Morris said. "Congress did make clear that NCMEC's blacklist could only be used for a very narrow category of child pornography, but this narrowing of the program does not avoid its clear unconstitutionality."

Dangerous Holes

Morris saw problems in KIDSPA as well. That law creates a national registry of sex offenders' e-mail addresses and allows social-networking services such as MySpace and Facebook to use the list to screen out sex offenders.

Morris said the definition of a "social network " in the bill is too broad and will be used to impose regulations on Web sites. Another problem, writes Morris in his blog, is that sex offenders who want to break the terms of their release by contacting minors can do so by simply creating new e-mail addresses.

A far more effective approach Congress could have taken would have been to allow probation officers to limit the ability of sex offenders to access social networks, according to Morris.