Congress sending child porn bills to president

The House on Friday passed by 418-0 a measure clarifying that images obtained over the Internet were subject to federal interstate commerce laws. The bill was in response to a federal court ruling that prosecutors must show that images kept on a computer had crossed state lines.

"This legislation closes the jurisdictional loophole that allowed a guilty man to escape punishment," said Rep. Nancy Boyda, D-Kan., the bill's sponsor.

The same legislation contained another bill sponsored by Rep. Christopher Carney, D-Pa., that would allow prosecutors to include money laundering as a tool in child pornography cases. That would fix another loophole that has allowed Internet users to evade child pornography laws by not downloading or saving the images.

The House was also scheduled to take up legislation, passed by the Senate on Thursday, that would provide federal funds to create a nationwide network of trained law enforcement experts to address the problem of child exploitation.

The legislation, sponsored by Sen. Joe Biden, D-Del., requires the Justice Department to develop a national strategy to fight child exploitation. It also requires the attorney general to set up a grant program to ensure that local agencies have the resources needed to create robust cyber units with highly trained investigators.

The bill contains a proposal by Sen. Charles Schumer, D-N.Y., to require more electronic service providers to report online child pornography and make failure to report known child pornography a federal crime.

Currently, Internet service providers are required to report child pornography to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children. The legislation would expand those companies with reporting obligations to include search engines such as Google and Yahoo!, social networking sites such as Facebook and MySpace, domain name registrars and wireless phone carriers.

These companies would not be required to monitor Web sites, but the legislation would triple fines for knowing failure to report child pornography.

___