Baucus, the ranking Democrat on the Senate Finance Committee, unveiled his plan to attack cyber crime against children Friday and said he intends to introduce some of the plan, "Cyber Safety for Kids," to Congress in the coming weeks.
His plan outlines ways to regulate adult sites by making users verify that they are over age 18 before entering, requiring that banks and other merchants process only those transactions that are age-verified and imposing a mandatory 25 percent tax on access of adult websites. The plan also calls for establishing the .xxx domain specifically for adult sites, as grouping adult sites should keep kids from mistakenly entering them, Baucus said.
A portion of the tax revenue would pay for a 24-hour cyber tip line and a chunk would go for cyber crime enforcement, Baucus said.
The senator also is looking for federal money to establish a state cyber crime task force in both Great Falls and Missoula. Start-up costs are estimated at $250,000 each, Baucus said.
Unlike Montana's current cyber crime task force in Billings, which consists of only FBI agents, the task force in Great Falls and Missoula would involve local and state law enforcement officers, as well as federal agents.
"You get all these people in the same room ... it can be highly effective," Baucus Spokesman Barrett Kaiser said.
With cyber crime on the rise, finding ways to deal with the problem are not always easy, Scott Cruse, FBI supervisory agent, said.
"This is a crime problem where we will never see the bottom," Cruse said. "It is very assiduous and hard to detect."
Often, collecting child pornography or scouring the Internet for child victims eventually leads to sexual assault, Great Falls attorney John Parker said. He added that targeting cyber crime can prevent more serious offenses from occurring, but that law enforcement relies heavily on parents monitoring their children's computer behavior.
Cruse said most victims are between ages 13 and 17. Baucus added that he hopes his initiatives will make it difficult for sexual predators to take advantage of children, especially children who browse the Internet and enter adult websites accidentally.