FROM THE EDITORS December 31, 2007 Issue

SAFE FROM CYBERWORLD CRIME

ABOUT A YEAR AGO, Megan, a teenage girl from Dardenne Prairie, Missouri, became the target of an e-mail hoax attacking her character. It eventually led Megan to commit suicide. The perpetrator wasn't shadowy cyber-predator, but a neighbor—the mother of another teenager, who apparently felt driven to know what Megan was saying about her own daughter.

Just as Johannes Gutenberg may not have foreseen how his invention of movable type sometimes would be used for base and destructive purposes, the innovators who first conceived the network-linked computers we've come to know as the Internet may never have foreseen its potential misuse, even for malicious attacks and criminal acts.

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