A Seekonk (Mass.) Public Library patron plead ed guilty January 28 to crossing state lines from Rhode Island to have sex with a 12-year-old girl—actually, an undercover FBI agent that Norman K. Foster, 45, met in a chat room. Foster was arrested June 22, 2001, after instructing the “girl” via e-mail sent from a Seekonk library computer to meet him at the library. Sentencing, which is scheduled for May 3, could carry a maximum penalty of 80 years imprisonment and as much as $750,000 in fines.
Seekonk library workers called authorities last June after finding discarded sexually explicit printouts of teenage girls near the workstation Foster had used, according to the January 30 Pawtucket (R.I.) Times. The library does not use filtering software, which Director Roberta A. E. Cairns explained at the time to the Providence Journal “would have done nothing to stop this guy.”
Such cases have apparently failed to impress the Traditional Values Coalition of libraries’ vigilance. TVC has launched an online petition drive to gather litigants who feel “personally victimized by pornography in a public library” for “a series of class-action lawsuits against libraries refusing to filter pornography.” The family-values advocacy group cites the unrelated arrests of two men who consumed child pornography at filter-free libraries and a third who molested a child as proof that young patrons aren’t safe without blocking software.
Posted February 4, 2002.