Parents, police monitoring kids' cell phones
One evening last winter, Mike Harris was watching his local TV news when he saw a segment that caught his attention: Parents were using software to monitor their kids' cell phones.
Harris, an investigator for the Child Sex Internet Investigations Unit in Jefferson County, Colorado, thought the service could be a new tool for combating sexual predators.
Equipping his phone with the software, Harris posed as an underage child on social-networking sites and began luring pedophiles. He immediately got results. Since then, Harris has made 83 arrests of alleged sexual predators -- 44 of them with the help of the monitoring program.
"It makes life easy for me as an investigator. It saves me hours of time, which obviously means I have more time to go out and catch offenders," he said. The software also documents text messages and other data that can be used in court, he said.
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