PROVIDENCE, R.I. – A congressman who sends an X-rated photo of himself jeopardizes his reputation and his job. But in many states, teens caught doing the same thing can risk felony charges, jail time and being branded sexual offenders.

That's because a minor who transmits a sexually explicit photo of themselves according to many state laws, is manufacturing and distributing child pornography. Lawmakers across the country, however, now say the problem of teen sexting didn't exist when they enacted harsh punishments for child porn and are considering changes that would ensure minors don't face jail time for youthful mistakes.

"Let's just call this what it is: stupid," said Rhode Island state Rep. Peter Martin, a Democrat from Newport who is sponsoring a bill to downgrade teen sexting from a felony to a juvenile offense. "These are kids we're talking about. I don't think minors should face these severe punishments just for being stupid."

Legislatures in Rhode Island and 20 other states have considered bills this year to adjust penalties for teen sexting, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures. California lawmakers are considering legislation that would enable schools to expel students caught sexting. Florida lawmakers voted to punish teen sexting with a $60 fine and community service.

Lawmakers in New York, where U.S. Rep. Anthony Weiner is embroiled in a sexting scandal, have introduced legislation that would allow judges to send teens who send explicit photos to counseling instead of jail if prosecutors agree they meant no harm.

Studies show that one in five teens has electronically transmitted explicit photos of themselves, and one third say they have received such photos. It's a 21st century update of "I'll show you mine" with one critical difference: lewd photos can be passed on with the push of a button and live forever on the Internet.

"It's an extraordinarily common behavior among kids, like it or not," said Amy Adler, a law professor at New York University who has studied how child pornography laws have been applied to sexting. "I hope lawmakers and prosecutors figure out quickly how to address it, because it's not going away."

Parents and educators are the most likely to discover that a teen has sent or received lewd photos. Even when police or prosecutors get involved, most cases don't result in felony charges. But it has happened.

Six Pennsylvania teens faced felony child pornography charges after police found underage boys swapping nude pictures of female classmates. Three girls were charged with manufacturing and distributing child porn, and three boys were charged with possession. The case ended up in juvenile court, where the teens were sentenced to community service and curfews.

In another Pennsylvania case last year, a federal judge blocked a prosecutor from filing felony charges against teen girls caught in a sexting investigation.

Last month, a Michigan prosecutor announced he had authorized felony charges against three 13- and 14-year-olds caught sexting.

In Rhode Island, a 16-year-old avoided felony charges last summer but pleaded guilty to disorderly conduct and indecent exposure. The boy had shown friends an explicit phone video of himself with a female student. He was sentenced to 200 hours of community service and prohibited from owning a cell phone with a camera for one year.

Prosecutors and judges need more discretion to treat each cast of sexting differently, according to Sherry Capps Cannon, a former principal and high school administrator who recently graduated from Southern University Law Center in Louisiana, where she wrote a law review article examining laws surrounding teen sexting.

There's a big difference, she said, between an adult who emails an explicit photo of a young teen and a 15-year-old who sends such a photo to a boyfriend. But laws in most states make no distinction.

"The law has to acknowledge the intent of the person sending the photo," she said. "Right now, laws designed to protect children are being used to punish them."

The legislation working its way through the Rhode Island General Assembly would make sexting by minors a juvenile offense similar to truancy. The bill has passed the House and awaits a vote in the Senate. Under current law minors who transmit indecent photos of themselves could face criminal penalties including prison time and fines of up to $5,000.

Teens who forward indecent photos of other minors, however, could still face child pornography charges.

State Sen. John Tassoni led a state task force examining cyberbullying and other problems caused by teens using technology in inappropriate ways. He said parents and schools can help stop sexting by reminding students that mistakes committed in cyberspace can have long-lasting, real-world consequences.

But as Weiner's recent case shows, he said, there's no age limit for inappropriate Internet use. And Tassoni doesn't see the problem going away anytime soon.

"I tell these kids that whatever they're putting out there will live forever," said Tassoni, D-Smithfield. "We need to discourage it, but charging them with felonies doesn't seem to be the way to do it."

BUFFALO, N.Y. – Lying on his family room floor with assault weapons trained on him, shouts of "pedophile!" and "pornographer!" stinging like his fresh cuts and bruises, the Buffalo homeowner didn't need long to figure out the reason for the early morning wake-up call from a swarm of federal agents.

That new wireless router. He'd gotten fed up trying to set a password. Someone must have used his Internet connection, he thought.

"We know who you are! You downloaded thousands of images at 11:30 last night," the man's lawyer, Barry Covert, recounted the agents saying. They referred to a screen name, "Doldrum."

"No, I didn't," he insisted. "Somebody else could have but I didn't do anything like that."

"You're a creep ... just admit it," they said.

Law enforcement officials say the case is a cautionary tale. Their advice: Password-protect your wireless router.

Plenty of others would agree. The Sarasota, Fla. man, for example, who got a similar visit from the FBI last year after someone on a boat docked in a marina outside his building used a potato chip can as an antenna to boost his wireless signal and download an astounding 10 million images of child porn, or the North Syracuse, N.Y., man who in December 2009 opened his door to police who'd been following an electronic trail of illegal videos and images. The man's neighbor pleaded guilty April 12.

For two hours that March morning in Buffalo, agents tapped away at the homeowner's desktop computer, eventually taking it with them, along with his and his wife's iPads and iPhones.

Within three days, investigators determined the homeowner had been telling the truth: If someone was downloading child pornography through his wireless signal, it wasn't him. About a week later, agents arrested a 25-year-old neighbor and charged him with distribution of child pornography. The case is pending in federal court.

It's unknown how often unsecured routers have brought legal trouble for subscribers. Besides the criminal investigations, the Internet is full of anecdotal accounts of people who've had to fight accusations of illegally downloading music or movies.

Whether you're guilty or not, "you look like the suspect," said Orin Kerr, a professor at George Washington University Law School, who said that's just one of many reasons to secure home routers.

Experts say the more savvy hackers can go beyond just connecting to the Internet on the host's dime and monitor Internet activity and steal passwords or other sensitive information.

A study released in February provides a sense of how often computer users rely on the generosity — or technological shortcomings — of their neighbors to gain Internet access.

The poll conducted for the Wi-Fi Alliance, the industry group that promotes wireless technology standards, found that among 1,054 Americans age 18 and older, 32 percent acknowledged trying to access a Wi-Fi network that wasn't theirs. An estimated 201 million households worldwide use Wi-Fi networks, according to the alliance.

The same study, conducted by Wakefield Research, found that 40 percent said they would be more likely to trust someone with their house key than with their Wi-Fi network password.

For some, though, leaving their wireless router open to outside use is a philosophical decision, a way of returning the favor for the times they've hopped on to someone else's network to check e-mail or download directions while away from home .

"I think it's convenient and polite to have an open Wi-Fi network," said Rebecca Jeschke, whose home signal is accessible to anyone within range.

"Public Wi-Fi is for the common good and I'm happy to participate in that — and lots of people are," said Jeschke, a spokeswoman for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a San Francisco-based nonprofit that takes on cyberspace civil liberties issues.

Experts say wireless routers come with encryption software, but setting it up means a trip to the manual.

The government's Computer Emergency Readiness Team recommends home users make their networks invisible to others by disabling the identifier broadcasting function that allows wireless access points to announce their presence. It also advises users to replace any default network names or passwords, since those are widely known, and to keep an eye on the manufacturer's website for security patches or updates.

People who keep an open wireless router won't necessarily know when someone else is piggybacking on the signal, which usually reaches 300-400 feet, though a slower connection may be a clue.

For the Buffalo homeowner, who didn't want to be identified, the tip-off wasn't nearly as subtle.

It was 6:20 a.m. March 7 when he and his wife were awakened by the sound of someone breaking down their rear door. He threw a robe on and walked to the top of the stairs, looking down to see seven armed people with jackets bearing the initials I-C-E, which he didn't immediately know stood for Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

"They are screaming at him, 'Get down! Get down on the ground!' He's saying, 'Who are you? Who are you?'" Covert said.

"One of the agents runs up and basically throws him down the stairs, and he's got the cuts and bruises to show for it," said Covert, who said the homeowner plans no lawsuit. When he was allowed to get up, agents escorted him and watched as he used the bathroom and dressed.

The homeowner later got an apology from U.S. Attorney William Hochul and Immigration and Customs Enforcement Special Agent in Charge Lev Kubiak.

But this wasn't a case of officers rushing into the wrong house. Court filings show exactly what led them there and why.

On Feb. 11, an investigator with the Department of Homeland Security, which oversees cybersecurity enforcement, signed in to a peer-to-peer file sharing program from his office. After connecting with someone by the name of "Doldrum," the agent browsed through his shared files for videos and images and found images and videos depicting children engaged in sexual acts.

The agent identified the IP address, or unique identification number, of the router, then got the service provider to identify the subscriber.

Investigators could have taken an extra step before going inside the house and used a laptop or other device outside the home to see whether there was an unsecured signal. That alone wouldn't have exonerated the homeowner, but it would have raised the possibility that someone else was responsible for the downloads.

After a search of his devices proved the homeowner's innocence, investigators went back to the peer-to-peer software and looked at logs that showed what other IP addresses Doldrum had connected from. Two were associated with the State University of New York at Buffalo and accessed using a secure token that UB said was assigned to a student living in an apartment adjacent to the homeowner. Agents arrested John Luchetti March 17. He has pleaded not guilty to distribution of child pornography.

Luchetti is not charged with using his neighbor's Wi-Fi without permission. Whether it was illegal is up for debate.

"The question," said Kerr, "is whether it's unauthorized access and so you have to say, 'Is an open wireless point implicitly authorizing users or not?'

"We don't know," Kerr said. "The law prohibits unauthorized access and it's just not clear what's authorized with an open unsecured wireless."

In Germany, the country's top criminal court ruled last year that Internet users must secure their wireless connections to prevent others from illegally downloading data. The court said Internet users could be fined up to $126 if a third party takes advantage of their unprotected line, though it stopped short of holding the users responsible for illegal content downloaded by the third party.

The ruling came after a musician sued an Internet user whose wireless connection was used to download a song, which was then offered on an online file sharing network. The user was on vacation when the song was downloaded.

SAN FRANCISCO – A certain feeling is back in San Francisco. Murmurings of stock market riches. Twenty-something entrepreneurs as celebrities. Lamborghinis parked next to taco trucks.

Driven by social media and mobile startups, the money is flowing in the city's tech industry again, a decade after the dot-com boom minted overnight millionaires and its crash fueled a local recession worse than anything San Francisco has seen in the latest downturn.

A recent tax break for Twitter and other proposals show city officials are hopeful that this latest tech industry prosperity does not portend another bubble and another bust.

"It seems to be the industry that's leading us out of the recession at the moment," said Ted Egan, the city's chief economist. Even so, he said, "it's certainly not yet another dot-com boom."

At present, the signs do not point clearly to the same excess of optimism that led to the high perch from which the city had so far to fall. But some of the numbers swirling around the tech startup scene could stir a sense of deja vu.

Along with Twitter, the San Francisco startup causing the most excitement is Zynga, maker of popular Facebook games like "FarmVille" and "CityVille." Estimates based on recent investments put the valuations of both companies at $7 billion or more.

Yet unlike the first dot-com era, when companies with neither customers nor a clear way to make money raised millions in public stock offerings, both Twitter and Zynga have become major participants in the online economy.

While Twitter is still tweaking its business model and keeps its revenue figures closely held, the company happily claims 175 million users on its way to becoming a global phenomenon.

Zynga's popularity and approach to money-making are even clearer: It sells virtual goods that players use in the company's online games. Last year, the company made about $400 million doing just that, according to published reports.

"It seems like they're doing things that people want rather than what they think they want," said market researcher Colin Yasukochi of today's startups versus those a decade ago.

In a study for his employer, commercial real estate firm Jones Lange LaSalle, Yasukochi found that the number of tech jobs in San Francisco is nearing the peak set in 2000, the height of the dot-com boom.

Yet the 32,000 tech workers today are occupying about half the commercial real estate space as their 34,000 counterparts before the crash — a possible sign that the estimated 500 tech companies in the city are taking a more conservative approach.

During the first dot-com boom, technology companies were committing to large spaces with the intent of filling them with employees well ahead of their needs, Yasukochi said.

"Obviously that growth never materialized," he said. "That had dire consequences."

Those consequences included an office vacancy rate that shot from less than 5 percent to 25 percent in two years.

Accompanied by the crushing blow of the 9/11 attacks on the city's tourism economy and housing prices that kept rising despite major job losses, the dot-com crash hit San Francisco harder overall than the recent recession, Egan said.

As a result, San Franciscans have reason to fear the bursting of another bubble even as they enjoy the fruits of the tech industry's current good fortune.

The hope is that companies, investors and the city itself have learned enough from past mistakes to avoid irrational exuberance.

The possible signs of a different attitude include a much lower rate of venture capital investment. The greater Silicon Valley saw more than $8.5 billion poured into the software industry during the year 2000 alone, according to Thomson Reuters data. In 2010, the amount was less than $2 billion. Startups are still raising money, but running lean has become fashionable.

Last year, Kevin Systrom, 27, co-founded a company that follows the typical lean San Francisco startup model, though with atypical success. The mobile photo sharing service Instagram launched in October. Since then, he says the service has grown to about 3 million registered users, or an average of a half-million new users each month.

Right now the company has four workers — as Systrom puts it, one non-technical person and one engineer for every million users. Despite raising $7 million from investors, he says the company has no plans to go on a hiring spree or seek to cash in on a quick public stock offering, the stereotypical scenario during the first Internet boom.

"It's about going after the best people in the world who want to build a world-class company," Systrom said. "We are pretty sold at staying lean for quite a while."

Instagram got its start at Dogpatch Labs, a San Francisco workspace where as many as 25 small startups at a time occupy desks for a few months while they try to get consumers and investors interested in their ideas.

Ryan Spoon, 30, oversees Dogpatch Labs for Polaris Venture Partners, a venture capital investment firm. During the first dot-com wave, he founded a company in his dorm room at Duke University to connect high school athletes with college coaches. The website, berecruited.com, is still around today, unlike many others that started at the time.

Spoon says that a big difference between those early days and now is the speed with which social networks can give startups feedback on whether they have a good idea or not. Investors see that feedback, too, meaning they'll have a better sense before they pour money into a company whether it has a chance.

"It's easier faster and cheaper to start and pursue an idea than it's ever been," Spoon said. "It's a fun time."