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Given
the speed with which online gambling in the US has been tackled are
there any logical, or commercial, reasons why legislation cannot
be passed to ban credit card transactions for child porn?
The war on Internet Child Abuse
Matthew Jones 24 10 2006
The United States and Russia host the bulk of the world's child abuse websites, according to a British-based Internet monitoring group which identifies the United Kingdom as one of the countries with the best enforcement records. The Internet Watch Foundation (IWF) reported on Tuesday that 51% of child abuse content was traced back to the United States and 20% to Russia. This compared with just 0,2% of potentially illegal content that appears to be hosted in Britain, down from 18% in 1997. "The UK has benefited from a concerted effort from the online industry which has sought to take down these websites and from the authorities which have demonstrated a determination to tackle the problem," said the IWF's Peter Robbins. "In Britain, hosts are told about content and told to take it down. Additionally the government has done its part in bringing in tough legislation," the group's chief executive told Reuters. New laws enacted in 2003 introduced the application of reverse burden of proof -- people have to prove they are innocent if they have downloaded obscene material. The British authorities were also very active in arresting and prosecuting individuals as part of Operation Ore, an international police operation targeting viewers of child abuse images. That the United States has such a high proportion of abuse websites is partly attributed to the fact the country has a large number of internet users, servers and ISPs. The enforcement approach also differs from the British model. In the United States law enforcement officials prefer to track down the people behind the websites by leaving them live for a period. In contrast, British police shut down the websites first and then track down the perpetrators using computer records. Robbins said the problem in Russia was a lack of any centralised authority to take ownership of the problem. He said there was no hotline that people could use to report websites. In total, more than 31 000 sites with abusive material have been removed since 1996 when the IWF was set up, but challenges remain. The growth of pay-per-view sites was worrying because they tend to be more technologically sophisticated and keep moving around the world to avoid being shut down. They also often host the most extreme images. "Some of these websites have been bragging about how they have been around since 1995/1996. We have got to track them down and then shut them down," Robbins said. - Reuters WENDY KOCH, USA TODAY
23.10.06
As
pedophiles swarm the Internet, an unprecedented war against child
pornography is intensifying.
She says high-profile cases such as that of John Mark Karr, the former suspect in the JonBenet Ramsey slaying, have made the public realize that pornographic pictures of children are crime-scene photos. Karr was freed from a California jail this month after 5-year-old charges of possessing child porn were thrown out when police said that evidence had disappeared. "There is a lot of unprecedented activity. It's just meeting the escalating problem," says Drew Oosterbaan, chief of the Justice Department's child exploitation section. In the past four months: • President Bush signed a bill to increase the number of prosecutors, computer forensic examiners and federal-state task forces assigned to child porn. It tripled to $150,000 the maximum penalty for downloading child porn and allows adults photographed when they were kids to sue those who buy, sell or distribute the photos. • The National Center for Missing & Exploited Children launched a victim identification lab to share pornographic photos - with graphic details obscured - with police agencies nationwide. The goal: Find victims by identifying background elements in a picture that will lead to the location of abuse. • Five Internet service providers, criticized by such lawmakers as Democratic Rep. Bart Stupak of Michigan for not doing enough, announced they will build a database. The companies - AOL, Yahoo, Microsoft, Earthlink and United Online - will give each picture a signature and then scan their sites for matches. • The National Center has begun giving daily notices of every reported porn site to Internet service providers registered with its CyberTipline. If police are not investigating the site, a company can close it or block subscriber access. • Credit card firms representing 87 percent of the U.S. market have formed a coalition to let police and the National Center know about porn sites their customers use. The aim: End the profit by 2008 by making arrests and closing pornographers' accounts. • Public service ads that teach kids and parents how to recognize a pedophile's online lures are being funded by, among others, the Justice Department and MySpace.com, a Web site popular with teens. A study by the University of New Hampshire found that 34 percent of kids 10-17 saw unwanted sexual material online in the past year, up from 25 percent five years ago. Growth
of Internet a factor
Despite all the activity, those on the front lines say they are losing
the war against child pornography."The images are propagating faster than we can police. It's far worse than people realize," says Wyoming police investigator Flint Waters. He co-chairs the technology committee of the Internet Crimes Against Children program, a network of 46 regional task forces. In the past 24 months, Waters says, the task forces have identified 6.5 million pornographic pictures of children online, up from 3,600 three years ago. Forty percent originated in the United States. "We're constantly playing catch-up," says Waters, who has developed software that identifies the location of porn distributors. "The funding hasn't kept up with the problem. If you quadruple my funding, I still couldn't keep up." A key reason is that much child porn isn't about money but pedophilia, the sexual attraction to kids. Many images are traded free like baseball cards. "It's an extension of child molestation - another sick feature," says inspector Jane Wilcox of the Toronto Sex Crimes Unit, which worked with the U.S. Justice Department to bust a porn ring in March that included a Sunday school teacher, a soccer referee, a mailman and a computer software engineer. In a chat room they used, a man broadcast a live video of himself molesting an 11-month-old baby. Few victims report the abuse. Of more than 800 online child porn victims identified by the National Center, Collins says only about 30 blew the whistle. She says some are too young to describe what happened. Others are afraid.
The Internet's seeming anonymity lures otherwise law-abiding men to child porn, says Patrick Carnes, author of "In the Shadows of the Net: Breaking Free of Compulsive Online Sexual Behavior." He calls the Internet the "crack cocaine" of sex addiction: "It moves people into areas they would not otherwise go." Carnes says users may be emotionally immature. "At heart, they're still 14," he says. Online, he says, they find others who share their interests and, feeling validated, soon become heavy viewers. More than 99 percent of those arrested for possessing child porn are men, according to a 2005 study funded by the Justice Department. Most, 83 percent, had images of prepubescent kids; 80 percent had pictures of sexual penetration. Predators
savvy
Another reason online child porn is difficult to stop is that predators
are adept at avoiding detection.Police are "right to feel outgunned. It's not only a matter of resources but of skill," says Philip Jenkins, author of "Beyond Tolerance: Child Pornography on the Internet." He says child pornographers started using the Internet in the early 1980s, a 20-year head start on police, and they know how to cover their cybertracks. Some pedophiles use private Internet radio stations and chat groups to trade ideas on evading detection. If credit card companies close their accounts, some move to alternate online payment services. They set up "modeling" sites featuring scantily clad young girls in seductive poses and contend that such sites are legal because they do not show genitalia, but people operating such sites have been prosecuted. Sheila Sellinger of Indiana pleaded guilty this year to selling pornographic images of a 10-year-old girl. She got an 11-year prison sentence. Predators entice kids with gifts and compliments to post provocative pictures of themselves online. "The seduction was slow. Each request only went a bit further than the last," Justin Berry, 19, told a congressional panel in April. When he was 13, he testified, men he met online asked him to film himself with his shirt off. He did so with his webcam, and they sent him money and gifts in the mail. For five years, he ran a porn site viewed by more than a thousand men who paid him to strip naked, masturbate and have sex with female prostitutes on camera. At least two men have been charged, including Gregory Mitchell, who was sentenced in July to 150 years in prison. Prosecution can be challenging. Sometimes evidence is lacking, because few Internet companies keep information on users' e-mail and Web site visits for long. Attorney General Alberto Gonzales has asked companies to retain such data, but some have balked over questions of cost and customers' privacy. Some pornographers use Web-hosting or domain registry companies to set up sites. Unlike Internet service providers, they are not required to report porn to police. Some pornographers are based overseas. Most countries don't consider possessing child porn a crime, and 122 have no laws against distributing it online, according to the International Centre for Missing & Exploited Children in Alexandria, Va. Organized crime is involved in some of those global operations, says Carlos Ortiz, a former assistant U.S. attorney in Newark who tracked down a Florida company called Connections USA that was processing $1 million a month in credit card purchases of child porn and sending the money to a company in Belarus. The investigation led to more than 1,200 arrests. Santa
was a predator
"I'm really worried. It's tough
to find a technical fix," says investigator Waters, who is
trying to refine his software so it can track an image's distribution.Hours spent looking at disturbing images are "brutal," he says. To cheer him, his wife hung a photo in his office of a man dressed as Santa Claus holding their two kids. Shortly after the picture was taken, Waters discovered the man trying to lure teen girls online. "We're always faced with problems that are bigger than we can address," says Justice Department's Drew Oosterbaan. He says the department is trying to use existing resources more effectively. "Is it enough? Probably not." Still, a growth in arrests provides hope, says David Finkelhor, director of the Crimes Against Children Research Center at the University of New Hampshire. "As more people get caught, others may get very nervous, and we may see a slowdown in traffic." While there is a steady focus on mobile and wireless security from a PC and ICT (information and communication technology) infrastructure point of view, the business sector has to pay a lot more attention to the mobile phone. This is according to Christo van Staden, director at Carrick Holdings, a local provider of IT security services and solutions. The company's parent/child online safety campaign, in the form of Safekids (www.safekids.co.za) has received numerous calls from concerned parents and guardians about cellphone usage and how best to supervise the situation. Emergency use "Many parents have enquired as to how to control their children's use of the cellphone. The reality is that a cellphone can be used in emergency and parents want to provide their children with this tool in the event they need to be contacted urgently. Unfortunately, as with any technology, including the Internet, these devices are open to abuse," explains Annette Carrick, chairperson of the Safekids initiative. The company is using Safekids to generate further awareness in the market around the need to keep safe. Van Staden points to the recent spate of incidents at school that are being recorded by pupils on their cellphones, many of whom have the intention of exploiting any commercial value the footage may have. Unscrupulous providers He also points to reports of unscrupulous service providers that hook unsuspecting youngsters into cellphone-service related contracts and cyber criminals that source personal data via unauthorised access to mobile phones. In many instances, access is gained from users replying to SMS or MMS and other forms of direct mobile communication. The market has been quick to take advantage of this surge in mobile phone interaction and there are now established companies offering related services including MXit, an instant messaging exchange program for cellphones. This particular service allows users to send and receive text messages to and from phones and PCs connected to the Internet. "The cellphone is essentially a machine or computer in its own right and, in most cases, has minimal security. Generally speaking, users tend to ignore or forget about the fact that they are engaging with the public. The security factor is significant, given the rate at which new features are being converged into cellphone and the extent to which users download, use and swap material. This trend continues to sweep across the mobile phone frontier and makes purchasing mobile product very appealing," adds Van Staden. Definitive "It is interesting to note that the cell phone has really become the definitive digital lifestyle technology piece. People use the mobile phone to take photographs, to email, fax and listen to music, watch video clips and surf the Web. This level of digital interaction may be very popular and innocent in most cases, but the problem comes in with unsupervised or unregulated use. Aside from the cost factor, there is a very real security threat to having unchecked mobile connectivity," Van Staden continues. Recent media reports have highlighted the disturbing ease with which so-called 'loan sharks' are targeting the youth market with 'amazing' airtime deals. Although Carrick's core business focus is IT security and comprehensive service provision, the company has a vested interest in helping to instil higher levels of security across all IT infrastructure. "The mobile and wireless market is expanding at a rapid rate. The mobile phone is a critical tool for the mobile professional and serves as an immediate connection to a company and its database. Our role is to ensure the user is protected against external threats and this principle applies just as much to the mobile phone user as it does to the individual sitting behind a desktop," concludes Van Staden. See also Combating child pornography on the Internet Why won't internet bosses stamp out web porn? |
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