The Times: Tracking illegal porn sites
By David Rowan
IT DOES not take long to locate child pornography on the internet: 0.12 seconds, according to the Google search engine. Using a home computer and a dial-up telephone line, users simply type in a few phrases that in the past have brought paedophile websites to the attention of police.
Beyond the graphically descriptive Google results pages, users are just a mouse-click away from entering an easily accessible criminal underworld, though many of the 129,000 web pages that the search engine discovered belonged to anti-pornography campaign groups. Far more efficient searches involve specific paedophile buzzwords or phrases documenting particular forms of abuse.
What worries police and prosecutors is that for each site they close, hundreds more are on standby in countries such as Russia and Tonga to meet a lucrative global demand.
Normally, those visiting an illegal website can be identified by the address allocated to their particular computer, even if they do not provide an e-mail address or credit card details. For that reason, some child-porn businesses promise a measure of anonymity to their clients. This was a key selling point of an online child-porn ring run by Thomas Reedy, a Texan computer consultant, who was jailed for 1,335 years in 2001 after a police investigation known as Operation Avalanche.
His network, which operated out of three continents, had 250,000 subscribers, and made almost £1 million a month by offering to protect users' identities as they visited sites based in Russia and Indonesia.
When the US Attorney-General, John Ashcroft, announced that the ring had been broken, he lamented that "the profit-driven purveyors of child pornography" had often "outgunned and out-teched" law enforcement agencies.
The Internet Watch Foundation, which polices the net, has urged internet service providers to block access to 50 newsgroups linked to paedophilia, but some providers argue it is not their role to monitor the net for illegal content.
(The Times, January 13 2003)
IT DOES not take long to locate child pornography on the internet: 0.12 seconds, according to the Google search engine. Using a home computer and a dial-up telephone line, users simply type in a few phrases that in the past have brought paedophile websites to the attention of police.
Beyond the graphically descriptive Google results pages, users are just a mouse-click away from entering an easily accessible criminal underworld, though many of the 129,000 web pages that the search engine discovered belonged to anti-pornography campaign groups. Far more efficient searches involve specific paedophile buzzwords or phrases documenting particular forms of abuse.
What worries police and prosecutors is that for each site they close, hundreds more are on standby in countries such as Russia and Tonga to meet a lucrative global demand.
Normally, those visiting an illegal website can be identified by the address allocated to their particular computer, even if they do not provide an e-mail address or credit card details. For that reason, some child-porn businesses promise a measure of anonymity to their clients. This was a key selling point of an online child-porn ring run by Thomas Reedy, a Texan computer consultant, who was jailed for 1,335 years in 2001 after a police investigation known as Operation Avalanche.
His network, which operated out of three continents, had 250,000 subscribers, and made almost £1 million a month by offering to protect users' identities as they visited sites based in Russia and Indonesia.
When the US Attorney-General, John Ashcroft, announced that the ring had been broken, he lamented that "the profit-driven purveyors of child pornography" had often "outgunned and out-teched" law enforcement agencies.
The Internet Watch Foundation, which polices the net, has urged internet service providers to block access to 50 newsgroups linked to paedophilia, but some providers argue it is not their role to monitor the net for illegal content.
(The Times, January 13 2003)
posted by David Rowan at Monday, January 13, 2003
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