INTERNET SERVICE PROVIDERS

Fight to cut kiddie porn

Photo: AP

Internet Service Providers have joined the US National Center for Missing and Exploited Children's efforts to protect children.

Traffic in online child pornography continues to grow with servers in Panama often acting as a conduit to perverts around the world

FATIMA ASVAT
fasvatstar@laestrella.com.pa

PANAMA. Traffic in online child pornography has exploded in recent years. The volume of illegal child images seized from computers appear to be doubling each year in the US and servers in Panama act as one of the conduits.

The National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, which is mandated to coordinate the US efforts to combat child pornography, collected more than eight million images of explicit child pornography between 2001 and 2006, leading the Center and the New York State Attorney General Andrew M. Cuomo to tackle the problem at the source.

The Internet source, that is.

They have established Internet Service Providers (ISP) as the new front in the battle against child pornography since 2008.

Verizon, Sprint and Time Warner have agreed to purge their servers of Internet bulletin boards and Web sites nationwide that disseminate child pornography.

The companies agreed to shut down access to newsgroups that traffic in pornographic images of children on one of the oldest outposts of the Internet, known as Usenet.

Usenet began nearly 30 years ago and was one of the earliest ways to swap information online. As the World Wide Web came about, Usenet was mostly left behind, except for those who needed a clandestine outlet to traffic illicit material.

One of the tools used by the companies is a library of more than 11,000 pornographic images. Because the same images are often distributed around online, once investigators catalog an image, they can use digital identifiers to scan for it anywhere else and find other pornographic sites.

Before, Internet providers had customer agreements that discouraged child pornography dissemination.

Verizon, for example, warned its users that they risk losing their service if they transmit or disseminate sexually exploitative images of children.

But an eight-month investigation and sting operation by undercover agents from the Attorney General's office, who posed as subscribers and complained that the ISP was allowing child pornography to proliferate online, were ignored.

The Attorney General's office threatened to press charges of fraud and deceptive business practices, forcing the companies to agree to cooperate.

Time Warner Cable said it will cease to offer customers access to any Usenet newsgroups. Sprint said it would no longer offer any of the tens of thousands of alt.* Usenet newsgroups. Verizon's plan is to eliminate some “fairly broad newsgroup areas.”

This new front in the battle against child pornography represents a new step away from the traditional approach of targeting those who produce child pornography and their customers, seeing as that strategy had limited effectiveness in part because much of the demand in the US is fed by child pornography from abroad.

As much as the new measure might make it extremely more difficult for an average person to find or disseminate the material online, access cannot be eliminated entirely.

Unfortunately, some third-party companies sell paid subscriptions, allowing customers to access newsgroups privately, preventing even the ISP from tracking their activity.

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