pornography19

For years, carefully trained volunteers with Wired Kids Inc., a nonprofit
organization devoted to online consumer safety, scoured the Web in search of
child pornography. They frequently found the illicit images and videos, and
passed tips to law-enforcement personnel about the Web sites and chat rooms
where they're exchanged. All too often, however, nothing happened. Frustrated
that the group's efforts were wasted, Wired Kids' executive director and founder,
Parry Aftab, has decided to pull back from the gumshoe work of proactively
seeking child pornography and concentrate instead on public education and
awareness. "The magnitude of the problem is so big that law enforcement can no
longer even put a dent in it," Aftab says. "I'm tired of having people work and
nothing happen." The statistics bear out Aftab's concern. The National Center for
Missing and Exploited Children's CyberTipline logged a 39% increase in reports of
possession, creation, or distribution of child pornography in 2004, the seventh
consecutive year child-pornography incidents have trended upward since the
federally funded group set up its 24-hour hot line in 1998. "The problem is getting
bigger," says Staca Urie, a supervisor with the center. Ironically, the proliferation
of child pornography is fueled by the same trend that's enriching the lives of
children around the world: advances in computer technology and the global
reach of the Web. In the same way that spam is an unwanted side effect of online
correspondence, the widespread distribution of child pornography is an ugly
by-product of digital technology. Encryption, key-chain storage devices,
peer-to-peer networks, and Internet relay chat are used by child pornographers
and pedophiles to correspond and share their illegal content with
stomach-turning efficiency. That makes child pornography a problem the
technology industry can't ignore--and it isn't. Microsoft, for instance, is
investigating whether Windows can be designed to resist storing child
pornography. Computer Associates, Sun Microsystems, and other vendors
contribute resources to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children.
And America Online and Yahoo both put "a tremendous amount of time and
expertise into solving this problem," says Aftab, who also writes a column for
InformationWeek (see "The Privacy Lawyer: The Pain Behind The Pictures").
What's more, as the problem grows, so do the chances that IT departments will
have to deal with it. According to the National Conference of State Legislators,
which provides research to state policy-makers, at least four states--Arkansas,
Missouri, South Carolina, and South Dakota--have enacted laws that require IT
technicians to report suspected child pornography if they encounter it in the
course of their work, and Oklahoma has drafted a similar bill. "There are a lot of
corporations that learn about this stuff" by finding it on company computers,
Aftab says. Products like Secure Computing Corp.'s SmartFilter let system
administrators investigate, by content category, the Web pages visited by
employees, with child pornography in the "extreme" category. Law-enforcement
agencies around the world are trying hard to track down the perpetrators. The
Department of Homeland Security's U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement,
the FBI, the Internal Revenue Service, the U.S. Postal Inspection Service,
state-level Internet Crimes Against Children task forces, and officials in other
countries collaborate on child-pornography investigations. Interpol and the
International Center For Missing And Exploited Children, with $1 million in
funding from Microsoft and philanthropist Sheila Johnson, are hosting a series of
seminars in Europe, Asia, and Africa to train police in what to do.

Using PCs and Google, investigators easily found child porn, Susan Cantor says.

Photo by Ben Baker/Redux

One of the most successful crackdowns to date, known as the Falcon case, has
resulted in more than 1,000 arrests in 13 countries, and the two-year pursuit isn't
over. It was launched in February 2003, when Immigration and Customs
Enforcement agents, using nothing more than PCs and Google Inc.'s search
engine, quickly found their way to Web sites that charged from $49.95 to $79.95
per month for access to databases full of child pornography. "It's really, really
easy," Immigration supervisory special agent Susan Cantor says. "We were
immediately brought to those sites." Rather than target just the Web-site
operators, investigators decided to go after the Internet billing company that kept
them in business, Regpay Co. Ltd., in Minsk, Belarus, and Connections USA Inc., a
credit-card processor in Fort Lauderdale, Fla. After being extradited from other
countries in Europe, where they were lured by investigators, three Regpay
officials now sit in New Jersey jails facing charges of online child pornography
and money laundering. Their trial in U.S. federal court is scheduled to begin next
month. The president of Connections USA will be tried there, too. The Falcon case
illustrates the international nature of the child-porn infrastructure. The IP
addresses of the child-porn sites led investigators to servers operated by
Rackspace Managed Hosting, based in San Antonio, Texas. Regpay was a
Rackspace customer; Rackspace itself has not been implicated. Using search
warrants, investigators obtained copies of the hard drives on those servers, and
they hit the jackpot: The electronic records of 100,000 transactions conducted in
the first six months of 2003, including credit-card information and other data that
could be traced back to individual subscribers. "That's where we turned over the
leaves," Cantor says. In tracking down individual consumers of the child
pornography, Falcon investigators put a priority on going after those who are in
frequent contact with children, including a grade-school teacher, a pediatrician, a
minister at an all-girls school, and a camp counselor. The latest suspect: a
high-school social-studies teacher in Buffalo, N.Y., arrested Feb. 3 and alleged to
have stored more than 400 child-porn images on his home computer.