This story appeared in the July/August 2004 issue of Web Host Industry Review magazine. Click here to subscribe for free.
June 16, 2004 -- (WEB HOST INDUSTRY REVIEW) -- Officials from the UK, Australia and the US are increasing their presence online, collaborating in an international effort to capture pedophiles operating on the Internet.
Jim Gamble, assistant chief constable for the UK National Crime Squad (nationalcrimesquad.police.co.uk) says the organizations intend to place a round-the-clock law enforcement presence on the Internet by getting more officers active in chat rooms and by helping to find and prosecute pedophiles who view and trade child pornography online.
Law enforcement is calling on ISPs and Web hosts to help officials track down the plague of pedophiles that abuse and exploit children using the Internet. But Web hosts also have the privacy of users in general to keep in mind, which, in combination with a fear of reporting all incidents to law enforcement, makes the issue particularly difficult.
"[ISPs and Web hosts] are in an uneasy position," says Frost & Sullivan (frost.com) senior analyst Mukul Krishna. "They have to protect the privacy of the user, but they also have a responsibility to work for the larger society and community. They have to sort of balance the two."
Citing recent talks at the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe conference over the issue of online hate sites and their hosts ? where some European leaders such as French Foreign Minister Michel Barnier called for more responsibility from providers ? Krishna says there is more value in tracking such racist sites than in taking them down.
However, when it comes to pedophiles, Krishna says the sites must clearly come down and their users must be aggressively prosecuted, adding his praise for international efforts to increase law enforcement's presence in the world of child porn.
"No one considers [child porn] free speech," Krishna says. "It's a simple black and white situation. There are so many shades of gray in other situations."
The latest effort involves putting a police presence, and possibly a logo, in Internet chat rooms to assure users that the police may be perusing and protecting users from predatory participants. The idea is to discourage pedophiles from communicating with and possibly luring children into harm either online or, as has increasingly been the case, offline. Late last year, the UK's National Crime Squad also collaborated with nations, including the US, Canada and Australia, and Interpol on a sting operation to trap pedophiles.
Certainly, the Web hosting and wider industry is on board to help law enforcement root out pedophiles that use the Internet to exploit and prey upon children, but how much responsibility can service providers take? Krishna agrees that with running multiple servers, updating a lot of content, and the basic resources expended on providing reliable, redundant hosting, Web hosts have little left to expend on screening or spying on content.
"That is their business model -- they host," he says. "They don't have the resources to monitor all of the Web sites they have. It's physically impossible for any ISP or hosting service to keep track of all of their resources. The best they can do is look into complaints they get and work with law enforcement." Krishna says closer interaction is enabling law enforcement, beyond just monitoring, to work with the industry to determine what warrants action. He refers to the practice of providers hiring former law enforcement officers to help them respond appropriately to both incidents and the police.
Stewart Baker, an attorney and partner with Washington DC-based Internet and technology law firm Steptoe & Johnson (steptoe.com), says the days when law enforcement agencies would seize machines from service providers are pretty much over, and there is generally good cooperation between providers and police. However, says Baker, it is difficult for both hosts and law enforcement to keep track of a moving pedophile target.
"My impression," he says, "is that practically all of the use of Web hosts [for child porn] is unwitting and it's not uncommon for people to set something up for three days and take it down again. When it's that fast, by the time there's a complaint, the material is gone."
Baker ? who suggests companies continue their own efforts to discourage child porn and abuse, and respond to alerts from users and police ? said international cooperation will be key to putting down pedophiles. "There are differences in procedure and legal standards and investigation that really have to be worked out almost country by country," Baker says. "There is a substantial amount of jurisdiction. But the English-speaking countries have gotten pretty good at talking with each other and the other European jurisdictions are also responsive."
