Print

Email story

Comment

Email editor

Porn arrests illustrate problem

By ASSOCIATED PRESS
Published February 8, 2007

The numbers behind an international child pornography bust Wednesday were themselves disturbing: Nearly 2,400 suspects from 77 countries allegedly paid to view videos depicting sexual abuse online. But the nature of Internet traffic makes it unsurprising that people would figure they could hide so much hideous material.

Finding and stamping out such content "is needle-in-a-haystack work," said Carole Theriault, a security consultant with Sophos PLC in London.

Austrian authorities said an employee of a Vienna-based Internet file-hosting service approached his national Interior Ministry last July with word that he had noticed the pornographic material during a routine scan.

The videos showed "the worst kind of child sexual abuse," said Austrian Interior Minister Guenther Platter.

Lead investigator Harald Gremel said the videos were online for at most a day before they were discovered. The Austrian Internet service employee blocked access and recorded the computer addresses of people who tried to download the material and gave the details to authorities.

Within 24 hours, investigators recorded more than 8,000 hits from 2,361 computer addresses in 77 countries, including the United States, according to Gremel.

Gremel said investigators believe the videos were shot in Eastern Europe and uploaded to the Web from Britain. A link to the videos was posted on a Russian Web site and hosted on a server in Austria. Some of the material was free, but the Russian site charged $89 for access for a "members only" section.

Because cases like this are not uncommon - in 2003, German investigators said they broke up child-porn rings that involved 26,500 suspect Internet users around the world - industry and governments have proposed prevention methods.

Wednesday, a bipartisan group of senators and members of Congress introduced revised legislation that would require Internet companies to do more to report child pornography discovered on their networks. Attorney General Alberto Gonzales has called on Internet companies to lengthen the time they hold onto logs of their customers' Internet use.

Five top Internet companies did announce last June that they would be compiling a database of child-porn images and developing other tools making it easier for network managers and law enforcement to detect such material.

[Last modified February 8, 2007, 00:30:27]