[Congressional Record Volume 149, Number 170 (Friday, November 21, 2003)]
[Extensions of Remarks]
[Page E2368]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]


                  STOP PEER-TO-PEER USE BY PAEDOPHILES

                                 ______
                                 

                          HON. JOSEPH R. PITTS

                            of pennsylvania

                    in the house of representatives

                      Thursday, November 20, 2003

  Mr. PITTS. Mr. Speaker, I submit the following for the Record:

                   [From the Guardian, Nov. 4, 2003]

     Special Investigation--Race To Save New Victims of Child Porn

                           (By Audrey Gillan)

       Paedophiles are swapping thousands of hardcore images of 
     child sex abuse in a new form of computer child pornography 
     that police believe is feeding a demand for more real-time 
     victims of abuse.
       The Guardian has established that the demand for child porn 
     through the use of file-sharing technology--normally 
     associated with swapping music and movies--has grown so 
     rapidly that law enforcement agencies are now employed in a 
     global race to track down the children who are being abused. 
     Some of the children, police believe, are being abused on a 
     daily basis to provide a constant supply of new computerised 
     material.
       Senior officers have revealed that the scale of peer-to-
     peer traffic in illegal images of children now dwarfs almost 
     any other paedophile network they have encountered. The 
     images are generally more extreme and at least 20% of the 
     users are what police class as Category One, meaning that the 
     suspect is ``of significant risk to children''.
       But resources available to police to tackle peer-to-peer 
     child porn are limited and though they are catching some 
     offenders, it may take months or even years to track down the 
     location of some victims. In such cases, officers monitoring 
     the images can only watch as the children grow older and 
     continue to be abused.
       Many of those addicted to child porn have flocked to peer-
     to-peer file sharing software such as KaZaA, Morpheus and 
     Grokster because they are free so, crucially, users do not 
     have to leave any credit card details, leading them to 
     believe that they cannot be traced. The explosion in file 
     sharing, driven by the demand for music files, has also made 
     the technology readily accessible, quick and easy to use.
       It also has the attraction of not requiring the users to be 
     part of a traditional organised paedophile ring using 
     password-protected, covert means to distribute images; rather 
     peer-to-peer technology allows them direct access into the 
     hard drives of other paedophiles' computers with no third 
     party authority monitoring content as is the case with chat 
     rooms and news groups.
       Scotland Yard officers have told the Guardian that they 
     stumbled across this phenomenon by accident during another 
     inquiry and say they have been stunned by its exponential 
     growth. They believe the phenomenon is more alarming than 
     previous internet-related cases, such as the high-profile 
     Operation Ore.
       The Met's child protection hi-tech crime unit has already 
     built a list of 800 suspects involved in file swapping 
     illegal images in the UK alone. While most are involved only 
     in sharing or downloading the images, a significant 
     proportion are active abusers producing the material 
     themselves, often using their own children, their neighbour's 
     children or--in rarer cases--by luring strangers. At least 30 
     peer-to-peer cases in the UK so far involved hands-on abuse 
     in which the children in the images were real-time victims.
       Police found one man who had wired webcams into his 
     daughter's bedroom so that he could share video images of his 
     abuse with other peer-to-peer file sharers.
       Detective Superintendent Peter Spindler, who heads Scotland 
     Yard's paedophile unit, said: ``We are finding real-time live 
     abusers. These people are able to get brand new images 
     straight up on the net.'' His officers have found that when 
     new images appear, the children involved are often related to 
     or live nearby the person distributing the material.
       But the sheer volume of new material, combined with the 
     fact that it could have been produced anywhere in the world, 
     has meant that police have often been unable to pinpoint the 
     child's location.
       Detectives rely on two methods of tracing location: 
     electronic footprints left by the user while online and 
     forensic analysis of the images to find clues pointing to the 
     country of origin, such as telephone books in the background 
     or the style of furnishings. In some cases, often where the 
     child is being held prisoner and abused in a completely blank 
     room, there are not enough leads for police to chase.
       One case being investigated involves a prepubescent girl 
     who is being held prisoner in a room and repeatedly abused. 
     International law enforcement agencies know only that she is 
     in the United States and the FBI is trying to pinpoint her 
     exact location. New images of the child are shared through 
     KaZaA and other services but police have been unable to find 
     her.
       Gemma Holland, victim identification project manager at the 
     University of Cork's Combating Paedophile Information 
     Networks in Europe (Copine) which has a database of more than 
     600,000 child porn images, said: ``This is a global problem. 
     The abuse could be in the next village or somewhere near you 
     but the problem is the images are being shown globally. 
     Identifying the kids in these images should be our prime 
     concern and of the greatest importance.''
       The decentralised nature of the internet and peer-to-peer 
     specifically make it difficult to define numbers of images in 
     circulation or children involved but experts says it is 
     growing daily. Washington's national centre for missing and 
     exploited children, which acts as a clearing house for child 
     porn tip-offs, said that reports of such images in shared 
     files had increased by 400% this year.
       David Wilson, professor of criminology at the University of 
     Central England in Birmingham, said: ``Peer-to-peer 
     facilitates the most extreme, aggressive and reprehensible 
     types of behaviour that the internet will allow.''
       The Guardian understands that the National Crime Squad is 
     considering coordinating all of this work, rather than 
     leaving it to small groups working within the country's 
     various forces; so far the leading forces have been the Met, 
     West Midlands and Greater Manchester.
       Peer-to-peer has become more attractive for paedophiles in 
     the wake of Operation Ore, the high-profile British police 
     operation which was launched after US authorities handed over 
     the names of 7,200 people suspected of subscribing to 
     websites offering paedophilic images. While Ore has grabbed 
     headlines, many senior officers and child abuse experts 
     believe that targeting people at the lower end of the 
     paedophile spectrum has been a distraction in terms of child 
     protection.
       Prof Wilson believes Ore showed how the criminal justice 
     system concentrated on the wrong type of offender, the people 
     who downloaded the material rather than produced them. It 
     needed to refocus on activities such as peer-to-peer file 
     sharing and the producers of child pornography.
       He said: ``Police operations have not been getting to the 
     type of paedophile that we need to get to. It's in their 
     interests to keep the debate moving towards the kind of 
     people they should be spending time and resources on.
       ``The achilles heel of peer-to-peer is that it makes 
     something that is secret and furtive into something that is 
     public and when it is public that offers the police a window 
     of opportunity to police it.''
       In a room on the fifth floor at Scotland Yard, officers in 
     the hi-tech crime unit are trying to do exactly that, sitting 
     at computers, monitoring activity on the peer-to-peer boards. 
     They are part of a team working on Operation Pilsey which 
     started as a smalltime inquiry in March 2001 by the Met's 
     clubs and vice unit and burgeoned with the number of people 
     posting images via file sharing. The detectives working here 
     are now inundated.
       They explain that they can use technology to detect the 
     location of those who download the images and sometimes that 
     of the abusers. If there is a child immediately in danger, 
     officers will conduct a raid as soon as they have a location.
       Paedophiles believe it is harder for them to be detected 
     through peer-to-peer software but investigators are able to 
     access their shared folders and quickly discover if they 
     contain illegal images of child abuse. They are then able to 
     establish the location of the owner of the shared folder.

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