news

NEWS
Plan to fight child porn would close websites
NY Times 21st September 2006

Plan to fight child smut would close Web sites By Kurt Eichenwald The New York Times
Published: September 21, 2006

NEW YORK As part of the battle against the spread of child pornography on the Internet, a U.S. initiative has begun allowing for the shutdown or blocking of sites offering illicit images of minors, even in cases where no criminal investigation is being conducted.
The initiative, which was to be announced Thursday at a congressional hearing, is part of an effort among a group of Internet service providers and the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children.
Until now, the decisions to close child pornography sites were ad hoc, based on thousands of referrals to the service providers and the CyberTipline of the center.
Often such shutdowns did not occur, and many times closings were reserved for sites that were the targets of criminal investigations
But in an inquiry this year by the Investigations and Oversight Subcommittee of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, lawmakers learned of an aggressive effort in Britain to shut or block access to identified sites.
That effort, run by the Internet Watch Foundation, resulted in a major decline in the percentage of child pornography sites based in Britain, to 0.2 percent this year from 18 percent in 1997.

In that period, the percentage of such sites based in the United States rose, to almost 50 percent, officials said.
The chairman of the House committee, Representative Joe Barton, Republican of Texas, asked the center why the United States did not have a similar effort.
In response, officials with the center joined with Internet service providers to begin the initiative.
In prepared testimony to be delivered Thursday to the subcommittee, the president of the center, Ernie Allen, credits Barton as the catalyst for the initiative. Under the program, the testimony says, the center will confirm the presence of illegal images on reported sites and provide the Web addresses and related information to the service providers. Those companies will then take down such sites if they are based on their systems or will block their subscribers' access using filters.
Among the groups participating in the effort are the U.S. Internet Service Provider Association, as well as AOL, Earthlink, Google, Microsoft and United Online.
The initiative is part of an array of tactics adopted in recent months to combat child pornography sites on the Internet. Among them was the creation of the Financial Coalition Against Child Pornography, a group of major financial institutions and Internet companies that are working with the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children. Payment processors representing 87 percent of the business in the United States have joined the coalition, according to Allen's statement.
The coalition will be able to follow the money that is the lifeblood of the commercial child pornography business and has the goal of eradicating the business by 2008, Allen said in his prepared remarks.
"We will aggressively seek to identify child pornography sites with method of payment information attached," Allen said.
"Then we will work with the credit card industry to identify the merchant bank. "Then we will stop the flow of funds to these sites."