British Telecom Fights Child Porn Techtree News Feb 8, 2006 Of late an increasing number of cases of child sexual abuse have been reported by newspapers and other information sources. A recent report is cause enough for alarm as it puts the spotlight on how the country - especially places like Goa and Kerala - is fast becoming a child sex tourism hub.
Pedophilia is rampant worldwide, and is fast and justifiably becoming a topic of global concern. In such a scenario, it's heartening to see both providers and users of the Internet getting together in an effort to fight this perversity... British Telecom (BT) - which owns most of UK's broadband infrastructure, has released figures which indicate that each day the company's Cleanfeed program blocks at least 35,000 user attempts to view online child pornography. Significantly, the key link in this chain, are domestic internet users. Again the BT numbers are exclusive of attempts by users registered with other internet service providers (ISPs), and these cover the remaining two-thirds of the market. In effect, BT prevents almost 3 million of its domestic users from accessing child pornography content that is blacklisted by the Internet Watch Foundation (IWF) in compliance with the 1978 Child Protection Act. How does BT do this? Users who discover a site harboring suspicious content are invited to report the site to the Internet Watch Foundation (IWF). The IWF has on its homepage a large red button which reads, "Click here: Report illegal content". Once a suspicious site is reported to the IWF, analysts trained by the National Crime Squad scour such sites for evidence of illegal content. Typically UK-based sites hosting child pornography are easily traceable. Once traced, the ISP hosting the site is notified and the site is taken down. In 2005, 20 out of the 6,000 online child pornography sites reported were UK-based. To shut down the remaining sites, IWF passes on the details to the police who then distribute these worldwide through Interpol. While the good news is that other domestic internet suppliers in the UK are also resorting to third-party filtering technology such as BT's Cleanfeed, the bad news is that the entire system can do little except prevent proliferation of newer pornographic sites.
