(LoveCry) Fw: new child porn reporting sites for police action

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Feb 6, 2005, 7:47:40 PM2/6/05
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----- Original Message -----
From: AdvisorX
To: Angel
Sent: Monday, January 31, 2005 10:39 PM
Subject: new child porn reporting sites for police action

 
Your Computer May Be
Housing Child Porn
By George Butters
The Globe and Mail
1-28-5
 
The Internet has become a place one veteran police officer and father of six calls a virtual wasteland.
"For all intents and purposes, the Internet is basically rotten with porn and child porn," says RCMP Corporal Jim Gillis, the head of Project Horizon, a regional policing initiative based in Halifax that deals with on-line child pornography.
He said the Internet porn industry generates about $57-billion annually worldwide and supports more than four million websites consisting of more than 370 million pages. Of that, he says, there are more than 100,000 child porn sites raking in about $2.5-billion a year.
"And those pictures are images of a crime in progress," he says.
But stemming the tide hasn't been easy, and innocent homeowners and businesses often play an unwitting role in the criminal activity.
"The largest problems we face," says Detective Sergeant Paul Gillespie of Metro Toronto's Internet sex crime squad, "are the technological advances that the bad guys are certainly taking advantage of."
Those advances include encryption, steganography (hiding information in images or other files), software designed to eliminate evidence and defeat attempts at data retrieval, highly portable storage devices such as keychain drives and memory-equipped watches, on-line libraries, advanced cellphones and personal digital assistants (PDAs), freenets, Internet Relay Chat (IRC) channels, and botnets (networks of infected computers used to distribute or store porn, unbeknownst to their owners).
"This is where they're hiding it. And it works," he says.
Det. Sgt. Gillespie says more than half a million child porn images are circulating, representing between 50,000 and 100,000 different victims. A growing part of the problem stems from "bot" (short for robot) software planted by some computer viruses to turn machines into electronic "zombies" that can be controlled remotely by hackers. The machines usually appear to operate normally to their users, but they could be surreptitiously relaying child-porn-related traffic or storing illegal images to keep criminals safe from detection.
According to RCMP Corporal Jacques Boucher, a member of the Atlantic Tech Crime Unit, criminals are using thousands of infected computers around the world gathered into zombie armies called botnets. They can be used for anything from extortion and hiding the source of massive e-mail spamming operations, to trafficking in child porn.
"Why should Mr. Pornographer buy a computer from Dell when he can use yours?" asks Ray Freeman, vice-president of business development for PresiNet Systems, a five-year-old Victoria company providing managed security services to small and mid-sized businesses.
He says that despite the best of intentions, many homeowners and businesses fail to provide and maintain adequate security. "Nobody has looked at the firewall logs to see what happened last year, never mind last night."
Mr. Freeman says it's impossible to thwart 100 per cent of malicious attacks in an environment as dynamic and changeable as the Internet, but people should ensure they have basic anti-virus, firewall and network protection in place. "There are too many holes in the castle wall," he says. "You need to have sentries watching the traffic going in and out, in real time, looking for anomalous patterns."
Suspected child pornography sites can now be reported on-line at Cybertip.ca, a federally funded site operated by Child Find Manitoba that was officially launched in Canada this week. Law-enforcement agencies from three continents have also launched a site, www.virtualglobaltaskforce.com, aimed at deterring and preventing on-line exploitation of children. It combines the efforts of law-enforcement agencies and industry in Canada, Britain, Australia and the United States, as well as Interpol, under an international alliance of law-enforcement agencies known as the Virtual Global Taskforce.
And later this month, the Child Exploitation Tracking System comes out of beta testing and goes into national operation. This initiative resulted from Det. Sgt. Gillespie's e-mail to Microsoft founder Bill Gates pleading for help in stemming the tide of on-line child pornography. It promises to help police forces share information and streamline the management of large volumes of data.
But while few would argue against tough measures aimed at the creators and distributors of child pornography, there is growing concern about the criminalization of simple possession or one-time viewing of illegal material.
"Some members of law enforcement say that anyone who has this on their [computer] system is guilty of a crime, regardless of how it got there," says data recovery expert Doug Coughey, president and CEO of Recovery Force Inc. of Guelph, Ont. "I think that's bull."
Some private computer consultants, particularly those called in to conduct forensic examinations, are including a clause in their contracts that they will report to police any illegal content, such as child pornography, that they find on their clients' computer networks. But Mr. Coughey points out that if a computer was ever infected by a virus, worm or trojan, or if the user has ever experienced dozens of windows (called popups) suddenly filling the computer screen while surfing the Net, chances are good there is illegal material on the hard drive.
"It would curl your hair what I found on some of these machines" during routine data recovery efforts, Mr. Coughey says.
Although current practices may turn up some false-positives, law enforcement officials vow to keep up the pressure in what is proving to be a difficult battle. Despite busts such as this week's arrest by Toronto police of a man accused of distributing thousands of child porn images around the world, Det. Sgt. Gillespie says estimates from Interpol and the Federal Bureau of Investigation suggest fewer than 400 cases worldwide have been cracked.
"It's staggeringly low," Det. Sgt. Gillespie told delegates to the second annual conference on privacy, security and trust in Fredericton last fall sponsored by the National Research Council. His message: "If we all work together, we might be able to make a difference."
© Copyright 2005 Bell Globemedia Publishing Inc. All Rights Reserved.
http://www.globetechnology.com/logy/



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