Congress looks to crack down on P-to-P child porn

WASHINGTON – Seven providers of peer-to-peer (P-to-P) services promised Tuesday to attack the problem of child pornography being traded on their networks as a U.S. Congress committee examined a report suggesting that thousands of child pornography files were available on P-to-P services.

Peer-to-Peer United, a newly formed group of six P-to-P services, said it was planning to launch a “Parent-to-Parent Resource Center” designed to provide parents with information on how to protect themselves and their kids from child pornography. The center, to be launched within a few weeks, could contain such information as warning signs for parents to watch for and links to law enforcement agencies and organizations working with exploited children, said Adam Eisgrau, executive director of Peer-to-Peer United.

In addition, Alan Morris, executive vice president of Sharman Networks Ltd., which operates the Kazaa P-to-P service, promised the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee that his company would provide any assistance the committee needed as it focuses on ways to rid P-to-P networks of child pornography and to keep adult materials out of the hands of minors who use P-to-P services. Senators and witnesses at the Judiciary Committee hearing complained that innocent search terms such as the Beatles or Harry Potter could bring up pornographic materials on some P-to-P services.

The P-to-P services also called on Congress to act against the criminals, not their services. “The answer is not to restrict the technology, because technology isn’t the perpetrator — criminals are,” Eisgrau said in a statement. “The answer is to track down and prosecute those who would exploit the youngest and most vulnerable among us, and to put them in jail where they belong.”

However, one prosecutor called on Congress to hold P-to-P services responsible. Thomas Spota, the district attorney for Suffolk County, New York, filed child-pornography-related charges against 12 Kazaa users in July, and he said federal government action is needed to combat child porn on P-to-P networks.

“Federal legislation is needed to combat this scourge,” Spota said. “We need a federal task force … in order to be able to attack the owners and the distributors of these programs, who are reaping enormous profits.”

Before the Judiciary Committee hearing, Spota joined Senator Charles Schumer, a New York Democrat, in calling on the U.S. Department of Justice to create a federal task force to track down users of P-to-P networks who trade child pornography. The Internet, Schumer said, is getting “bogged down” by spam and other annoying practices. “Now comes word of the dark side of the Internet has gotten even a little darker,” he said. “File-sharing software is an effective tool for someone trying to get their hands on child pornography.”

Schumer said he’s looking into whether P-to-P networks are doing all they can to prevent child porn. If they aren’t, they should be held responsible, he said.

Schumer and the committee members talked about a report from the U.S. General Accounting Office (GAO) released Tuesday that found the names of about 42 percent of pornographic images found on Kazaa hinted at child pornography. GAO staff used 12 keywords known to be associated with child pornography and found 1,286 items, 34 percent of which were adult pornography and another 24 percent of which were non-pornographic, according to the GAO report. Another Kazaa search for child pornography found 341 image files, about 44 percent of which were child pornography.

The GAO report didn’t estimate how much child pornography is now available on P-to-P services, although it noted that the Internet has emerged as the “principal tool” for exchanging child porn. Committee witness John Malcolm, deputy assistant attorney general at the criminal division of the U.S. Department of Justice, said it’s difficult to tell how big a problem child pornography is on P-to-P networks.

Sharman Networks’ Morris said his company would be “very happy” to assist such a task force if it were formed, and he noted that Kazaa has cooperated with law enforcement agencies investigating child porn, although only four such agencies have contacted his company in the last 18 months. The Kazaa software now comes with a pornography filter turned on by default, he added.

The U.S. Department of Justice didn’t have an immediate reaction to Schumer’s call for a task force.

Morris defended Kazaa by saying it’s impossible for his company to know what files are being traded between users. Only a small fraction of child pornography available on the Internet comes from P-to-P services, he said, with about three-quarters of all child pornography available on Web sites, not P-to-P services. Meanwhile, pop-up ads on the Internet can expose children to explicit images, he said.

“The chance that somebody is suddenly exposed to a pornographic image is infinitely greater (through a pop-up ad),” he said.

Schumer and Senator Patrick Leahy, a Vermont Democrat, questioned whether Kazaa was doing enough to discourage the trading of child pornography. Schumer asked if Kazaa had revoked the software licenses of the 12 Suffolk county residents charged by Spota. Morris said he hadn’t thought of doing that until the senator suggested it, even though Kazaa’s end user license prohibits the sharing of offensive or illegal materials.

Leahy questioned how Kazaa could scrub its system of files that appear to be popular songs but contain white noise, but couldn’t get rid of child porn. “Somehow you are able to check the content of that, and those are taken off the network,” he said.

Morris said Kazaa users, not Kazaa itself, warn other users about the white noise files. Kazaa can’t look at the content being traded between users, he said. “There’s no technical way at all; it’s like asking Microsoft to look at the content of people’s e-mails,” Morris added.

Leahy blasted some P-to-P services for attempting to introduce new technologies to keep users anonymous, and he said the networks can be used to lure children to meet with sexual predators.

“So far, the peer-to-peer networks are not only turning a blind eye to this problem; in many cases they are specifically designed so that parents are unable to keep their children off the network with a traditional firewall,” Leahy said. “What few protections are available are designed so that they can be easily circumvented by a child, regardless of their parents’ intentions.”