If you ever doubt about how much it really pays to report child porn, on and offline, maybe your doubts will be assuaged a good deal by Protegeles.com, the Spanish hotline, which works directly with Spanish Internet service provider Terra-Spain and other area agencies with what Adult Sites Against Child Pornography calls "concrete" results.
ASACP executive director Joan Irvine met Protegeles executive director Ana Luisa Rotta when both attended the Internet Hotline Providers in Europe conference in Luxembourg in early September. And, in turn, Rotta shared with Irvine and ASACP some pungent information, such as that Protegeles's efforts helped Terra-Spain revamp almost its entire way of operation in a bid to choke off the child porn makers and distributors.
Protegeles, Rotta said, worked with Terra throughout 2002, until Terra finally revised its personal pages content to eliminate and report illegal content, became a paid contribution site rather than a purely free site, demands valid e-mail addresses and password use, put in a new system to measure bandwidth "in order to detect pages with an excessive amount" of seen images, refuses entrance by foreign proxies, and created a kind of internal hotline linked directly to Protegeles to process "reports and sends" for law enforcement.
For Irvine, this meant there's anything but a black hole when it comes to reporting and fighting child porn. "It is the reports from the public that alert government agencies, ASCAP, and other hotlines about child pornography," she said.
Irvine told AVN.comthat Protegeles was the first European hotline she had heard from to give her this kind of information and feedback. "I've been e-mailing with various hotlines," she said. "Everybody has asked us if we find something that's in their country to send it to them. They are open to accept the leads that we have, since they can take it right to the law enforcement they work with in their countries.
"It's a good thing for us," she continued. "It really does get frustrating because everybody is always saying to us what's going on. We aren't a law enforcement agency, and most of the other hotlines are in the same situation, don't tell them what's going on unless something's going specifically. What was realyy nice for me, when I was (at the INHOPE conference), is that many of the hotlines have the same issues as ASACP. So it's not just that we are adult site oriented. It's that we are a hotline for reporting child porn, suspect child pornography."
Irvine also said she will be included in a local Fox News segment on child pornography, with a reporter and crew visiting her October 2 to tape her part of the segment. "They contacted ASACP while I was gone," she said, "and I couldn't do it then. I don't know when it's going to be (on the air), though."
Protegeles is a non-profit founded by Optenet, a Spanish filtering company, and the Spanish NGO Accion Contra la Pornografia Infantil (ACPI), meaning, "Action Against Child Pornography".
