There's a virtual neighborhood watch on the World Wide Web, APBNews.com says, in which a group of computer security experts polices the Web for child porn and sometimes hacks into and brings down the sites.
They call themselves Condemned.org, and APBNews says some attorneys and even anti-child porn crusaders think their activities could make it harder to prosecute the offending Web sites.
APBNews says Condemned.org launched the campaign with some 35 security and high-tech pros in Australia last month. They claim to have taken down about 115 Web sites, including up to 90 in the United States. At their own Web site, surfers can offer tips, donate funds, or even volunteer, APBNews says.
Child porn concerns have risen with the rise of the Internet, and advocates say pedophiles and child pornographers often use sites set up for other purposes to advance their activities. The founder of Children's Protection and Advocacy Coalition, Anne Cox, tells APBNews a Usenet discussion group for ferrets was overtaken by child pornographers posting links and photographs there.
Condemned.org tells the news service its purpose is information gathering to help law enforcement attack child porn and pedophilia Web sites, with only a small part of its activity involving actively hacking such sites. They're not the first group to hit online child porn by hacking - Ethical Hackers Against Pedophilia and Hackers Against Child Pornography have also done it.
Condemned.org says they first contact the Web host or Internet service provider in question to inform them of child porn or pedophilia, gathering more information for law enforcement only if the host or ISP fails to take action - and hacking the sites only as a last resort.
But even those anti-child porn groups and law enforcement who sympathize with Condemned.org and the others say these groups could be hitting dangerous ground, APBNews says. Former high-tech crime specialist Brad Astrowsky tells APBNews the groups that, depending on the jurisdiction in question, the anti-child porn hacking groups could be breaking computer fraud and property laws, and costing groups like the American Prosecutors Research Institute, for whom he now works, valuable anti-child porn and anti-pedophilia information.
And Astrowsky also says to leave it to the experts with the training to determine whether a given site fits the legal definition of child porn.
"What are the limits of 'using all means possible for their existence to cease?'" says Cecil Greek, a criminologist at Florida State University, to APBNews. "Why alert ethical hacker groups? My concern here is that vigilantism might creep in, with hackers trying to take down servers. This would mean they were themselves committing crimes in the pursuit of removing material that no court of law has yet ruled as obscene, at least under U.S. law."
And PedoWatch.org's Julie Posey says shutting down a child porn or pedophilic Web site isn't the solution, either. "There are thousands of Internet service providers as well as free Web hosting services that are readily available to provide instant service," she tells APBNews. "Shutting down a site is only a minor inconvenience to the person possessing and posting the child pornography, and the predator is still out there and is still able to continue harming and exploiting children."
Other anti-child porn/anti-pedophilia activists tell the news service that hacking the sites could ultimately jeopardize legitimate court cases against them, and the anti-child porn hackers' best service is to be the "eyes and ears" of law enforcement.
