Peer-to-peer trade association P2PUnited has joined in the fight against child porn, unwrapping a new Parent 2 Parent Resource Center it hopes to help parents and others "understand and manage the risks to children of using the Internet and peer-to-peer technology."
This came five weeks after the trade group promised publicly they would build and maintain this kind of online resource, following a September 2003 Senate Judiciary Committee hearing which, among other matters, looked into charges that P2P networks are easy havens for sending child porn, often without the network administrators or even the users knowing it's there.
"As parents, as people, and as peer-to-peer technology developers the men and women of P2P United's member companies believe that any child pornography is too much child pornography," P2P United executive director Adam Eisgrau said in announcing the resource center. "The producers and consumers of this damaging and disgusting material should be behind bars and we urge every member of the public - here and abroad - to ?click on' to www.p2punited.org and ?turn in' legitimately suspected child pornographers. Our new ?Parent 2 Parent' Resource Center puts the FBI one-click away and offers links to many more resources, including where to go for help if you or someone you love has been exposed to this sickness."
P2P United is far from the only group interested in putting a cork on child porn crossing the P2P networks. The Recording Industry Association of America has previously accused online file-swapping networks of looking the other way when any kind of porn, never mind child porn, is being swapped amidst the thousands of music and video files trading cyberhands.
And General Accounting Office director of information management issues Linda Koontz told the Senate Judiciary Committee, during those September 2003 hearings, that child porn was found and downloaded only too easily over P2P networks.
As AVNOnline.com reported in January, Koontz told senators her office used 12 child porn-tied keywords on KaZaA and spotted 1,286 titles and filenames. Of those, she said, 543 were child porn images, or 42 percent of the titles in question. The remaining titles, Koontz told the committee, were 34 percent adult porn and 24 percent non-porn.
The executive vice president of KaZaA's parent, Sharman Networks, Alan Morris, told the Judiciary Committee his company encouraged suggestions for more ways to keep children from exposure to adult materials on P2P networks. But he also called "reprehensible" any attempt to charge that there were explicit or deliberate child porn links on P2P networks.
Gay adult videomaker Titan Media has petitioned the Judiciary Committee to turn up the heat on P2P networks to compel them to keep children from accessing legitimate adult entertainment.
Eisgrau said the Center for Missing and Exploited Children believes P2P technology is a portal to child porn "in only a very, very few and declining number of cases," as opposed to just surfing the Net with a standard search engine.
"Even so," he continued, "P2P United's members firmly believe that we all have to do whatever we can to help the police find the animals who prey on our children so they can be put in cages where they belong. This is just the first of many steps by a new industry toward that critical goal."
The P2P United child porn-battling resource center was good news to Adult Sites Against Child Pornography executive director Joan Irvine, when she learned about the center.
"A recent government report stated that a very large percentage of the files accessed via P2P were child pornography files. So, it's about time that the P2P industry took responsibility for self-regulating and education just as the adult site industry has done," Irvine told AVNOnline.com "Hopefully, this will inspire search engines to do the same. I was shocked when I used Google.com and the search term ?lolita,' then clicked on images. Adult content and suspect child pornography was available for anyone to view."
