When the Federal Bureau of Investigation holds a peer-to-peer summit gathering September 24, SVC Financial Services chief executive Chris Haigh will be among those providing recommendations for an anti-child porn initiative the FBI calls Operation Peer Pressure.
"The FBI has made its anti-child-pornography effort a top priority," Haigh said in a September 9 announcement, "and has asked a few of the more advanced digital rights management companies for insights into watermarking and other areas where technology is headed developmentally and how this will create more challenges for enforcing anti-child-pornography."
"FBI officials have specifically asked us to explore ways we might work with them to increase the Bureau's effectiveness and efficiency as the technology advances," he continued. "We are extremely proud to be invited to the FBI summit, and we are pleased to be a part of this critical mission in the fight against child pornography."
Haigh received his summit invitation as part of a Distributed Industry Computing Association delegation. SVC is a member of the trade group, which works to develop standards and practices to advance innovative consumer-based distribution channels.
Operation Peer Pressure launched last November. "It is important for parents to be educated to the risks associated with peer-to-peer networking," said FBI Deputy Assistant Director Keith Lourdeau in May, as he announced the operation had already resulted in identifying 106 potential prosecution targets.
"While not all aspects of these (P2P) networks are bad, like other Internet services, they provide pedophiles with a false sense of anonymity to collect and transmit images," Lourdeau said. "This sense of anonymity encourages pedophiles to openly share as much of their child pornography to as wide an audience as possible."
A month before Operation Peer Pressure launched, P2P trade association P2P United launched an anti-child porn initiative of its own, Parent2Parent Resource Center, aimed at helping the P2P community find help if exposed to child porn and its purveyors.
“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 at that launch. “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."
Eisgrau also rejected a growing body of opinion that considers P2P a major child porn conduit, particularly among some federal and state lawmakers looking to put the brakes on P2P networks on those as well as other grounds.
"The Center for Missing and Exploited Children says that P2P technology is the portal to child porn in only a very, very few and declining number of cases; compared, for example, to simply surfing the Web with a search engine,” Eisgrau said. “Even so, 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."
