The United Nations is calling on credit-card companies and tech firms to do more to fight online child porn, with a particular emphasis on credit companies that inadvertently might process child-porn-related Web transactions in spite of their best efforts not to.
"Credit-card companies shouldn't wait for the problem to arrive," said Juan Miguel Petit, the UN's "special rapporteur" regarding child porn, at a news briefing April 14. "The international credit-card companies and also the manufacturers of hardware and software ... surely know more than NGOs or governments about these problems and how to fight them."
He also called for Internet service providers to pull or block child-porn access whenever they see such material and to monitor their services to prevent it from turning up in the first place.
Petit's concern was good news for Joan Irvine, executive director of the Association of Sites Advocating Child Protection. "I am pleased that on an international basis, there is a focus on the real problem of child pornography and what technology can do to battle it," she told AVNOnline. "ASACP spent the last two years having a system developed to help in this effort."
Visa has been chasing illegal Web operators, including and especially child pornographers, for a long time, according to spokesman David Masters, who told reporters the problem isn't credit-card companies but tech-savvy child-porn operators who make it difficult to hunt and fight them.
"It's a horrific industry, and we do everything we can against it," he told the Associated Press. "It's business we don't want and we're only too pleased to help where we can. We work very closely with law enforcement across the world."
Irvine said ASACP has sent messages to Petit and Masters as well as Microsoft legal and corporate chief in Europe, Africa, and the Middle East, Horacio Gutierrez, offering the group's services, including its technology platform to help the battle.
Microsoft most recently unwrapped a joint project with Canadian law enforcement to track down child pornographers electronically by way of their credit transaction information. "Technology companies have a critical role to play in making the Internet safe for children," Gutierrez said. "It's a multifaceted issue which really has worldwide implications."
Microsoft and other tech firms were also reported in meetings in France with Interpol and the International Center for Missing and Exploited Children on the child porn problem.
