"Vile and Reprehensible": Kazaa Chief Rebukes P2P-Child Porn Links

"Vile and reprehensible." That's what the executive vice president of peer-to-peer program Kazaa's parent company called allegations that child porn and P2P networks have "strong linkage," when he testified to the Senate Judiciary Committee September 9.

"P2P plays a very minor role in the propagation of child pornography," said Sharman Networks executive vice president Alan Morris to the committee. "P2P referrals presently constitute less than two percent of all reports of child pornography submitted to the CyberTipline operated by the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, while Internet Web sites account for more than 77 percent." 

That didn't exactly impress Judiciary Committee chairman Sen. Orrin G. Hatch (R-Utah), who said during the hearing that child porn on P2P networks presents a "unique challenge" to law enforcement and a need for parents to be educated about the child porn risks of P2P. Another committee member, Sen. Patrick Leahy, accused the P2P networks of turning a blind eye to child porn.

Morris essentially contradicted the NCMEC, whose chairman of the board Robbie Callaway, said a day earlier that P2P networks are a significant means of distributing child porn, even if the network operators aren't yet aware of how significant it is. 

"From NCMEC data and interaction with leading law enforcement investigators, we have concluded that the use of file-sharing programs to trade, distribute and disseminate child pornography is significant and growing dramatically," Callaway said in a September 8 comment.   

According to Internet.com, the General Accounting Office issued a September 9 report saying youthful P2Pers are at high risk of inadvertent porn exposure in general and child porn in particular, with young surfers hitting innocent keywords like cartoon characters or teen stars and coming up porn at a 34 percent rate, among those the GAO studied. 

Another GAO analysis, according to Internet.com, studied 1,286 titles and file names identified through Kazaa searches of twelve keywords known associated with child porn – and came up 42 percent having child porn images. 

Morris, however, testified to the Judiciary Committee that "the vast majority" of the child porn problem comes from Websites accessed by browser software. He accused those charging the P2P networks with being a conduit for child porn of running a smear campaign trying to stop the P2P networks' users from swapping music and films online.

In fact, according to Morris's testimony, pedophiles learned fast that P2P was "a foolhardy way to pursue their warped ends" of swapping child porn, because they're not anonymous on those networks.

"Law enforcement agencies quickly picked them off and so they retreated back to their sordid encrypted sites, newsgroups and the like," Morris told the Judiciary Committee. "While any amount of child pornography available via P2P software is unacceptable to us, we know of no instance or charge that there is any commercial or organized distribution of such materials using P2P, while many of the thousands of Web sites hosting child pornography do charge for access to these illegal materials, and newsgroups are actively used for illegal private distribution."