One week after a U.S. House subcommittee held hearings on the ties, actual or alleged, between peer-to-peer file-swapping networks and porn on the Internet, the federal government announced a crackdown aimed at fighting child porn passing through the P2P networks.
“No one should be able to avoid prosecution for contributing to the abuse and exploitation of the nation’s children,” said Attorney General John Ashcroft, announcing the crackdown, formalized after a few months in which dozens have been arrested on child porn charges after about 1,000 domestic investigations and over 350 authorized searches.
“The Department of Justice stands side-by-side with our partners in the law enforcement community to pursue those who victimize our children under the perceived, but false, cloak of anonymity that the peer-to-peer networks provide,” Ashcroft said.
Justice is joining with the Department of Homeland Security, the FBI, and the Internet Crimes Against Children Task Forces in the effort.
“Today’s announcement sends a clear message that the digital environment will not offer sanctity to those pedophiles who lurk in peer-to-peer networks. We will identify you. We will pursue you. We will bring you to justice,” FBI Director Robert Mueller said May 14. “Today’s announcement also raises public awareness to the inherent risks associated with file-sharing networks. Parents must know that access to these networks is free and exposure to child pornography is often a frightening reality.”
“[We] will use its technical expertise and its legal authorities to target those who would purchase child pornography over the Internet or trade in those despicable images," Michael J. Garcia, who runs Homeland Security's Immigration and Customs Enforcement, said at the announcement. “By partnering with our colleagues at the Department of Justice and in local and state law enforcement, we will uncover these transactions and bring the offenders out of the anonymity of cyberspace and into a court of law.”
Last week, the House Subcommittee on Commerce, Trade and Consumer Protection held hearings on whether peer-to-peer networks can be blamed directly for the spread of child porn as well as legitimate adult materials among minors.
The subcommittee heard from people like Penny Nance, Kids First Coalition president, who told the subcommittee that with a large enough visitorship from children, P2P networks are only too easily known by pedophiles and child pornographers. "What is more alarming," she told the subcommittee, "is that instant messaging is also available on these networks, which gives easy access to child predators to communicate with unsuspecting children."
Nance also said that while P2P site owners "like to say" that just a fraction of child and adult porn on the Internet passes through their networks, it "doesn't absolve them of the problem nor does it take into account some factors that make peer-to-peer sites in some ways more dangerous than the Internet overall."
Ernie Allen, the president of the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, seemed to support Nance's contention in his own testimony. "[I]t is clear to us that thousands of individuals are trading child pornography via peer-to-peer programs," he told the subcommittee, "and that the people utilizing this method of distribution can be found in every state and in countries around the world. Peer-to-peer programs have made it more difficult to identify the users."
But Distributed Computing Industry Association chief executive Martin C. Lafferty demurred, telling the subcommittee that blaming P2P networks for exposing children to more porn – child porn and adult porn alike – than those using unfiltered Internet search engines, as some had done during the hearing, was "unsupported by evidence." He said actual evidence might show instead that with monitoring and filtering on P2P networks, you were less likely to find child or adult porn than when using standard search engines.
"Furthermore, in contradiction to [those] disingenuous allegations," Lafferty told the subcommittee, "using family filters included with leading peer-to-peer software applications set at the maximum level… [meant] no files retrieved on searches for popular terms like 'Britney,' 'Pokemon,' and 'Olsen Twins' will contain pornography, child pornography, or child erotica. By contrast, searching on these same terms using unfiltered search engines will yield many thousands of pornographic and criminally obscene results."
P2P United, the peer-to-peer interest and action group whose members include popular networks Grokster, Morpheus, and eDonkey, told the subcommittee they were developing an idea based on the famous milk-carton campaign to help find missing children – the group wants to get the names and pictures of suspected child porn makers and distributors posted on P2P networks. The group is in discussions with the FBI about the idea.
Eisgrau did not return a call for comment from AVN Online before this story went to press, but he told AVN Online after the subcommittee hearing that several subcommittee members were "clearly concerned about the exposure of horrible material to children" but also understood and asked about the point that P2P is an outgrowth of the Net with the Net itself creating the exposure in the first place.
"We are not only not the problem, we are instrumental elements of the solutions," Eisgrau said at the time. But he also said those sponsoring "rather overbroad" legislation intended to crack down on P2P or online content are "well intentioned and very concerned" about kids being exposed to child porn, but that they "did not fully appreciate… that P2P producers are not Website operators; they are not people who produce what Hollywood would call content, and do not maintain any kind of database of actual information that is made available to the public… To hold P2P software producers accountable for what their software is used for… misses a very fundamental difference between what P2P networks really are, relative to more common or familiar parts of the Internet."
Indeed, critics like CNET.com columnist Declan McCullagh thought the subcommittee hearing last week was a case of "what happens when politicians try to ban technology they don't like or understand."
Citing a bill by subcommittee chairman Rep. Cliff Stearns (R-Florida), in which P2P programs would be required to get parental consent before being installed, McCullagh said that kind of legislation is "so broadly worded that it regulates far more than just peer-to-peer applications. Anyone distributing instant-messaging programs, File Transfer Protocol software or Internet Relay Chat clients would have to follow a complicated set of regulations to be published by the Federal Trade Commission, which might as well be renamed the Federal Software Regulatory Commission."
Stearns calls the bill the Protecting Children from Peer-to-Peer Pornography Act, but McCullagh called it "just one example of politicians attempting to write rules for software – often with a worthwhile goal in mind – that end up hurting legitimate programmers, network administrators and end users. In other words, state and federal laws regulating technology often invoke an even more powerful rule: the law of unintended consequences."
But the feds have intended consequences in mind with the newly-announced crackdown, which came in formal presentation after a few months worth of activity by several federal agencies that has resulted in at least 65 arrests and counting. Assistant Attorney General Deborah Daniels of the Office of Justice Programs said the 39 task forces making up the Internet Crimes Against Children operation showed how "unprecedented cooperation of law enforcement… track(s) the sale and trade of child pornography over the Internet [and makes] this country a safer place for our children."
