Trade Group Fights Child Porn On Peer-To-Peer Networks

An industry trade group on Monday launched an education site to fight child pornography on peer-to-peer networks, and plans to launch in February tools that would enable the group to send suspected illegal images and video to law enforcement.

The Distributed Computing Industry Association's P2P PATROL site is the latest effort in the group's initiative against child pornography, which started in the spring. PATROL stands for Peer-to-Peer Parents and Teens Reach Online.

The site provides information to help visitors identify illegal child pornography from child erotica, which may be offensive, but is not necessarily illegal, Marty Lafferty, chief executive of DCIA said.

"Some content may be objectionable, but it may also be on the (legal) edge," Lafferty said.

People who find what they believe to be child pornography are advised on the P2P Patrol site to report it through the web site of the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children.

In February, however, the DCIA expects to make available to its members, which include Grokster, Sharman Networks and other major P2P consumer networks, tools that will link their software to a DCIA hotline, called CPHotline.org, Lafferty said. A P2P subscriber can send network location and other information taken from a suspected image or video to the DCIA by right clicking on the file and choosing CPHotline.org from the list.

DCIA will review the data before passing it along to law enforcement, Lafferty said.

"What we don't want to do is create a lot of leads that are not actionable by law enforcement," he said.

DCIA is working with the FBI's Cyber Division, and with state police Internet Crimes Against Children Task Force units.

Currently, only DCIA members RazorPop and Intent MediaWorks have publicly announced participation in the group's anti-child pornography initiative. Lafferty, however, expected nearly 100 percent participation over the following six to 12 months, once technical issues are worked out.

"The devil is in the details," he said.

Less than 1.5 percent of the child-pornography complaints received by the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children are related to material found on peer-to-peer networks, according to the DCIA, based in Arlington, Va. That's an improvement over 2 percent two years ago.

"(Nevertheless), it's such a serious problem that even one instance of a child being violated in making one of these images or videos is intolerable," Lafferty said.