Child Pornography is Getting More Anonymous & Harder to Catch
Child pornography is no more dealt on the streets. On the contrary, it has reached a much wider market on the Internet, and it is getting more and more anonymous, according to Ernie Allen - the president of the International Centre for Missing and Exploited Children.
Mr Allen was speaking at a conference in Ottawa on Saturday as he said that there was a fundamental shift in child exploitation and human trafficking, Ottawa Citizen reports. The payment is also made with virtual currencies such as Bitcoin, which makes it even more difficult to track the criminal. The software, capable of making them anonymous, is easily available in the market for free. Pimps and child pornographers online have found a new way of circulating their material.
The criminals are sophisticated and organised, he said. They are now involved in such a business which is highly profitable yet extremely safe as well. It is the basic nature of the Internet to offer its user a kind of anonymity which Mr Allen calls a 'prescription for disaster'. There should be a way to draw a fine line between privacy and anonymity to stop the criminals from continuing what they actively indulged in.
'Together Let's Stop Traffick' was the international summit Mr Allen was speaking to. The summit was held in Ottawa and was attended by software developers, advocates, police officers, private agencies and victims, among others. Mr Allen further said that law enforcement would be restricted after the NSA and Edward Snowden controversy. There is a virtual power struggle for creating more impenetrable technology which is anonymous, he said.
The people who are being caught are the ones who make mistakes while using the anonymising software, he said. Otherwise, there are highly unlikely to be captured. The law has only been able to catch the really dumb ones where the more organised criminals who pose greater threat are still moving freely.
Meanwhile, plain-clothed FBI agents captured a seemingly innocent currency trader called Josh Terrey whose real name turned out to be Ross Ulbricht. Mr Ulbricht is believed to be the Dread Pirate Roberts, the owner-administrator of Silk Road which is a successful online market that sells illegal goods like fireworks, hacking software, fake IDs and drugs. Time reports the Silk Road is located in Deep Web which is an anonymous region on the Internet. Many believe that Deep Web is the principal hub for child pornography.