On September 9, the Senate Judiciary Committee heard testimony on the role of peer-to-peer networks in disseminating pornography, particularly child pornography.
A recent General Accounting Office (GAO) report states that pornography, including child pornography, is easily accessed on peer-to-peer networks. In a GAO search using common pornography keywords, 42 percent of the downloaded files were associated with child pornography images. Juvenile users of peer-to-peer networks also may access pornography inadvertently by using celebrity names or cartoon characters as keywords.
Committee Chair Orrin Hatch (R-UT) stressed the dangers posed by unsuspecting children and parents. “Child pornography is inherently repulsive, inherently victimizing, and intolerable in any form,” he said. “This is an issue of critical importance to parents, who must be educated about these risks and equipped to control or eliminate them.”
Ranking Member Patrick Leahy (D-VT) said that the Judiciary Committee and the Senate “will do everything possible to combat child pornography.” He censured peer-to-peer networks for “turning a blind eye to this problem” and designing their software “so that parents are unable to keep their children off a network with a traditional firewall.” “If peer-to-peer networks are going to find a useful place in our culture,” he said, “they must respond to these problems.”
Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-CA) characterized electronic pornography as “a growing cancer.” She deplored “the use of words such as Pokemon or Harry Potter to pull up child pornography.” She said the committee should find a way to prohibit this practice, possibly by enforcing copyright laws.
John Malcolm, Deputy Assistant Attorney General, said that the “decentralized nature of peer-to-peer networks” and “relative anonymity” pose particular problems for law enforcement. “Nevertheless,” he said, “a law enforcement agent can identify a file containing child pornography…no peer-to-peer user is truly anonymous.” He added that the Department of Justice “has established a High Tech Investigative Unit within the Child Exploitation and Obscenity Section, dedicated to providing investigative support in prosecutions for crimes involving child exploitation and obscenity, and specifically, child pornography on the Internet, including peer-to-peer networks.” He also said that the PROTECT Act (Prosecuting Remedies and Tools Against the Exploitation of Children Today Act, P.L. 108-21)(see The Source, 4/11/03) has provided “invaluable tools to law enforcement to aggressively prosecute crimes involving the scourge of child pornography.”
Robbie Callaway of the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC) said the Center’s CyberTipline “has received over 1,513 reports regarding child pornography being traded by peer-to-peer users” and that “peer-to-peer reports increased five-fold between 2001 and 2002.” Mr. Callaway linked identification of the peer-to-peer user with a decrease in pornographic file sharing. “It is quite likely that the extensive swapping of child pornography images on peer-to-peer networks would reduce if users knew that recipients of the images/movies could easily attain their IP address,” he stated.
Alan Morris of Sharman Networks Limited defended the position of peer-to-peer networks. He pointed out that, according to the GAO report, peer-to-peer networks “play a very minor role in the propagation of child pornography.” “It is clear that the vast majority of the child pornography problem stems from Web sites accessed by Web browsers,” he said, asserting that his company has “no direct knowledge of what any particular user is providing, nor do we have any ability to control such distribution or remove a particular piece of content.” He argued that the “best means of preventing unwanted exposure to offensive materials is for parents to employ safeguards…and to actively monitor their children’s Internet activities.” Mr. Morris assured the Committee that Sharman Networks is “ready to take any feasible steps a software distributor can take” to reduce the problem of child pornography.
Other witnesses at the hearing included: Linda Koontz of the General Accounting Office; Thomas Spota, district attorney for Suffolk County, New York; Stephen Hess of the University of Utah; and Douglas Jacobson of Palisade Systems.
