p2pnet news | Crime:- Software developed by Flint Waters, an agent with the Wyoming attorney general, was used by police in Ontario, Canada, to uncover IP addresses in what’s being called the largest kiddie porn sweep in the province’s history.

“Yesterday, more than 18 police forces targeted child pornography in a series of raids across Ontario,” says the Toronto Star, going on:

“Details of the sweep, headed by the OPP Provincial Strategy to Protect Children from Sexual Abuse and Exploitation on the Internet, will be released at a 10 a.m. news conference today.”

In Scotland, Waters has produced a map showing the “rough locations of computers in a single ‘peer-to-peer’ child porn network,” says the Daily Record.

“More than 10 such networks, where perverts swap images directly with each other, are operating on the web,” it says, continuing, ” ‘Peer-to-peer’ exchanges are only one method of obtaining child porn. Thousands more perverts trade images using email or websites or buy movies on subscription sites.

“Also, many people possess child porn images but do not share them online.”

In Canada, thousands of people in Toronto and more than 15,000 in Ontario, are actively using their computers to distribute child pornography, says the Toronto Star.

“A special task force in the U.S. - with help from a global network of investigators, including Toronto police - has discovered that in a four-month period last year, more than 4,000 computers in this city were involved in trading images of ‘child sexual abuse,’ it has Waters, who’s also in charge of the Internet Sex Crimes Against Children task force, stating.

Using the software Waters wrote in 2004 and now shared by international police forces, “detectives have been able to trace pornographic images to individual computers using serial numbers and Internet Protocol addresses,” says the Toronto Star. “IPs are linked to a specific computer when it connects to the World Wide Web,”it states, continuing:

“Since IPs may change a few times a year, Waters’ data has been corrected for possible duplication. In Canada, pornographic images involving children have been traced to more than 205,305 unique IP addresses. In Ontario, more than 63,338 unique IP addresses have been linked to such images.”

Waters’ software allows police forces to contribute information about the online porn trade to a centre in Wyoming where his team processes the data, the story says, quoting detective sergeant Kim Scanlan, head of the Toronto police Child Exploitation Section, as saying the application has enabled Toronto police to, “identify many offenders they may have missed”.

“On the eve of Internet Safety Day, which is tomorrow, Scanlan stresses prevention by reporting predatory online behaviour to police, Crime Stoppers and Cybertip, a direct and anonymous link to police that youth are encouraged to use if they’re targeted,” the story adds.

Sadly, this news will be picked up by the movie and music cartels and cynically used in their anti-P2P, anti-filesharing campaigns.

Slashdot it!

Also See:
Toronto Star - Police launch massive child porn crackdown, February 12, 2008
Daily Record - Shock Scale Of Kid Porn In Scotland Revealed, January 21, 2008

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This entry was posted on Tuesday, February 12th, 2008 at 6:58 am and is filed under Crime. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.

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