TOR hidden services are not easy to navigate. In many respects, they are very similar to websites on the surface net. But they are rarely linked to other sites, and the URL addresses are a meaningless series of numbers and letters: h67ugho8yhgff941.onion rather than the more familiar .com or .co.uk. To make matters worse, Tor Hidden Services frequently change addresses. To help visitors, there are several ‘index’ pages that list current addresses. In 2013, the most well known of these index pages was called the Hidden Wiki. The Hidden Wiki looks identical to Wikipedia, and lists dozens of the most popular sites in this strange parallel internet: the WikiLeaks cache, censorship-free blogs, hacker chat forums, the New Yorker magazine’s whistleblower drop box.
In late 2013 I was browsing the Hidden Wiki, searching for the infamous dark net market Silk Road. As I scrolled down, I suddenly spotted a link for a child pornography website. I stopped. There was nothing strikingly different about it – a simple link to an address comprised of a string of numbers and letters, like every other website listed here. For a while I sat frozen, unsure what to do. Close down my computer? Take a screenshot? I contacted the police.
The internet has radically changed the way child pornography is produced, shared and viewed. According to the United Nations, child pornography (which some specialists prefer to call child abuse images) refers to ‘any representation, by whatever means, of a child engaged in real or simulated explicit sexual activities or any representation of the sexual parts of a child for primarily sexual purposes’. According to UK law, these images are classified under five levels of obscenity.
Once I’d opened my Tor browser, it took me two mouse clicks to arrive at the page advertising the link. If I had clicked again, I would have committed an extremely serious crime. I can’t think of another instance where doing something so bad is so easy.
We can now share files and information more simply, quickly and inexpensively than ever before. On the whole, that is a very positive thing. But not always. Is child pornography really this accessible? What does it mean if it is? Who is creating and viewing it? And in an age of anonymity, is it possible to stop them?
The prohibition of child pornography is a surprisingly recent phenomenon. During the sexual liberation movement of the late 1960s and 1970s child pornography was openly sold over the counter in some countries – most notably in Scandinavia – and in certain US states; an interregnum that is now referred to as the ‘ten-year madness’. By the late seventies many governments started passing tougher legislation to stamp it out, and by the late 1980s, child pornography had become very hard to find. The biggest-selling child pornography magazine in North America had a circulation of approximately eight hundred, and was distributed via a handful of shops to small, close-knit networks of dedicated collectors. In the UK, many paedophiles would travel overseas in order to smuggle it in. Law enforcement agencies in the US considered the matter more or less under control. In 1982, the US General Accounting Office reported that: ‘As a result of the decline in commercial child pornography, the principal Federal agencies responsible for enforcing laws covering the distribution of child pornography – the U.S. Customs Service and the U.S. Postal Service – do not consider child pornography a high priority.’ In 1990, the NSPCC estimated there were 7,000 known images of child pornography in circulation. Because it was so hard to come by, the numbers that were accessing it were vanishingly small. It required effort and determination, which limited it to the most motivated individuals. Even during the ‘ten-year madness’, you didn’t – you couldn’t – just stumble across it.
The arrival of the internet changed everything. By the early nineties, the opportunities of networked computing were quickly exploited by child pornographers as a way to find and share illegal material. In 1993, Operation Long Arm targeted two Bulletin Board Systems that were offering paid access to hundreds of illegal images. Anonymous Usenet groups alt.binaries.pictures.erotica.pre-teen and alt.binaries.pictures.erotica.schoolgirls were both used to share child pornography in the late nineties. In 1996, members of a child abuse ring called the Orchid Club were committing and sharing live abuse using digital cameras connected directly to computers in the US, Finland, Canada, Australia and the UK. Two years later, the police uncovered the Wonderland Club, which comprised hundreds of people in over thirty countries who were using powerful encryption software to secretly trade images over the net. Prospective members had to be put forward by existing members, and possess at least 10,000 unique child pornographic images to join. In total, the police uncovered 750,000 images and 1,800 videos. Seven UK men were convicted for their role in the network in 2001.
As more countries went online, new production hubs sprang up. The infamous Lolita City in the Ukraine flooded the net with half a million images in the early 2000s, before it was shut down in 2004 – although two leaders of the agency were taken into custody and then released.
By October 2007, Interpol’s Child Abuse Image Database – made up of images seized by the police – contained half a million unique images. By 2010, the UK police database, held by the specialist Child Exploitation and Online Protection Centre (CEOP), stored more than 850,000 images (although they have since reported finding up to two million images in a single offender’s collection). In 2011, law enforcement authorities in the US turned over twenty-two million images and videos of child pornography to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children.
Twenty-five years on from the NSPCC’s estimate, there are today huge volumes of child pornography online, easily accessible and efficiently distributed. Between 2006 and 2009, the US Justice Department recorded twenty million unique computer IP addresses who were sharing child pornography files using ‘peer-to-peer’ file-sharing software. CEOP believes that there are approximately 50,000 people in the UK today sharing or viewing indecent images of children.
~~The Dark Net : Inside the Digital Underworld -by- Jamie Bartlett
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