Work harder to stop online child abuse, MEPs tell EU states EU countries are doing too little to combat online child sex abuse, said MEPs on Wednesday. The European Parliament called on national authorities to fully implement the 2011 directive on combating child abuse images and exploitation, adding that more than half of EU member states have so far failed to do so. The Parliament …
"Slovenian MEP Tanja Fajon turned the hyperbole to the max, saying children are permanently in danger due to new technologies and the internet."
With the ability to spout total bollocks like that, she needs to be imported, and given at the very minimum, a junior ministry post over here. A friend for Claire Perry.
Why all the focus on the local 'receiving' ISP? i.e. the end of the journey, rather than the start?
Why aren't the hosting companies being taken down? "Dear <web site hosting service>, you seemed to have hosted several child porn sites this month, and haven't really been responding in a timely manor to take down notices. You are all under arrest, and all the servers you host, vm images etc are being confiscated for evidence."
Do this enough times, and there'll be no one around to host the sites in the first place.
If the hosting companies are untouchable, due to the local country acting as a safe harbour, then disconnect the country from the internet until they start playing ball.
If the sites are being hosted on private servers, then go after their local ISP, and do the same. i.e. Stop providing internet connections to these people, or we shut your entire service down.
As we are finding out in the UK, lots of the ones who were in power during the "electronic age" embryonic stage were consumers of those type of images, all it took was to be good at fundraising or donating to the parties (yes, all of them had people in the club and friends who could make the allegations dissapear) and a blind eye was turned.
They will never vote for "real measures" for fear of losing "Uncle <fix it> Fred" or a close family member in the ensuing investigations
Perhaps this is my personal unease with regards to all attempted censorship coming through, but it does feel a bit like they might have missed the point here... and more worryingly perhaps intentionally so.
What they're saying - as far as I can tell - is that the national police forces of member states need to work harder to combat child abuse... fine, sure, but the focus on the internet seems... misguided to say the least.
"There is child abuse on the internet" - well, yes, I imagine there is in terms of people grooming children for abuse in chat rooms and the like, or blackmailing children into performing sexual acts in front of webcams, but I'm pretty sure that's not what they actually mean here.
What they seem to mean is "There are depictions of child abuse on the internet" - that is, pictures and videos of children being abused. That's also certainly true, but it does rather feel like the wrong part of the equation to be making a fuss over.
It's classic "Treat the symptom not the cause". Surely what we want is for the police (nationally and internationally) to be investigating, finding, and arresting the people who actually took these photos/videos in the first place. We want them catching the people who are doing the grooming, or the blackmailing, or indeed the straightforward raping and videoing. That would be the _cause_ of the proliferation of this sort of thing.
Trying to remove things from the internet is just an exercise in futility and we all know it. You can spend forever playing whack-a-mole with dodgy websites and peer to peer networks (whatever it is they're pedaling) but you'll never kill them all, and if you know that's not going to work, are you not better off doing something else?
I know it sounds heartless, especially with such an emotive issue, but the fact is there are limited resources available here. I fully agree there should be more. I think we'd be better off if the police had more time to spend protecting the vulnerable - which surely is what they are actually for - but whilst this sort of pronouncement sounds very pro-active on the surface, the more I think about it the more it looks like papering over the cracks rather than repairing the foundations.
Digging into the cause, however - seriously investigating the people who create this material - that would seem to involve the police looking in places that they are discouraged from doing so.
"... we'd be better off if the police had more time ..."
It looks to me as though we would also be better off if various sectors of the police did not ignore information that the public and others provide about these appalling crimes.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-31859931
http://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2015/mar/12/rape-cps-police-prosecutors
Kinda what I was getting at with that last paragraph. The police seem to get told how they may and may not use the time they have. Actual investigations that might lead to important people ending up behind bars seem to be discouraged in favour of token gestures like this.
The Register 
Biting the hand that feeds IT
Copyright. All rights reserved © 1998–2024
