Perpetrators and Investigators of Child Pornography Offenses Both Rely on Modern Technology

Child Pornography Sexual Offenders not so Faceless Behind Encrypted IP Addresses & Password Protections

As the recent USA Today article on February 19, 2014, highlights, viewing and trading images of child pornography has skyrocketed in recent years. (See USA Today, Clandestine Websites Fuel ‘Alarming’ Increase in Child Porn, by Kevin Johnson, Feb. 19, 2014 ). More than 100 million images and videos of suspected sexual abuse against children have been referred to the Children Division at the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children (NCMEC) and there are an estimated 50,000 people in the United States who are “consistently trading illegal images” involving children at any time.

The perpetrators hide behind encrypted IP addresses and password protected sites where they band together to share and trade images. The “dark web” provides a social haven for the suspects, who often find social status based on their frequent and escalating abuse of children.

However, investigators now have a new software tool to help them track down the suspects. The technology, known as ICAC (Internet Crimes Against Children) Cops, tracks the coding of illegal images that have been previously recovered to individual computers that are currently downloading the images. The tracking software allows investigators to pinpoint suspects who are currently downloading illegal material all over America. The new technology appears to be helping: according to the USA Today article, of the one hundred an fourteen (114) arrest of child pornography distribution suspects in Pennsylvania last year (2013), the ICAC Cop helped in identifying about eighty (80) percent of them.