Fergie's Tech Blog

Officials Find Child Pornography on 20,000 Virginia Computers

Chris L. Jenkins writes in The Washington Post:

Law enforcement officials working undercover were sent child pornography files from nearly 20,000 private computers in the state over a 30-month period, according to a report by an expert on the distribution of Internet child porn.

Those computers accounted for 215,197 Internet child pornography transactions between October 2005 and February, according to a state report developed by Flint Waters, a special agent with the Wyoming attorney general's Division of Criminal Investigation. He has developed a national online system to track such activity.

The recorded numbers are just a small percentage of the traffic generated by child pornography distributors, who use peer-to-peer file-sharing networks such as Lime Wire to peddle often violent and hard-core movies and images, Waters said. The program tallies only the files that were distributed to undercover officers. The tracking software investigators use, Operation Fairplay, does not tally files shared between private users.

"Right now there's no way that law enforcement can keep up with all this activity," Waters said, adding that such activity has increased steadily in the United States.

posted by Fergie @ 4/10/2008 09:11:00 AM