Britain’s spy centre GCHQ is teaming up with police to track paedophiles…
Prime Minister David Cameron has announced the initiative and promised to hunt down child molesters with the same effort used for terrorists. The PM made the announcement at a summit in London of agencies working to protect children and under-age teenagers. The summit includes 26 top technology companies and delegations from 50 countries.
The move follows a number of admissions from the police that they were having difficulty dealing with the sheer scale of the problem.
The first case to hit the headlines, Operation Ore in 1999, found 390,000 individuals had accessed material from 60 different countries. In the UK 2,450 individuals were charged and the police finally admitted that of all of the 7,000 cases submitted to them that some would not be brought to book due to costs.
Subsequent cases have led to a further deluge of information with the police eventually stating that investigating child abuse cases was drawing resources from its core duties.
Due to the emotive nature of the charges such a statement was not received well by the public, a reaction that has led to ongoing political pressure to deal with the issue.
Tech companies Google, Microsoft, Facebook, Yahoo and Twitter revealed they have created new technical solutions to help block and remove illegal child abuse material posted online.
The new National Crime Agency and GCHQ partnership will focus on the ‘dark web’ – encrypted websites and forums where obscene images of children are bought and sold.
They will also harvest images to build a new database and work with law enforcement agencies in more than thirty different countries to track the international trade in child porn.
Journalists working for Future Intelligence have been at the forefront of the battle against computer pornography, Fi editor Peter Warren wrote the first articles on the subject in 1989 and as a result of his work was asked to advise the Greater Manchester Obscene Publications Squad – the first force in the UK to take the issue seriously – of the risks by it’s then head Sergeant John Ashley.
“At that time there was very little thought given to computer pornography but it very quickly became an issue. The first investigation we did was into a site called ‘Hotel California’ that was started up by BT.
“When we went onto it, it became clear in minutes that it was not a very pleasant place to be with virtually every one there making obscene suggestions. It felt as though it was a lurker’s paradise and that was some five or so years before the internet took off.
“I think it fair to say that the pornographers have always been ahead of the game technologically speaking. Between 1987 and 1989 I covered a number of stories involving pornography and each one showed a move into the latest means of transmission so the police have always been playing catch-up.
This may be the moment that they begin to get a grip on the issue, but its quite something when the intelligence agencies are needed to deal with a problem that used to involve visits to shady shops in back streets.”
Sexting initiative
Which is the first thing that the new initiative will have to deal with. The reason for the explosion in material is modern technology. The ability to quickly and easily generate material without the need for specialist resources due to the power of modern editing and capture software which has made it incredibly difficult for the police to cope.Whereas once they would be able to stake out and raid production and distribution premises and monitor customers, cast, and producers now every house and smart phone  is a potential studio and shop which, with intent, can access sophisticated, clandestine distribution networks.
A problem that has been made worse by social media and the now ubiquitous smartphone which provides the means to acquire victims and material as the explosion in sexting has shown.
A problem that Surrey Police are trying to deal with at root, they are funding a major training programme to prevent children becoming either victims or offenders.
Most under-18s do not realise that sending scantily-clad or nude selfies to their teenage friends is a criminal offence – making and sharing a sexually explicit picture of a minor. On conviction it can carry a ten year jail sentence.
Again it is an issue of freely available and powerful technology. Digital technology has allowed the deployment of a huge number of high quality cameras onto mobile phones and the storage to save and send the images. The result has been that the public are able to take huge numbers of pictures without the constraints of film and development costs or of the controls that used to be in place via the companies that developed the film for the public at large that imposed on them the duty to alert the authorities to questionable use of film.
Before the internet it would be difficult to ask for the use of a camera without being asked what you wanted it for, now the ability to take pictures simply involves the click of our fingers.
A facility that with many of the young they are unaware of the consequences of, which when coupled with the pressures now delivered by social media to compete with peers and show a ‘healthy social life’ via social media has led to an explosion of images aimed at showing teenagers as celebrity lookalikes.
The resultant glare of selfies has inevitably led to further attempts to mirror celebrities fuelled by the fascination with instant celebrity programmes.
It is a trend that has led image conscious teenagers of both sexes to flaunt their figures with little thought to the possible consequences, something that is concerning Surrey Police.
The training scheme aims to raise awareness and keep teenagers out of trouble. Trainer Holly Powell Jones, a legally qualified journalist, takes her programme to all the county’s state secondary schools. She includes details of how to avoid prosecution for sending defamatory tweets and text messages, and how to avoid being jailed for contempt of court. This can happen if the messages exchanged could influence a current or pending court case. Holly Powell Jones told the PassW0rd radio show on Resonance FM that the schoolchildren often do not believe her when she explains that tweeting or sexting can land them behind bars.
Powell-Jones believes that the celebrity culture of posting sexy self-images in provocative poses is to blame for the teenagers’ attitude. She cites role models for girls such as Rihanna, Jennifer Lawrence and Kim Kardashian, who all regularly post risque pictures of themselves on Facebook and Twitter. Kim Kardashian is even publishing a book of her ‘selfies’.
Boys may emulate footballers like prolific tweeter Joey Barton and Mario Balotelli, who was recently censured for an allegedly anti-semitic tweet.
“They are not good role models!” says Holly Powell-Jones. She plans a new round of training courses early in 2015 using the teaching materials she herself devised, and she regularly updates her blog with new examples of social media transgressions by people who do not know or respect the law.
http://socialmedialawandethics.com/author/hollypowelljonesgmail-com/
