Child Pornography On Usenet - Web Server Level

Child pornography is a worrying issue that has pulled down the repute of so many other licit Usenet newsgroups. Authorities and newsgroup advocates have clashed opinions in the past about the latter’s legitimacy, but the real culprit in between this raging storm are child porn contributors and participants that have silently flouted the three legislations passed in 1996 and 1998 to protect the rights of children with respect to online activities. This serious multi-billion dollar problem calls for a blockage and one step to achieve this is by employing a filtering system starting from the administrator level. If this is realized a bottleneck against child pornography will ensure success of this aim.

While an ordinary person you meet on the street detests child pornography, some Usenet groups provide some form of legitimacy for these deviants and everyone else in the group thinks this practice of child abuse is just normal. Pedophiles are a danger to the welfare of our children, but you will be surprised to know that the market for child pornography is not anymore limited to the stereotypical pedophile you have in mind, as it has grown broader to include a more diverse type of people, according to a 2005 National Juvenile Online Victimization study. This makes them a heterogeneous group that subscribes to contorted practices but who are not necessarily a brainless crowd. They have developed alternative, mislabelled and misleading posts to evade detection.

A distasteful task indeed, but in order to stamp out child pornography, we need to follow the footsteps of this group of deviants—how they operate, the content they distribute, and the method of distribution. This includes searching for terms they utilize that enable them to fly under the radar of authorities. If this dirty job is not undertaken, it will then be difficult to tackle child pornography. To begin with, search engines do not help much, and not to blame them completely, since they need to block all content pointing to this illegal activity.

Thus, a keyword database of all possible terms relating to child pornography that distributors so creatively employ needs to be collated at the Usenet administrator level. A careful treatment of terms will have to be observed though, as words with completely innocuous meaning outside the realm of child pornography can be incorrectly given attention. For instance, the word ‘girl’ needs to be stricken off the list as its inclusion will cause numerous legitimate posts to be deleted as well.

Several newsreaders already have a filtering mechanism to obstruct unwanted content, but readers like you can also manually add keywords that you have come across elsewhere. This will educate the administrators and make them aware of other means that deviants use in propagating child pornography. In effect, a comprehensive keyword database will assist us all in putting a stop against this illegal activity. The most efficient method to instigate a bottleneck against child pornography on Usenet, and the Internet in general, is to legislate the use of filter keyword database that makes this process mandatory and regulated.

Which now begs the question: do we need to become so strict to curtail the freedom of the majority or let the menacing deviant minority run the show? This is a balancing act that calls for the concerted efforts of the authorities, the Usenet administrators and the readers.

By: JV Valdez

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JV Valdez writes about technology--its development and innovations, and how people respond to them. He also writes about travel and political affairs.
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