Tech giants ‘could stop child porn if they wanted to’
TECH firms could end the proliferation of indecent images of children online instead of tolerating it, the National Crime Agency (NCA) chief leading the fight against child abuse has said.
Rob Jones said the firms had the technology to be more proactive to prevent images reaching the web in the first place, to stop crime happening and to hunt down paedophiles grooming children.
In an interview with The Daily Telegraph, he warned their approach was too reactive and there was a danger of online child abuse being normalised in society by the continued proliferation of thousands of images that were too easy to access on the “open” web.
He said it provided an “escalation pathway” that “desensitised” and “radicalised” paedophiles who were then drawn to ever more depraved sites on the “dark web” where they had to generate and supply a new image of child abuse in order to join the forums. “It’s a direct incitement to abuse. They upload their image and then they get into a much darker forum which encourages more abuse, where people are scored, lauded and given credit for having ever more depraved images,” said Mr Jones.
The NCA has seen a 700 per cent rise in referrals of cases from the US to 80,000 a year since 2012, most of which involve downloading images.
“We want to raise the bar to make sure it’s only the sophisticated, resourceful and determined that can obtain images on the open web, not anyone that can use a proprietary search engine,” said Mr Jones.
This would enable the NCA to focus resources on paedophiles who posed the greatest risk such as Matthew Falder, a Cambridge graduate who used the dark web to blackmail and abuse 300 young victims, and Derek Hutton, who created 407 fake identities to abuse 900 children online.
“It is moving from this stance of an acceptance that child abuse will happen online and that images of abuse will exist online. We can’t accept that. It’s challenging that reactive stance,”
he said. “At the moment there’s a risk that the proliferation of this material will be normalised within society, that the internet is seen as so difficult to police that we will just accept that this stuff happens. It’s the moment to press the re-set button, stop tolerating that this stuff happens online and go on to the front foot so this material becomes the exception and not the rule.”
He said the Government was right to consider legislation if tech firms failed to act, and he called for the tech industry to set minimum standards for tackling online abuse, just as there was for cyber security and online banking. This could include kitemarks on apps and websites so parents would know if their children were protected.
The Telegraph is campaigning for a statutory duty of care on the tech giants to better protect children from online harms.
Mr Jones warned abuse victims were getting younger, including babies under 18 months, as more children under 13 went online.
“It’s not dissimilar to a toddler walking on to a motorway,” he said. “Once they get access to the internet, there’s nothing that defines them as a child. Without age verification, or identity verification, it becomes very difficult to provide a credible response to protect a child.”
Mr Jones said it was not clear how far the internet was increasing the number of paedophiles rather than providing a new avenue for those who would have been abusers previously.
He warned there was a risk with the 80,000-plus referrals from the US that “high risk intelligence leads” could be missed, which was why it was critical to reduce the scale of offending.