‘U.S., U.K. spy agencies fight online child porn’

LONDON (AFP) ― Britain and the United States will enlist the help of spy agencies to track down pedophiles who share images of child sex abuse online, Prime Minister David Cameron said on Monday.

A joint U.S.-U.K. taskforce will work with encryption experts at Britain’s GCHQ communications monitoring agency and the U.S. National Security Agency to find offenders who operate in the darkest corners of the Internet, he said.

The initiative put the capabilities of U.S. and British electronic eavesdropping agencies in a positive light, after recent damaging revelations that the NSA and GCHQ pried into the private communications of millions of people.

Cameron welcomed announcements by Google and Microsoft, which runs Bing and powers the Yahoo! search engine, to provide ‘clean’ results to 100,000 searches related to child sex abuse.

But he told BBC radio: “The next stage is now to go after the dark net where people are sharing images peer-to-peer away from the Googles and the Microsofts.

“There has been a lot in the news recently about the techniques, ability, and brilliance of the people involved in the intelligence community and GCHQ and the NSA in America,” the prime minister said.

“That expertise is going to be brought to bear to go after on these revolting people sharing these images on the dark net and making them available more widely.”

Officials said Britain’s new National Crime Agency would be joining forces with the FBI to target pedophiles using secret or encrypted networks.

The new role may help rehabilitate the agencies after their role in mass surveillance came under scrutiny following the leaks by fugitive NSA contractor Edward Snowden.

Cameron was speaking after hosting an Internet safety summit with tech companies including Microsoft and Google, child protection groups, the industry-funded Internet Watch Foundation and the NCA.

The British government has been pushing for action from the industry since the middle of 2013, after two high-profile child sex murders in which the killers were found to have searched for child porn online.

In July, Cameron threatened to introduce legislation to block access to illegal images if search engines failed in a “moral duty” to do so voluntarily.

The problem was highlighted last week when police in Canada announced that 341 people, including teachers and doctors, were arrested around the world following an investigation into a child porn site.

Cameron said the measures announced by Microsoft and Google represented a “massive breakthrough in cleaning up the Internet” and praised the industry for taking action.

Google put more than 200 staff on the problem in July and on Monday announced it has developed new software to block child porn from the results of more than 100,000 unique searches.

This represents just a fraction of the 1.2 trillion searches conducted on Google in 2012, but the tech giant said it would constantly monitor the latest terms being used by pedophiles.

“While society will never wholly eliminate such depravity, we should do everything in our power to protect children from harm,” said executive chairman Eric Schmidt.

The restrictions will initially apply to English-speaking countries but will be expanded to 158 other languages within six months.

Microsoft has also blocked images, videos and links from searches for a smaller number of blacklisted terms.

Both companies have also stopped auto-complete features from offering child abuse search terms, and both are using software to identify banned images and stop copies being disseminated across the Internet.