At a hearing yesterday before the Senate Subcommittee on Crime and Drugs, anti-child porn activists urged the Senators to increase the FBI's budget for combating child porn online and to move forward with plans to create a next-generation network monitoring and database system that can ferret out child porn trafficking on P2P networks, web sites, and chat rooms. The new system would be hosted on the FBI's Regional Information Sharing Systems (RISS) network and would give more law enforcement agents across the country access to an existing system, based in Wyoming, that's currently being used to find and catch online child porn traffickers. Congress would also expand and better fund the current Wyoming system, called Operation FairPlay, consolidating it in a newly-created National Internet Crimes Against Children Data Network Center.

In arguing for the funding and the upgrade, Grier Weeks, executive director of the National Association to Protect Children, briefly recapped for the senators the history of the Canadian Child Exploitation Tracking System (CETS), a suite of network monitoring, database, information management, and collaboration tools that Microsoft developed and funded to the tune of $7 million. In 2003, Microsoft deployed the system in Canada and offered it to the US Department of Justice, which turned it down because it was then locked in a bitter anti-trust dispute with the software maker.

US law enforcement was left to roll its own answer to CETS, and Wyoming's Internet Crimes Against Children (ICAC) task force stepped up with Operation FairPlay, a system developed by task force chief Flint Waters and housed in Wyoming's ICAC headquarters. FairPlay can monitor and map illicit file sharing activity on popular P2P networks, web sites, and chat rooms, and has become a key tool for law enforcement in the two years that it has been in use.



The FBI's six RISS divisions

Special Agent Flint Waters described parts of the system to the subcommittee, and CNet's Anne Broache was there to capture some of the details. The system appears to rely heavily on filenames for targeting users for additional levels of scrutiny, but Waters declined to give too many details of how it positively identifies specific users who are engaged in illicit activity. Waters' comments, which refer to 624,932 "unique serial numbers" that are tied to specific suspects' computers for long-term tracking, make it difficult to discern just how accurate and invasive the system is. The agent wouldn't disclose much of anything about these "serial numbers," either how they're obtained or what they represent.

Recent revelations about the FBI's honeypot scheme for catching possible child porn traders do give some cause for concern over the lack of detail on how the system works, a concern that's only likely to grow as the system itself grows. There's no doubt that child exploitation ruins lives, but so could the high number of false positives associated with computer-automated surveillance and tracking systems, especially when combined with aggressive prosecution and the overall technical ignorance of CSI-watching juries.

Weeks urged the subcommittee to pass the Combating Child Exploitation Act, which is the Senate version of the bill that would provide the new funding and other resources for combating online child porn. The bill would also consolidate control of the ICAC at the federal level with the creation of an ICAC task force within the DoJ itself, and it would call on the Attorney General to appoint a Special Counsel for Child Exploitation Prevention and Interdiction—a sort of national child exploitation czar.

The bill's main sponsor is Senator Joe Biden (D) of Delaware. Biden praised Operation FairPlay to the subcommittee and urged the bill's passage.

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