sexual exploitation of children over the internet - Meldpunt ...

Krwawecz testified that, in his experience, employing a web crawler service that usescertain terms found on child pornography websites would be impractical because thesearch would turn up thousands of results, most of which do not contain childpornography content. As mentioned previously, financial services companies do employweb crawlers as well as conduct other searches in order to identify inappropriate content.Ms. Jones and Mr. Krwawecz also explained that they typically learn thatwebsites they host contain inappropriate content through reports or complaints fromoutside parties. Once a report is made, Ms. Jones testified that GoDaddy.com initiates aninvestigation to determine if the website contains child pornography or child modelingand immediately suspends and reports websites that contain child pornography content.With regard to child modeling websites, Ms. Jones stated that GoDaddy.com routinelysuspends websites that show images of children posed in a manner intended to be“explicitly sexy”; posed in adult lingerie; or children who are partially nude or in verylittle clothing “not associated with normally acceptable situations.” Similarly, Mr.Krwawecz stated that it is the policy of his company to investigate the reports it receivesand to disable the accounts of websites that contain “blatant illegal content.” However,with regard to potential child modeling websites, Mr. Krwawecz states that his companyrequests proof of age for the models from the website, and if “satisfactory proof” cannotbe provided, the website is terminated. Although websites hosted by Mr. Krwawecz’scompany included sexually solicitous posing of children who appeared as young as eightor nine-years-old, there is no evidence that Mr. Krwawecz was aware of this content and,once notified of the websites prior to the hearing, immediately terminated them.As noted earlier, web hosting companies, domain registries, credit cardcompanies, social networking sites, and cellular telephone carriers, are not clearly subjectto the reporting requirements of 42 U.S.C. § 13032 or other provisions. While certainfinancial services companies have taken a proactive approach to working with NCMECon the problem of commercial child pornography websites, and in reporting into theCyberTipline without a legal obligation to do so, not all firms that profit from thesewebsites have followed suit. More importantly, many industries do not even know aboutthe CyberTipline or whether they can, should, or must report into the CyberTipline. Forexample, due to the urging of NCMEC and a question posed by the Subcommittee at theJune 28 th hearing, in August 2006, the FCC issued an advisory opinion that cellulartelephone carriers would not be precluded by other statutory requirements fromcomplying with the reporting requirements of 42 U.S.C. § 13032.Without any mechanism by which to track the number of Internet ServiceProviders, web hosting companies or domain registries in the U.S., it is also difficult togive notice to these entities of their statutory obligations, the existence of theCyberTipline, NCMEC, and the VGT, as well as the development of best practices.Clearly, neither current legal requirements nor voluntary action have been apparentlysufficient to put a significant dent in the problem of sexual exploitation of children overthe Internet.34