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

found in 42 U.S.C. § 13032, criminal liability under 18 U.S.C. § 2252 et seq., orother criminal and civil liability pursuant to Department of Justice antitrustenforcement actions. We recommend that the Department of Justice provide ISPswith guidance on these points to ensure that ISPs continue to cooperate with lawenforcement agents on these investigations. These guidelines should also permitISPs to perform proactive measures on their networks to block images of childpornography and, if the ISP is conducting such measures and blocking childpornography images on their networks, provide assurance to the ISP that they arenot in violation of the crimes they are trying to prevent, such as possession anddistribution of child pornography images.• Social networking websites are not enforcing their Terms of Use as vigilantly asthey could and, thus, sexual predators are using these websites to find potentialvictims.• Social networking websites must take proactive steps to start cross-referencingstate sex offender registry lists with those individuals that have profiles on theirsite, and notify law enforcement immediately of their findings for furtherinvestigation. States should consider enacting legislation, such as that proposedin the Commonwealth of Virginia, to require sex offenders to provide their emailaddress when registering as a sex offender so that social networking websites canuse the registries to block those offenders from their websites.• Digital currencies are being used more frequently on commercial childpornography websites and provide another layer of anonymity to the purchaserand seller of these materials. Digital currencies on the Internet are not regulatedanywhere in the world.• The U.S. Department of Treasury and the U.S. Department of Justice shouldpropose legislation to Congress aimed at providing effective controls over theburgeoning digital currency industry over the Internet.• According to the Internet Watch Foundation (“IWF”) in the United Kingdom,approximately 50 percent of the child pornography content the IWF is discoveringon the Internet appears to be hosted in the U.S. It is possible that this content mayappear to be hosted in the U.S. but in fact is re-routed from another hostingcompany outside of the U.S. Currently, there is no registration requirement in theU.S. for web hosting companies and thus, it is difficult to know how manycompanies in the U.S. are hosting content over the Internet. It would benefit lawenforcement investigations as well as provide uniformity in the number of webhosting companies that report to the CyberTipline if a registry for web hostingcompanies was created in the United States.• U.S. law enforcement investigations have uncovered instances where obviouschild pornography domain names were registered with a domain registry companybased in the U.S. It would benefit U.S. law enforcement’s effort to combat child6