The project, dubbed the “Cyber-Safety Plan”, has already drawn criticism regarding its feasibility from several groups but the government is adamant that the system will help protect children from being exposed (intentionally or otherwise) to inappropriate materials.

According to the Australian government, home-based filtering will do absolutely nothing as it can usually be bypassed by children as young as seven years old. Yet, while the idea to filter the internet on the ISPs end is good in principle, the technology required to actively block these potentially inappropriate materials from viewing in real time is not available. The filters will block access to websites, yes. But everybody, including a seven year old child, knows that most illegal materials are traded on P2P technologies that cannot be easily filtered.

That said; the system is planned to have two tiers of operation. The first tier, which people could not opt out of, will block all content the Australian government deems to be illegal. This can be scaled up or down at any time and without notice. Control of the site black list will be held exclusively by the Australian Communications and Media Authority, and the list will never be made publicly available. The second tier, which is optional, would see all pornographic and sexually explicit content filtered out completely.

International Support

There seems to be quite a bit of interest in this project by other western nations, as well, as countries like Japan have expressed interest in blocking such material from web users. Many school boards think this is a great way to protect children from witnessing child pornography, police groups think this will make it easier to locate and track the illegal trading of such material, lobby groups feel this is the best way to make the internet a safer place, and parents view this with the same regard.

On one hand, it’s easy to see the benefits of filtering the internet at the ISP-level, as it will ensure our pre-pubescent children are not witness to acts of sexual promiscuity or other less-than-Fisher Price subjects. However, by blocking access to websites that display material the government deems unworthy of sharing, does this not open the doors to censorship on a broader scale? What about the responsibility parents have of properly educating their children on both the good and the bad sides of the internet?

The Cyber-Safety Plan is certainly a well-intentioned method for keeping the internet a “family safe” environment, but it seems to be little more than an elaborate system designed to let the general public blame others when their children view something they themselves might not want to see. With the exception of PornTube, there is very little online our children can witness which isn’t already on MTV, Fox, CNN, and other powerful TV stations.

Am I Missing Something?

Should the day come where I find my elementary school child sitting at a computer and staring at a sexually explicit scene on the screen, the last person I would expect to hold accountable would be the government. Instead, I would hit Alt+F4 to close the browser and discuss the situation with my child. Depending on whether this was a repeat offense or not, I might even call my wife in to have a “family discussion” on the topic of appropriate viewing materials.

Democratic governments were not, in theory, designed to protect us from ourselves, but to protect us from without and to ensure that the citizens of the country had the bare minimum to enjoy a happy and prosperous life. It’s not their job to make sure my children grow up happy and mentally prepared to handle everyday life, it’s mine. Parents who cannot accept the responsibility to properly raise their children shouldn’t have them in the first place. Why should my occasional appetite for pornographic material be stymied because my neighbors can’t pay attention to their child’s online activities?

Besides, porn is not the biggest problem that children face online today. There are far more cases of stalking, bullying, chatting with sexual predators, and identity theft going on online than there are of grade school children sharing flash cards loaded with pornographic media. If this isn’t enough, most “illegal materials” (a phrase that is not completely defined to allow ambiguity) are encrypted and split into many files to prevent such basic filtering attempts. How will the Australian government account for these?

$126-million Better Spent Elsewhere

While I can empathize with the Australian government regarding their attempts to filter the seemingly seedy underworld that is the internet, the ends will not justify the means. The project is slated to cost an estimated $126-million (AUS) at a time when governments around the world are seeing their coffers empty out at record speeds. Rather than using this money to protect parents from the harsh responsibilities that come with being a parent, the government should be using it to prop up their falling dollar or fund other projects that will put food in some empty stomachs.

It’s true that young people should not be witnessing things that they are not mentally prepared for, but it is part of growing up. My parents taught me right from wrong whenever I strayed too close to the line, and I will do the very same for my children. There is no government in the world that should put limitations on what we can see, hear, or judge for ourselves.

What’s your take on this? Should governments or ISPs have the right to filter the internet?

Scratching an imaginary itch, the blogger tried to make sense of the data displayed on screen. The last five weeks had seen traffic to their main website more than double, thanks in part to the SEO work they had put into each of the thousand-plus blog articles that had been written since college. Focusing on a very narrow niche subject, the amateur writer had decided to use their real name in an attempt to bring more credibility to their name, while making legitimate business contacts at the same time.

Interestingly enough, though, the people coming to the site were coming through search engines with really odd requests. Words that had very little to do with the subject on hand, aside from being semi-related synonyms to keywords selected were commonly seen, with bounce rates of almost 100%. It seemed that only 15% of all visitors from the big search engines were actually looking for the information found on the blog, while the majority of people were finding the site while looking for something completely off topic.

“How the heck does this happen?” Being the only person in the room, nobody had an answer for the blogger, but it did give them something to think about for the next phase of the SEO project.

Taking a page from mainstream media, according to a statistic pulled from the farthest reaches of “where the sun don’t shine,” over 90% of all bloggers use some sort of pseudonym in order to keep some semblance of separation between the online and offline realms. This level of ubiquitous anonymity provides most people the freedom to say what they want about whoever they want, as well as the opportunity to eliminate an online persona at a moments notice should a situation get out of hand. However, despite the freedoms a person may have while writing under an assumed name, there are some advantages to using your real name online.

That said, what does a person do when they notice that a large percentage of their visitors are coming through search engines like Google and Yahoo! with really weird queries? What can we do when there are a few keywords that put us on the first page of an unfavorable query? Or, perhaps more interestingly, what can we glean from the visitors that come to our sites using queries that would get most normal people locked up?

Search Engine Psychology

Over the last two years I have had the luxury of working with over 50 bloggers to help them build their sites from the ground up. I’m not a professional blogger by any stretch of the imagination, but I do have the basic skills required to set somebody up with a simple WordPress site and a number of themes that might catch their eye. One aspect of my services involves basic SEO training and, after monitoring close to 80 websites, I’ve come to the realization that bounce rates are incredibly high not because of phenomenally poor SEO, but due to something far more sinister: Google’s overuse of synonyms, and Yahoo’s inability to tell the difference between a good search result and a hole in the ground.

More than this, though, is the analysis of the search strings that are most commonly seen for each site. It makes me want to peek into the lives of some of the people searching for information, if only for half an hour or so, just to see if I’m imagining too many strange things. Here are a few of the actual search strings that I’ve seen for people coming to this site in the last 30 days, in order of frequency:

1. Jason japan
2. Drought Africa G77
3. japan sucks
4. jason irwin
5. Japan Canada work
6. Find work Japan
7. Porno japan
8. Young boy prostitute japan
9. Jason pedophile
10. Space elevator japan

It seems that I have the “Japan” keyword nailed pretty good, as well as my first name. Heck, I’ve even started seeing some pretty good results when checking for my ranking using my full name; Jason Irwin. But what the hell is up with points seven through nine? People are actually coming to this site by looking for these things in Google and Yahoo!? But this isn’t the scariest one I’ve seen recently. Not by a long shot. Earlier today I was checking my FireStats and this is what I was met with:

“I want to watch child porno”

What the hell is this? I can understand that some search engines might be perfectly content with my post a few months back talking about some ways that we might combat child pornography online but how does this translate into people being foolish enough to actually type something so damning into a search engine?

Understanding the Mind of a Fool, or Over-Analyzing the Data?

Just for giggles, I decided to check out the IP of the person that wanted to watch this highly flammable form of rape and was shocked to discover that the fool was from the United States. From the good ol’ Christian state of Texas, no less. I wonder why this person isn’t worried that the FBI or some other federal organization might be monitoring activity like this. Heck, considering how stupid some of the dolts were in NBC’s “To Catch A Predator” series, you’d think that the average idiot that gets off on watching kids subjected to something worse than water-boarding would have wisened up just a little bit to prevent getting caught with their pants down.

Clearly I was mistaken.

But now I’m left wondering just why someone would be so daft as to actually type this in to a web browser. Considering the amount of press the worldwide criminal investigations of this matter seems to garner, you’d think that people would know that they need to use the less traversed realms of the interweb in order to meet their needs. UseNET, closed IRC channels, and obscure FTPs with very limited access would be a few of the places that might still carry such taboo materials. Those who are familiar with Torrents might have some secret trackers at their disposal, but somehow I doubt that people would want to connect and risk having their IP broadcasted to any number of seeds that turn out to be police agencies engaging in a necessary, albeit potentially illegal, form of entrapment.

All this said, perhaps the data is nothing more than part of a police investigation for illegal activities. Who’s to say that the person using Yahoo! to search for potentially horrific depictions of children in all manners of inescapable predicaments wasn’t a law-enforcer who is working night and day to bring the lowest scum of the earth into the waiting arms of a federal prison where countless hardened criminals can subject the “fresh meat” to the same situation as they had once enjoyed viewing?
Regardless of the intent of these visits, one thing is for certain: people who have blogs that cover a multitude of topics and discussions will likely see lots of strange search terms that have brought visitors from all over the world. There have been an incredible number of visitors coming to this site looking for some kind of pornography, and there are other sites under my domains that have seen visitors come for everything from pictures of shaved monkeys, to dancing emoticons. How they manage to arrive, I’ll probably never know, but I’d love to find some ways to capitalize on it.

Have you noticed any strange patterns with search terms for your sites? Is this the result of search engines being too smart, or is it a failure in SEO? I’d love to hear your thoughts on the matter.

But then, with the sheer number of scammers out there, perhaps some of us really are unaware of the persistent plague of pestilent people who prey on copious quantities of uninformed customers.

I currently host email for about 190 people on three continents. The average person receives roughly 80 messages per month and anywhere between 200 and 5000 spam email messages every month. While I can certainly understand why some addresses are spammed to death, what I can’t tolerate is the sheer amount of processing power that’s going into identification and elimination of these malignant messages. Here is the breakdown on the email messages for the past two weeks:

Total Messages Received: 6,920
Messages Marked as Spam: 6,193
Messages Sent: 590
Messages Flagged by System: 1

So in two weeks, my server has received almost seven thousand messages. A good portion of these were marked as spam and deleted before arriving at its intended destination. 590 messages were sent from the same server, and only one was marked as being potentially spam. The only reason it was marked that way was because it was an actual spam message that got through, and someone was forwarding it to PayPal to see if it was a real warning.

As a disclaimer, I will mention that I do not read the emails of people on my server. That would not only be a huge invasion of privacy, but the act of a stupid SysAdmin. While I’ve done many stupid things in my life, this will not be one of them. When my spam checker identifies something as spam coming from my server, it sends me a message with the name of the person who sent it, as well as the subject line. If I think someone is sending spam from my server, I will talk to them about what they’re doing with the free service I’m providing and get clarification. The last thing I want to see is my server going back on the black lists. It took months to get it back on the white lists with MSN, Yahoo and GMail a few months back thanks to IP sharing with my host provider.

That said, I thought it would be interesting to see what kind of spam messages are being sent out this month. Have spammers learned from the past and become more sophisticated with their techniques? Are they using well-written messages in an effort to entice us with sex, cheap goods, drugs or some combination thereof?

Oh, if only it were true.

Type One: The Sexy Offer

We’ve all seen this one. The subject line looks something like “[MSG: 83921] I want to see you right away” and is supposed to be from someone with a rather seductive looking name. “Foxy Brunette” and “Penelope Wilson” seem to be the two most common names found in my spam filter and, despite by best attempts to understand, I just cannot wrap my head around why someone would respond to something that clearly looks so fake.

MSG 83921? Would you put this in an email to someone you want to get into bed with? I can just imagine how stupid I would have looked to my Reiko had I sent emails with such ridiculous subject lines when we were still dating.

Anyone who is begging someone they’ve never met for sex is either a crack addict, a prostitute who’s being threatened by a pimp, or someone you wouldn’t want to be involved with in the first place. If I ever meet someone who responds to these kinds of messages, I’ll probably vomit in rage before passing out due to a severe chemical imbalance in my brain while trying to parse the fact that the person before me is really so gullible.

Type Two: The Sales Pitch

“Exclusive Offer! Best imitation r0l3x watches you’ll ever see!” This is a subject line I can understand. The Rolex brand has been trashed so badly online that even mentioning that you bought one will earn your email an unhappy trip to the Junk folder, if not deleted outright. Other brands such as Viagra, Gucci, Prada, Cialis and just about everything else that is considered up-scale have received the very same treatment. It must be damn near impossible for advertisers from any of these companies to market their products online thanks to scammers and spammers the world over. Luckily, rich people don’t use the internet.

Have you ever known someone to buy drugs from some unknown vendor on the internet? How about a nice-looking $500 replica Rolex watch? If you do, send me their email address. I have a bridge in Nagoya I’d like to sell them, and perhaps I’ll even part with some land on the moon.

Type Three: The e-Card

What started out as a nice little industry where people could send animated “cards” to each other to celebrate all the little things in life turned into the most effective way to transmit viral infections and just about every other type of unwanted software online. One of these managed to sneak past my spam filters a few weeks ago and looked pretty convincing … until it asked me to click a link. The message looked a little like this:

You’ve received an eCard from your sister!
To pick it up, just click on the link below, or copy and paste it into your browser: http://nonsensical.com/e-card.exe.

Your card will be available only for a few days, so be sure to pick it up quickly!

Wow! My sister sent me an eCard? How thoughtful! Wait a minute … it’s an exe!

What’s really sad about this last one is that I can actually picture my parents clicking the link and being infected with whatever code the executable file contained. The way I look at it, if my parents would click it, then so would tens of millions of others.

No wonder bot-nets become so massive in such a short amount of time.

What’s the Solution?

Like many other people (who are far more intelligent than I), I’ve been looking for some possible solutions to this issue, but have yet to find any that would be workable on a grand scale. Limiting people to one email address in a lifetime would be difficult to ensure and maintain, not to mention troublesome for those of us who need separate addresses for whatever reason. Having people manually confirm an email address by traditional mail or phone call would be just as troublesome, as some companies would pop up offering to bypass this for $20 USD or whatever. At the same time, we don’t want email to become something that is darn near Orwellian in nature, as the communications method has lots to offer both individuals and companies.

So what’s a workable option?

Unfortunately, I can’t think of a single realistic alternative to our current spam-filtering technologies. Sure, the filters will continue to suck up a large amount of processing power, but what other methods could ensure a spam-free mailbox?

I’d love to hear your thoughts on the matter.

So what’s the most workable solution to bullying?

Kenji’s Opinion: Dismiss and Punish to Prevent

Having spent his entire life in Japan, Kenji has first hand knowledge of growing up in a society where the youth are often pushed to extremes by everyone around them. Students must be part of at least one club activity in order to “fit in” at school, and parents are always pushing their children to get phenomenal grades in every class before sending them off to a juku (cram school) after the day’s lessons are complete. From the age of 12 to 17, students often get by on just five to six hours of sleep, and are out of the house or studying intently for the rest of the day.

Although we all hear stories like this about schools in Japan, the reality is really quite different. Sure this might happen with some students, but most have a little free time here and there so that they can enjoy their youth. That said; the average Japanese student still has about 1/10th the free time of their North American counterparts.

Regardless of how much free time a person has, the type of bullies that exist here in Japan are just the same as you would find anywhere in the world. Many bullies do what they do because they’re not happy at home, or they’re not happy with themselves, or they just enjoy being bigger than everyone and want to flex their muscle in any way possible. Regardless of the cause, the effects of bullying are quite real: people are made to feel inferior.

When students go online to write a blog post, communicate with friends, or be part of an online forum, the last thing they want to deal with is abuse. To combat the growing rise of bullying on this medium, Kenji feels that it would be best to prevent students from participating in any online communities. Not only would this give them more time to study, but it would prevent students from being targeted by bullies and sexual predators. When these students reach an appropriate age, which is supposedly somewhere around 17, they will have a better handle on their emotions and be able to handle bullies more effectively.

How would students be better able to handle bullies at 17? I asked.

“Students should be given the power to immediately report bullying to a teacher or police officer in order to bring the offender to justice in a swift and orderly manner,” Kenji tells me.

Essentially, Kenji feels that we should dismiss the rights of the individual by banning the use of a (relatively) safe communications medium and promoting the act of tattle-tailing in order to quickly bring bullies in line with what society expects of them. Rather than let our young people use the internet as a communications medium and learning tool while showing them how to handle idiots, we’re supposed to keep our net connections locked down just in case somebody hurts their feelings?

I can understand that some parents want to protect their children from all harm, but this level of protectionism is just lunacy.

My Opinion (Not That It Matters): Educate and Encourage

Until the age of 14, I was always “the fat kid.” Forever wearing track pants because jeans would seldom fit long enough to be worth the money, I was the butt of every joke. It didn’t help that I came from a poorer family, nor did my rather explosive temper. However, with the help of some great teachers and role models, I learned how to control my rage (externally) and deal with people who wanted to see me dead. Without the guidance from people I respected, and the encouragement I received from my parents whenever I accomplished something worthwhile, I never would have enjoyed my youth and would have likely become a very dark and negative person with pent up rage and a grudge on life.

To this day, the lessons that I had learned from teachers like Mr. Robinson, Mr. Neil, Mr. Castle and Ms. Laidlaw continue to help me get through the most difficult situations where I am being discriminated against or otherwise treated unfairly. Rather than tattle to a superior about how so-and-so said this or that about me, it’s much simpler to just let it slide. One of the best ways I’ve found to handle personal slander is to respond in a direct fashion, while giving the impression of misinterpretation.

“You’re such a @#$!ing douce, Jason.”
“What’s so bad about being clean?”

“I’ve never seen such a pitiful excuse for a report. You expect me to pay you for this?”
“The numbers don’t lie. Clearly you can’t manage a business. I do expect to be paid but, after seeing this report, I’d rather receive cash than a cheque.”

Well … I don’t recommend using that last one too casually, but the fact of the matter remains. So long as a person is confident in themself and knows how to handle abusive dolts, bullying online will be less of a problem. Kids are pretty tough and don’t need to be protected as much as some people think. All it takes is a little education and encouragement from others.

Of course, online bullies can sometimes seem larger than life. Rather than have one or two people attack you, like in most real situations, it’s possible to have thousands of people attacking you simultaneously. In the case of some recent online suicides, some mocking dolt would happen upon a blog post or live video stream of a person who was feeling particularly depressed and send the link to friends around the world. From there, friends of friends would receive the link and the number of people following something would quickly snowball into the thousands. Regardless of what the depressed individual says, their words are twisted and spat back at them in a devastatingly deriding fashion, which would then lead to an unfortunate circumstance. In a few cases, people have actually hung themselves while people watched through the webcam. Even in death, their mocking laughs and hurtful words filled the screen of the recently deceased. Quickly bored by the sight of a cooling corpse swinging from the ceiling, they congratulate themselves and move on to the next unwitting victim. Never once will they give a second thought to the fact that they were responsible for a person’s death.

I’m disgusted every time I think of the news story.

The media response to this is always the same, too. They scream and holler that Kenji’s “solution” should be put into effect to save the lives of countless other people. They point fingers, blaming everything from rap music to video games to the de-humanizing nature of the internet. But never once do they ask the real questions: where were the parents, and why didn’t they see the long-term patterns in their own children?

Should we prevent kids from living through this solitary horror? Oh, yes. But we shouldn’t do it with restrictions. Again, education and encouragement is the only way a person can bounce back from those days where it seems there’s nothing left to live for.

Your Opinion: <Insert Keywords Here>

What do you think we should do about online bullying? Bullies have been around since life began so many years ago, and they’ll continue to be with us until long after the sun goes cold. Should society attack bullies with reason and compassion? Should parents be held more accountable for the emotional and psychological well-being of their children? I’d love to hear your thoughts on the matter.

We’ve all heard the phrase “crime doesn’t pay” but, when we look at all of the scammers and illegal activities on the internet that generate huge sums of cash for anyone greasy enough to do the work, it’s hard not to be a little bit jealous. That said, there are a few ways that police are trying to crack down on internet crime. Today’s topic is on the Big Brother Approach, and why it won’t work.

If police forces around the world are serious about combating online crimes such as child pornography, money laundering, sex slave trading, or any of the other highly illegal online activities for that matter, they need to start attacking the problem from the inside. Several police forces around the world have taken this idea to heart and tried to implement a very Orwellian approach to fighting crime in cyberspace. The only problem with the idea, though, is that it would need to be universal to have any chance of success. This means that the various national and municipal law enforcement agencies would need to get support from internet service providers, concerned citizens and, most importantly, each other.

The idea that some analysts have proposed is to employ a series of storage servers at ISPs all over a specific nation (any nation, it really doesn’t matter) and monitor every user connected to that one data center. The system wouldn’t be used to store every online file download, of course, but would instead be designed to look for specific usage patters. These patterns would likely include the following things:

• monitor for excessive bandwidth to and from a given site or IP
• monitor the amount of encrypted data being transmitted and received
• analyze every email, text message and video chat

This is only a partial list, but it’s enough to give law enforcement agencies the ability to perform complex data mining in order to determine which person is most likely a secret child molester or engaged in some other socially unacceptable human behavior.

Because the system would be pattern-driven, the storage servers could be called on to collect and store a random portion of a person’s transferred data only if a suspected pattern match is made. From this point, a series of distributed computers (concerned citizens who donate their spare processing cycles, much like those involved with the BOINC Project) around the world would analyze the data looking for particular patterns with technology licensed from Quaero. Using a media pattern-recognition package would allow simple background searches of data without the need to have a human manually examine potentially sensitive or classified information. This would also make unencrypted data validation incredibly quick.

Naturally, encrypted data would require quite a bit more computational horsepower as many of today’s technologies are designed to be resistant to brute-force attacks. However, with a potential processing capacity approaching that of over 1 PetaFlop (1,000,000,000,000,000 FLoating point OPerations per second), assuming this project became as popular as BOINC, this can combated quite effectively. With such incredible measures in place, it would be possible to quickly track down some of the worst offenders before they go deep underground. The technology could then be adapted to look for other forms of digital media such as DRM-free audio and video files. The internet could then, in theory, become a crime free region fostering an open exchange of ideas.

In theory.

Everything Works On Paper

This is a great idea for anyone who enjoys the poetic justice of cause and effect. Data encryption is an incredibly important element of security and, if cracking today’s algorithms became a trivial matter, the ever-resourceful online community would simply create something so complicated that the raw processing power required would be several orders of magnitude higher than the Big Brother project could realistically accommodate.

Government bodies, bureaucrats, and public services have a terrible habit of ignoring the lessons learned in the past, so are destined to forever repeat the same mistakes. Since the days of Caesar’s shifted-character encryption method, people have looked for ways to crack codes.

If a company was connected online and sending excessive amount of encrypted data across the internet to a single IP, it could be discovered that the encrypted information is sensitive company-specific data that is being shared across two disparate servers, or backed up at some alternate location. It could be successive credit and debit card transactions from a huge department store. It could be a bunch of people chatting through a secure tunnel because they’re a little paranoid about Big Brother watching their every move. Would we really want to put so much processing power towards cracking encryption and reading data contents?

Of course, if we didn’t have a choice in the matter, then it wouldn’t be our decision to make.

Advantages to the Big Brother Approach

Like many crazy ideas, there is an element of genius involved with implementing a scheme like this.

By monitoring people from their ISP’s nearest relay, law enforcement agencies would save themselves the hassle of tracking most IP spoofing activities, as well as complicated tunneling operations. While it’s true that people who actually know how the infrastructure works could still get around the tighter monitoring, 99% of all perpetrators of illegal activities have neither the skills or the tools to get around the blockade. With such restrictions in place, many private producers and distributors of questionable material would be forced to rely once again on their local contacts.

On top of this, internet subscribers would finally have a reason to lock and protect their wireless networks. It would only take a few high-profile news reports of a family being arrested on allegations of accessing or distributing illegal digital media before the majority of networks became WPA encrypted.

Disadvantages to the Big Brother Approach

There are problems, though. Many of the professional producers and distributors can afford to hire the technologically adept to protect the organization and their best interests. Thousands of innocent, but naïve, internet users will be rounded up due to false positives and other technological gaffes. Perhaps worst of all, instead of making the police’s job easier, such a system would only send net users to darker corners of the internet to get their fix.

Going further with a worst-case scenario, much of the diversity and uniqueness that we see online would be lost by the end of the first year. Nobody would write anything that could upset Big Brother in their country. Fewer people would develop new web technologies for fear of being a party to some crime. If that’s not bad enough, existing technologies such as online gaming and chat could become targeted as enterprising individuals begin to “piggy back” data to each other while using another well-known data streaming technology as a cover (an example would be to hide an image or data file in the video stream from a webcam).

To make matters even worse, tens of thousands around the world would shout, holler, and scream about the gross invasion of privacy as well as the new “guilty until proven innocent” mentality. Online freedoms, if there ever was such a thing would become a thing of the past and quickly fade into the realm of myth and make-believe.

Fun? Wow!

More Trouble Than It’s Worth

At the end of the day, any effort to police the internet is only going to end in ruin. Mankind has continually sought ways around the laws imposed on us, regardless of their justness. While most will do their best to follow the rules, human nature is hard to ignore. If the police truly want to capture the people responsible for most of the crimes committed online, they need to start employing some of the best and brightest computer wizards in the workforce. This means sending out the head hunters to entice well-respected, well-educated individuals with plenty of experience to back up the huge paycheques they would undoubtedly receive.

That said, it will likely be another ten years before we see any police force start to make any serious dent in the online crime industry.

Child pornography; the two words we never want to see next to each other. It’s yet another crime that preys on some of the most vulnerable people in the world and, like adult pornography and prostitution, it’s not going to disappear anytime soon. This shouldn’t stop us from trying, though.

The Tokyo-based Internet Hotline Center identified 1,600 web sites as repositories of child pornography in 2007. Of these, only about 300 have been shut down in response to the IHC’s “cease and desist” requests. Of course, it doesn’t help that downloading pictures and movies of children in various states of undress, perhaps while “pleasuring” someone, is not a punishable offense in Japan. This is considered one of the major factors behind the availability of such material online, and has drawn the ire of several nations as they try to eliminate this socially unacceptable and psychologically damaging criminal activity.

A Worldwide Problem

Japan’s IHC was set up by the National Police Agency to collect information, in the form of complaints and tips, on objectionable material online. In 2007 alone, 1,600 sites were reported by concerned citizens. Of these, 543 are hosted on servers overseas, which puts them outside the jurisdiction of the Japanese authorities. Five hundred of the sites operating from inside the nation were then asked (a little too politely) to remove the illegal content or otherwise shut down. Only 298 have complied.

As for why the IHC could only request the shut down of 500 sites, the organization does not have the legal authority to force operators to cease and desist, even if it can identify the operators. To add insult to injury, for every site shut down, two others are launched.

Naturally, with all the sites available and the audiences that follow, once an image or video is posted, it can circulate online for dozens of years. There are some victims of this heinous crime that have said they can never move on with their lives so long as these digital reminders exist in cyberspace.

Definition of a Crime

Many nations consider just the act of seeing child pornography as a crime, regardless of whether a person had intentionally sought the material. However, in Japan, only those who distribute or purchase the porn are punishable under Japan’s law on child prostitution and pornography. People who obtain the stuff for free or simply in possession are not punishable.

Because of this, lawmakers are working hard to revise the law in order to penalize everything from full scale production, to simple possession.

Blocking The Distributors

In a bid to counter the ready availability of child porn, the IHC is pushing for the introduction of a blocking system, much like the one currently used in several European countries since 2004. If a blocking system is implemented, people would not be able to view these sites, including those hosted overseas. This system has proven to be incredibly effective in Sweden, where 30,000 attempts to access illegal sites are blocked every day.

That said, the introduction of a content blocking system could undermine the police’s ability to track, trace and otherwise bait child molesters. If that’s not bad enough, we need to remember that the miscreants who visit public sites to get off on children are the dumbest of the dumb. These are the mouth-breathing bottom-feeders that are too inept and unconnected to matter. If governments want to seriously start going after the villians involved with child pornography, they need to set their sights on something bigger: the content creators.

However, in order to be mostly successful with this, people may need to give up some of the freedoms and liberties found on the internet.

How far would you go to protect children from this kind of exploitation?  Is it enough just to combat the problem online?  When it comes to defending human dignity and rights, how many freedoms would we be willing to give up for the greater good?