Today as I was quickly scanning the 300 SPAM messages my filters had caught this morning looking for false positives, I came across a blatant child porn SPAM email.
I’ve never actually received one before, and I wanted to report it. From what I’ve been able to gather, you can’t really report the email, you have to report the site that is in it. OK, so I clicked the link. The site that came up was the most depraved disgusting thing I’ve ever seen, and having used the Internet for many many years, I’ve seen allot.
OK, so I now know that this is a legitimate illegal kiddie porn site, so what do I do now? My first step was to fire up Google and do a search for “reporting child pornography” which came back with dozens of links, none of which looked at all official. I did a whois on the IP of the hosting site and found it is located in Taiwan, which led to another question, is it illegal there? If so, where do I report it in Taiwan? Or do I report it in Australia or the US? Where in Australia or the US do I report it?
I ended up looking though the FBI site, the ABA (Australian Broadcasting Authority) site, and about two dozen other sites, all the while looking for a way to report this site to the authorities. And yet found practically nothing that relates to reporting child porn sites on the Internet.
After all my searching, the best thing I found was cybertipline a site that covers child abuse, but doesn’t really cover reporting kiddie porn sites on the net. I filled out a report titled “possession, manufacture, and distribution of child pornography” which was the closest thing I could find to “report an illegal porn site”. Since the subjects didn’t really match, I had to put “unknown” into most of the fields in the report because I don’t know who the kids are, where they are, who the owner is, or any of the other details they asked for.
UPDATE: A visitor has given us a new reporting address, http://www.iwf.org.uk/reporting.htm. It is UK, but kp is kp and hopefully they will know that email and the net is global which means the problem is too.
Child pornography is a huge and growing problem, and yet the “authorities” have made it really hard for the public to help them. Why is that? If ever there was a need for an international collaboration on something, this would be it.
How hard would it be to do this? Intelligence agencies are working together and passing information at an ever increasing rate since the events of 9/11/2001, so they are already talking. How hard would it be to make a site for international reports of this nature, and have that same site come up under all the different country TLD’s (Top Level Domains)? I submit that it would not be hard at all. And yet from what I found, nothing of this nature has happened.
My concern about these issues has been around for some time now, and to that end I created a site called childsafetyonline about a year and a half ago which was designed to be as un-threatening as I could make it, and advise about how parents can protect their children, and how children can protect themselves, but I didn’t really cover the issue of child pornography (or pornography at all). I’m going to rectify that situation as soon as I can get more information about what people can do about it.
What I saw today sickened me and has drastically lowered my opinion of humanity. I actually felt sorry for the feds whose job it is to chase this stuff down. The things they must see while going about catching the human trash that traffic in this soft of thing. Feeling sorry for them however, does not mean that they are forgiven for not doing all they can to help the public alert them to issues they should be looking at.
Since I viewed the site, the images were in my browsers cache, something that is strictly illegal. (if so, then why must you report the site instead of the email?) so the first thing I did after reporting it, was to delete my cache, followed by running a tool to permanently wipe the files from my computer. (when you delete a file, you are not really deleting it, you are just removing the listing of the file from the drives table of contents, the file is still there and can be retrieved.) Then I moved a couple of really big files to different directories on the drive and ran diskkeeper defragmenter twice with reboots in between. Why you ask? because I don’t want to end up in jail because of my efforts to do the right thing, and people have been prosecuted for having illegal images in their browser cache. And that highlights another problem we have. People are much less likely to help if they risk prosecution for doing so.
Today’s adventure saddened me for two reasons:
1. The fact that there are people out there that actually go for this filth.
2. The authorities have not done all they can to get the publics help on such things and no public international effort is in place to get reports.
The question then becomes, who do we write to, to encourage the authorities to do something about it? I imagine that person or people would be as hard to find as a decent international site to report incidences of this sort of thing.
Regards
Franki
August 13th, 2005 at 1:48 pm
Last night I came across blatent sites for child porn while using Lime wire which is a file sharing tool.
September 11th, 2005 at 5:34 am
I agree with exactly what you said. I was a member of Cyberangels for 3 years and nothing really changes. I just had a bad experience with eMule which I am trying to report.
I do not think your comuter is totally clean. You should downlaod a tool called crap cleaner or CC cleaner from http://www.filehippo.com (free) It deletes everything from where you have surfed, even the index.dat file that other tools overlook. Once you have run that you need to bleach your free space on the hard drive. This writes many layers of random and encrypted data over the hd making it impossible to recovers deleted files. Degragging will not do anything. You need to clean your registry, index.dat, all the caches, etc.
Anyway, I am still looking where I can legitimately report child porn. If you can help me please email me back.
regards.
laurie
September 14th, 2005 at 9:56 pm
I took it one step further when I received MY child porn email today. I “whois”d the IP address on the properties of the email. That lead me to a domain server in the Netherlands. There was also a phone number registered to the domain. I called the phone number, not expecting to get an answer. To my surprise, someone picked up. I explained who I was and why I was calling. I was a little shocking when this idiot admitted to hosting the content. I blew up on him in a form rarely seen in my personality. It felt great.
October 11th, 2005 at 10:46 pm
I also recieved an email today but after reading the above posts about opening it and possibly being arrested for kiddie porn scared me from doing the right thing. 🙁 I ended up deleting the message. This is the 2nd one i’ve recieved in under a year and it has me nervous. How can they get away with this stuff? It also had my email address as “Xanthius@bellatlantic.net” which was my email about 2-3 years ago from before the bellatlantic/verizon merger. I’m not sure how they got that email but it sure is old. Its a shame verizon forwards all the mail from that account to mine. Luckily I never opened any links nor saw any pics. What happens to someone who accidentally clicks it or is trying to report it and opens the link? Will the FBI come and bust down their door for being a pedophile? I think this is unfair, we shouldnt have to deal with these sites/emails in the first place. I was scared it was only me recieving these outlandish emails but I see im not alone. Let me know if you get any responses, child pornography makes me sick.
October 23rd, 2005 at 4:46 am
Thanks
November 3rd, 2005 at 4:03 pm
I just received , for the 2nd. time child porn spam, it is sooo disturbing I can’t believe this sort of thing is legal & if not why am I getting it? I really just want it to stop….
November 27th, 2005 at 1:45 am
I recieved a spam advertising porn which I didn’t take too much notice of, I opened the site to remove my address from their list and was shocked to see young children. I reported the sites to both the group abuse and ABA address above, hopefully they can refer it on and close them down. I am amazed that this stuff is so easy to access, I assumed it would be kept underground
December 4th, 2005 at 8:27 pm
I went on lime wire looking for “kids Bop” and when i went on my documents there were pornagraphic youth pictures, be careful what you download
December 18th, 2005 at 9:58 am
I once came across this page with a lot of thumbnailed links to different teen porn sites, most of them probably legal, but the thumbnails are made to look as questionable as they can. Sick stuff. I was afraid of getting in trouble for these thumbnails and the sites just kept linking to another thumbnailed page. I wonder how much of these so called “teen porn” is really illegal. I can’t believe so much stuff like this is out there
January 7th, 2006 at 6:00 am
Same stuff happend to me tonight. Was looking at porn and clicked on one of those many thumbnails, looking for an actuall website I could browse. The bad link opened up around 20 kitty type websites. I had to ctr alt delete to close it all. From reading above I’m affriad I will be arrested or something now. What can I do to protect myself? It also sounds like reporting it will get you no where as of yet, since there seems to be no where to do so. Plus it appears as if they will arrest you for something that wasn’t my fault. My internet also opens up to porn and other weird websites on its own. I will sit down at my pc and find 10 websites open. I scanned for viruses and spy wear so will see if that helps. It’s tough to figure out the issue since it happens at random. Around once a week or 2. Iam not a porn addict so I think I’ll just stop all together.
May 16th, 2007 at 6:00 pm
me too i came across the same thing when using emule. u start by looking for something and u get tons of files with misleading names in which they contain the most disgusting thing i’ve ever seen. i swear i was not able to eat for 2 days. somebody has to stop emule and all the file sharing softwares.
regards
June 16th, 2007 at 1:33 am
I was searching for somewhere to report a CP email I also got….with no success.
You’d think with the literally MILLIONS of sites on the internet, there would be someplace to report this filth and control it.
June 18th, 2007 at 6:08 pm
How about this?
http://www.iwf.org.uk/reporting.htm
August 1st, 2007 at 11:45 pm
Is pictures of underage girls naked illegal? I found photographs of young minor girls nude in “nature” type surroundings on a message board that directed to a website that contained these images. These pictures were considered “art” by the photographer, where to me they were simply sicking and abnormal.
Do I have a care for reporting him?
August 1st, 2007 at 11:50 pm
If the point of the website is to display photos of underage girls then yes, I’d say that is worth reporting. How the photographer considers his work is irrelevant, how the authorities consider it is much more significant.
Let them decide if it is art.
rgds
Frank
January 28th, 2008 at 3:49 pm
I too have stumbled across this FILTH and was effected to the point of nitemares. Now their must be someone that I could report this trash to by now so please email me with phone numbers or other contact info asap. I dont know what numbers or IP address to use in making a complaint, just for lack of use of internet but please provide a discription of info needed to help stop this madness. I think that if everyone that sees this will do something then we can make a difference.
sincerly Robert Starcher
January 29th, 2008 at 4:53 am
http://www.missingkids.com/cybertip/ is linked to directly from fbi.gov I think thats pretty official. and you don’t have to be in the USA to report it. they even have a tip line you can call. I just reported the accidental download of questionable content. yeah, I’m worried they will give me issues but at least my conscience is clear knowing I didn’t just look the other way when children are being exploited. For those of you that haven’t I recommend reporting these issues.
Furthermore if you want to help public fear NEEDS to be addressed by a reputable organization. Maybe those concerned can petition for better public awareness of how to report so we can feel safe while doing our civic duties. How many Children remain in the hands or eyes of these horrible people because people are scared to report.
Actually I just called the U.S. center for missing or exploited children to try to ask them for information regarding these safety concerns. hopefully I’ll have some results to post for you all soon.
July 31st, 2008 at 9:27 pm
In Australia, you can use
http://web.acma.gov.au/AimsWeb/webcontent.jsp
I’m still feeling sick. 🙁
June 16th, 2009 at 10:41 am
Australia http://web.acma.gov.au/AimsWeb/webcontent.jsp unavailable due to maintenance. Unopened offensive item sent to online@acma.gov.au.
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