klinkhart.com

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As you all are aware, recent legislation on what some call “censorship” of  child pornography websites has caused uproar amongst those “native” to the internet. Right so, say I.  But what legitmate cause do I have to say so? Well here is one source of unbiased and beyond-suspicion neutral comment. That of Detective Glen Klinkhart,a far off family tree member in Alaska, that has earned international applause and rank in the field of child abuse and pornography crime related investigations.

Being cut off by German Government from doing independent research myself, I asked Glen to assist with the task of getting his views and sources released. Here is his reply:

Arnd,

I don’t envy you in your search for helping keep people in your country find a balance between maintaining people’s rights and using censorship to solve all of the world’s problems.

I am probably more reasonable than most of my fellow Cyber Detectives in that I have been doing this work so long that I am of the opinion the trying to censor, or filter the internet is not realistic and often gives people a false sense of security.

You mentioned that this law deals with suspicious sites. I assume that means web sites. Its interesting in that based on my training and experience, web sites are no longer the main avenue in which child pornography is obtained. Child porn Web sites and general web surfing can be used to obtain child porn, but the bad guys have learned that its very easy to get caught doing it that way. In the past 5 years the child porn has moved from static web sites to the much more efficient and more difficult to track peer-to-peer networks such as gnutella, bittorrent, etc.

In addition, child porn can still be obtained from the Internet Realy Chat networks (Dalnet, EFnet, IRCnet, etc) as well as from other chat rooms and other social networking sites. Unless this new law deals with these other Internet distribution systems, they are missing 95% of the child porn traffic. Oh and don’t forget email. I have lots of child porngraphers sending and trading child porn via email servers and free web based email systems. Does your country intend on searching and/or blocking all email traffic as well?

Just putting up blocks to sites or IPs is akin to having the police search every citizen coming into the country for drugs when there is a kilometer wide underground tunnel just underneath them that no one is watching.

I am a firm believer from my years in working in this area that technology and filtering is not an effective use of curbing child pornography. The bad guys will always find a new way to obtain manufacture and distribute this material no matter what kind of filters you put into place. A better way to go after the bad guys while being careful to mind the rights of the rest of the 99.9% of the citizens is to have enough investigators to follow-up reports of child abuse and child porn, have enough law enforcement officers to work online stings and monitor peer-2-peer networks, and when a specific person or computer is identified use the proper legal procedure to stop the possession and distribution. It’s a technique that is more like a laser and less than a shotgun approach to the problem.

Below is a sample of a weekly report that I get from the U.S. National Center For Missing and Exploited Children via their National CyberTip line. The Cyber Tip line is one where anyone can call and report child porn or the online sexual exploitation of minors. The CyberTip personnel then research the report and forward it to the closest Law Enforcement agency. I get these tips regularly and many of them do turn out to be local bad guys here in Alaska and we have made multiple arrests based on the reports.

I see that the CyberTip line has gotten many reports of child porn possession and/or distribution from your country and that in the first week of June there were 25 cases referred to the German Law Enforcement for further follow up. That’s 25 specific people who may be involved in child porn and targeting them is a better and more effective way than just trying to censor something that may never be completely stopped.

I hope some of this helps.

Glen

I thank Glen for these open words and those of you interested in the statistics may well contact me. I will ask Glen, whether they are open for public release.

No further comment to make at this point.

Arnd.