Aideen Hayden (Labour)

The Minister is welcome. I also welcome the motion tabled by the Independent Senators and congratulate, in particular, Senator Jillian van Turnhout on her work on it. The amendment also has much to recommend it and I hope an agreement will be reached on the matter. I also welcome the indication given by the Minister that the Government plans to introduce a sexual offences Bill in the coming months. This legislation will facilitate the State's full compliance with the EU directive on combating the sexual abuse and exploitation of children and child pornography. It is important to note that this directive permits member states to take measures to block access to Internet users in their territory of web pages containing or disseminating child abuse material hosted on servers outside their jurisdiction. I hope this will go some way towards addressing some of the issues raised by Senator Jillian van Turnhout.

The Special Rapporteur on Child Protection, Mr. Geoffrey Shannon, has also called on the Government to ratify the UN Optional Protocol on the Sale of Children, Child Prostitution and Child Pornography. It is envisaged that the protocol will be implemented in the sexual offences Bill.

Child pornography is a complex and difficult problem to tackle. As Professor Philip Jenkins of the University of Cambridge has concluded, the overwhelming evidence is that child pornography is all but impossible to obtain through non-electronic means. The Internet is often used and, for the most part, unregulated. I draw a clear distinction between the proposal in respect of blocking access to the Internet and recent controversies surrounding the Stop Online Piracy Act, SOPA, and Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement, ACTA. As the only victims are children who must be protected, there is no debate about blocking access to the Internet in the circumstances I have described.

Despite increased international co-operation on child pornography, the problem is increasing. According to the National Centre for Missing and Exploited Children in the United States, the number of child pornography images on the Internet increased by 1,500% between 1997 and 2003 and has probably increased exponentially since. In 2007 the British based Internet Watch Foundation, IWT, reported that child pornography on the Internet was becoming more brutal and graphic and the number of images depicting violent abuse has risen fourfold since 2003. The IWT also found that approximately 80% of the children in the abusive images were female and 91% appeared to be children under the age of 12 years.

I fully support the intentions of my colleagues, as expressed in the motion. While it is important to make strong efforts to tackle child pornography, it is also important to recognise the need to find new solutions and means of approaching the problem. According to its 2010 report, the self-reporting system, hotline.ie, which has been operating for ten years, only recently succeeded for the first time in identifying and removing child pornography from the Internet. The reason for this stark illustration of the need for new approaches is not a failure of the system but child pornography is not readily or easily found when trawling through the Internet.

Given the high stakes involved in child pornography, especially in financial terms, perpetrators of this crime have considerable technical knowledge and take advantage of sophisticated systems to manage the proliferation of child abuse material. Some child pornographers circumvent detection by using viruses to illegally gain control of computers on which they remotely store child pornography. In one case, a Massachusetts man was charged with possession of child pornography when hackers used his computer to access pornographic sites and store pornographic pictures without his knowledge.Prosecution is difficult because multiple international servers are used, sometimes to transmit the images in fragments to evade the law. Without international co-operation it is almost impossible to find those responsible.

Another trend, one to which other speakers alluded, is the growing use of sophisticated security measures and peer-to-peer networking in which participants share files on their computers rather than downloading them from a website. This means no fingerprints are left on the computers of those who view child pornography images. The group uses encryption and data destruction software to protect the files and screening measures to ensure only authorised participants can enter the chatroom. Hosting images on websites that could be accessed by members of the public is being consigned to the past. For this reason, blocking websites is failing and we should be careful not to use valuable resources in pursuing this outdated approach.

The clearest example of how child pornography rings work is the recent coup by the Internet vigilante group, Anonymous. The Anonymous hackers infiltrated what is known as "Darknet", essentially a network within the Internet. This "underground Internet" is often used by criminals and sometimes dissidents in countries such as Iran and China to circumvent government censorship. Anonymous members disrupted and hacked into systems of websites hosting child abuse material and obtained the log-in details of more than 1,500 users which they then published online. This incident demonstrates that there is a level of expertise which could be made available to governments and concerned bodies. We should ensure we are as technologically informed as is possible. Simply blocking or removing material may only provide temporary solutions which will not guarantee success. Suggested methods such as monitoring financial transactions and covert electronic surveillance are more likely to yield promising leads as they lead back to the people involved. Pursuing these approaches will require resources, however, and we must make available sufficient resources to ensure we have access to the most up-to-date technology and information to tackle child pornography on the Internet. It is also crucial to continue to increase co-operation at European level and worldwide. I support the methods used by the Garda Síochána under Operation Icarus which is supported and co-ordinated by Europol.

The Government must also embrace the good will shown by those involved with the Internet. For example, in 2008 the Google search engine worked with the National Centre for Missing and Exploited Children to help automate and streamline the way in which child protection workers sifted through millions of pornographic images to identify victims of abuse. Google has developed video fingerprinting technology and software to automate the review of some 13 million pornographic images and videos which analysts at the centre previously had to review manually. Although specialist technology is available to the Garda, it is important that Ireland is at the forefront of advances in order that we are able to tackle this developing disease with a suitable cure. I commend the Senators who tabled the motion and I also commend the Government amendment. I hope and believe a middle way can be found between the two.