Aideen Hayden (Labour) | Oireachtas source

I welcome the introduction of this directive, which marks an important step in tackling a difficult problem. The directive helps by requiring states to set out clear offences in a number of areas, provide assistance and support to victims and take preventative measures in a range of areas.

Having spoken previously on this subject, I propose to focus on the complex issue of child pornography and how such material is disseminated over the Internet. Efforts to combat child pornography must recognise exactly what is the problem because otherwise one will not come close to solving it. Not being particularly technologically aware, I asked a computer expert to help me to understand how this works in practice.

Professor Philip Jenkins of the University of Cambridge has stated that the "overwhelming evidence is that child pornography is all but impossible to obtain through non-electronic means." However, while on the face of it, the solution to the problem is simply to remove pornographic pages, it is extraordinarily difficult to obtain access to these pages in the first place. Child pornography on the web is evolving technologically. It is not simply found through a Google search and one does not normally stumble upon it randomly. A stark example of this is the self-report system, hotline.ie. According to its 2010 report, the organisation only once succeeded in identifying and removing child pornography from the Internet in a ten year period. This was not due to a failure of the system but because child pornography is not usually found when routinely trawling the Internet.

Groups using the Internet to sell child pornography use encryption and sophisticated data destruction software to protect files and screening measures to ensure only authorised participants can enter relevant chatrooms. The former method of hosting images on websites which could be accessed by members of the public is becoming a thing of the past. There are four or five different ways in which pages can avoid being on the surface of the Internet. This means they cannot be found by using a search engine such as Google but only by using specific web addresses.

These websites may be placed in the deep web, which consists of regular web pages which are nearly impossible to find without knowing the specific web address. When the site is accessed, the user gains entry onto it by using encrypted connections, such as those used by banks when trying to access account details. Unlike the traditional centralised Internet, where each site has a particular domain name and can be accessed by typing in the web address, the meshnet, which is a new and evolving form of web, is completely decentralised. Each web domain hops from place to place. As the webpage is constantly moving, it is impossible to pin down. The meshnet is evolving in response to perceived Big Brother tendencies. As we all know, material has recently come into the public domain about the actions of certain governments in intruding into people's domestic lives. There are genuine meshnetters out there who, for perfectly legitimate reasons, simply want to talk to each other through a channel they control. The darknet, which is an anonymous version of the meshnet, is even more sophisticated and even harder to trace. Its decentralised nature means that the connection between the user and the location from which he or she is downloading is not well defined. It cannot be traced as it will be lost among other people's connections routing through his or her computer.

Tor software protects users by bouncing communications around a distribution of networks. Anything that is sent over Tor is encrypted several times and then sent to a relay. Each relay server decrypts one layer of encryption and sends it to another relay, selected at random. That process continues until it has all been decrypted and sent to its destination. Each relay only knows the identity of the one directly before and after it in the chain. It leaves a huge mess to be untangled. This system is infamously used for drug dealing, the sale of illegal goods and child pornography on the Silk Road, which is the dominant marketplace of Tor. These "goods", which is the expression that is used out there, include child pornography and children who have been trafficked. They are bought on the Silk Road using bitcoin, which is like meshnet money in the sense that payments are made anonymously and are identified through strings of random letters. I mention all of this so that Senators will understand how utterly complex it is. The only way to find out who has been using bitcoin is if someone uses the same wallet of money repeatedly and an identifiable pattern can be found, or if a person can be tracked from where he or she started by using his or her credit card to buy bitcoin. As Senators can imagine, however, bitcoin is usually purchased on the street using cash. Prosecution is difficult because multiple international servers are used, sometimes to transmit images in fragments in order to evade the law. In the absence of international co-operation, it is almost impossible to find those responsible. It is clear that this problem is almost impossible to solve.

There are two ways in which we are going to have to consider dealing with this issue. First, we will have to use our monetary investment in research and technology to try to match the skills, creativity and ingenuity these people show in their use of technology. It is important to make the point that we need to move past the idea of simple filters on Internet services. The systems used by the people who deal in this area are far more sophisticated than those which can be dealt with by means of simple filters. Second, we have to engage in significant Europe-wide undercover operations. It should be possible to use the anonymity of the system to our benefit, given that any individual can get into the system and undermine it completely.