Is your computer under surveillance?

A recent Newsbytes interview with Paul Komoszki, creator of the Benjamin worm that targeted Windows-based users of the KaZaA network, said he released the code to frustrate Internet users searching for pirated software and child pornography.

Super. Once again, opposition to kiddie porn is being used to justify all sorts of poorly thought-out decisions. The U.S. Supreme Court got it exactly right when it ruled recently that computer-generated images of minors engaged in sexual acts are not illegal, but protected by the First Amendment.

Ruling otherwise would have made it a thought crime to simply imagine such images. Coercing children into sex for the purpose of making photographs is illegal and cruel. But nothing in your imagination should be illegal. If we begin policing the thoughts of artists, who create images without involving or harming children, we will be living in a completely Orwellian society.

That said, prosecutors and police investigators are reportedly unsure of how to proceed in child porn investigations. Is the image real? Or is it computer generated? How can they tell? An Illinois man who pleaded guilty to possessing 2,600 images of kiddie porn was freed from jail recently when a judge ruled that the state law was unconstitutional because it couldn't distinguish fake porn from real.

A Los Gatos, Calif., company called Bay Total Service Provider (BayTSP) now says it has developed a piece of software that can scan a suspected kiddie porn picture - and match it to a proposed database of known kiddie porn images. After the Supreme Court ruling, a bill was introduced to create a central kiddie porn database that includes 250,000 photographs. BayTSP says cops and courts, that want to locate pictures of actual children in the database, can buy the system for $250,000. BayTSP asserts that the software will build stronger cases and support collaboration between local and federal authorities resulting in more convictions.

The BayTSP system not only matches images, it searches the Internet for them. According to BayTSP, it can even locate altered copies of known kiddie porn by analyzing what the company calls the file's "digital DNA." The company says its product works on P2P networks where kiddie porn is commonly swapped. They company does not reveal how its system penetrates the P2P network.

BayTSP has already developed a policing program that scans the Internet for copyrighted material. Company CEO Mark Ishikawa says the system has identified more than a million copyright violations for clients in the past two years. They find the data, match it to the IP address of your machine, and proceed from there. Clients include Adobe and the big movie studios. BayTSP makes possible those cease and desist orders that have been sent out to file swappers well outside of U.S. jurisdiction.

BayTSP has so far, been unable to sell one of its kiddie porn locating systems to law enforcement. But eventually, it will probably succeed in convincing some agency that analyzing and matching the files on your computer is the same as making matches in a fingerprint or DNA database.

The defense against invasive scans of your system is encrypting your data. But this makes it much more difficult to freely trade.

Computer users should brace themselves for more intense surveillance of the data they store and trade. And they should expect that someone, somewhere, will eventually create a backdoor to BayTSP's surveillance system to find out if they are being spied on.

And eventually, the database of porn images will itself be hacked and appear somewhere on a file trading network.

Ann Harrison is a technology reporter in San Francisco. She can be reached at ah@well.com.

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