Legislators investigate smut on P2P nets

One of the information commodities in greatest demand on P2P sites is porn. It is an uncomfortable truth for many Americans to face, but as a nation we are very fond of porn. It’s a huge industry that continues to grow quickly here and around the world. 

The U.S. government recently issued two reports announcing that file trading networks are full of pornography. The vast majority of this material is legal adult porn. But the feds say the amount of child porn on P2P networks is growing so quickly that Congress needs to consider new P2P legislation.

It is currently illegal under federal law to knowingly possess or distribute child pornography. These laws have already been used to arrest and prosecute alleged child pornographers. But on the matter of additional laws, the issue is not as clear-cut as it would seem.

The U.S. Supreme Court struck down the Child Pornography Prevention Act last year, which would have banned any image that “appears to be” a naked child in a sexually suggestive posture. The legislation ran into trouble when it was pointed out that some of these photos were, in fact, computer generated images that did not involve children. The court decided that banning such images would essentially amount to a thought crime.

“First Amendment freedoms are most in danger when the government seeks to control thought or to justify its laws for that impermissible end,” wrote a 6-3 majority of the justices. “The right to think is the beginning of freedom, and speech must be protected from the government because speech is the beginning of thought.”

Nevertheless, the General Accounting Office (GAO) has generated a report on alleged child porn on the Kazaa network, and the House Government Reform Committee has issued its own report noting that Web blocking software has no effect on P2P networks.

The reports were presented at a hearing titled “Stumbling Onto Smut” convened before the Government Reform Committee. It included 9th and 10th graders who found porn on P2P networks, a psychologist, a Department of Homeland Security Official, and Daniel Rung, CEO of the P2P service Grokster.

The GAO used 12 keywords associated with child porn, identified 1,286 files, and determined that 42% or 543 files appeared to be child porn images. They did not open the files to find out if they contained child porn, because it is illegal to knowingly possess that material. The GAO instead asked the U.S. Customs’ CyberSmuggling Center to look at 341 downloaded images found with three key words, and of these they found that 44%, or 149, showed images of child porn.

These 149 images, if they involve people under the age of 18, are indeed illegal to possess or distribute. But considering the hundreds of millions of images posted on P2P networks, this is hardly an epidemic of child porn. Since investigators did not release the search terms they used, it is difficult to assess just how likely a kid, or anyone else, will stumble across these images. I am concerned that worries over child porn will lead to ill-conceived laws governing P2P networks.

During the hearing, Rep. Adam Putnam (R-Fla.) suggested a government-mandated labeling system would be appropriate for files on P2P networks. But what about the highly distributed networks with millions of users who are outside U.S. jurisdiction. How would they comply? Should they? How could you stop people from around the world uploading these images?

John Netherland, the acting director of the Department of Homeland Security’s CyberSmuggling Center, said his office would focus more closely on P2P networks and that his operation is already “expanding its investigative efforts to encompass this new technology.”

Rep. Christopher Shays (R-Conn.) suggested that Rung was getting rich from porn on Grokster and said that, “For all practical purposes, you’re the pornographer. You’re the vehicle by which people are doing these things.”

Shays seemed eager to use the porn issue to demonize P2P sites, and where is the proof that P2P sites are getting rich off of porn? Rung said Grokster had cooperated with federal law enforcement in child pornography investigations. He said that they would continue to do so, but suggested that parents supervise their children when they are online.