Several websites popular with sexual predators were thwarted last month after a determined campaign by groups dedicated to eliminating the content. It has been described as a rare victory in an unending war.
In late November, the moderator of three highly trafficked websites posted a message titled “RIP”.The unnamed moderator thanked over 100,000 “brothers” who had visited and contributed to the sites before their demise, blaming an “increasingly intolerant world” that did not allow children to “fully express themselves.”
Several of those groups, including a child exploitation hotline in Canada, hunted the three sites across the internet for years but could never quite defeat them. The websites, records show, were led by an experienced computer programmer who was adept at staying one step ahead of his pursuers — in particular, through the services of US and other tech companies with policies that can be used to shield criminal behaviour.
The victory was cheered by groups fighting online child sexual abuse, but there were no illusions about the enormous undertaking that remained. Thousands of other sites offer anybody with a web browser access to illegal and depraved imagery of children, and unlike with apps, no special software or downloads are required.
In an interview in The Hague, the Dutch minister of justice, Ferdinand Grapperhaus, said he was embarrassed by the role Dutch companies played. “I had not realised the extent of cruelty and how far it goes,” he said. As the sites gained in popularity, child sexual abuse content became more and more common. The transcripts, which include over 10,000 time-stamped messages on a chat app, show how the founder, a man identifying himself as Avery Chicoine, revelled in the opportunity to interact with others who shared his interests.
He did not identify himself and would not say if he was Chicoine — the sites’ founder, according to the chat transcripts — or if he knew him. Last year, a Canadian by the name of Avery Chicoine with a lengthy criminal record was arrested in British Columbia and charged with possessing and distributing child pornography. Canadian authorities would not say whether the charges related to the websites. According to court documents, he pleaded not guilty, and a trial is set for next month.
The protections are valuable to many legitimate companies but can also be a boon to bad actors, though Cloudflare says it is not responsible for the content on its clients’ sites. The man accused of a mass shooting at a Walmart in Texas had posted his manifesto on 8chan, an online message board that had been using Cloudflare’s services and was well known for hosting hateful content. Cloudflare also came under criticism for providing services to the neo-Nazi site The Daily Stormer.
The National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, the clearinghouse for abuse imagery in the US, had sent Cloudflare notices about the sites starting in 2014, said John Shehan, a vice president at the centre. Last year, it sent thousands. Through its general counsel, Doug Kramer, Cloudflare said it worked closely with hotlines and law enforcement officials and responded promptly to their requests. It denied being responsible for the images, saying customer data was stored on its servers only briefly. Efforts to eliminate the content, the company said, should instead focus on the web-hosting companies.
Still, he said, the company had stopped providing services over the past eight years to more than 5,000 clients that had shared abuse material. And Wednesday, the company announced a new product — currently in development — that would allow clients to scan their own sites.
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