Internet Watch Foundation

 

1.      To enlist the support of Board and Funding Council to proceed with a discovery engine project.

2.      To seek Board approval to accept a Government grant of £27,612.50 to fund the set up costs, licence fees, hardware and training requirements for twelve months.

 

The IWF have a working partnership with the NHTCU and APACS in a joint effort to stifle the availability of child abuse images being sold via pay to view websites. In essence we pass details of PPV websites selling abusive images of children to the NHTCU and those that are not the focus of police investigations are passed by the Police to the credit card bodies if their logos appear on those websites so they can try and disrupt the flow of funds to the website owners.  Conversely the credit card bodies pass details of PPV websites they suspect are selling child abuse images to us via the NHTCU so we can assess the content according to UK law.

 

During the course of this initiative we learnt that specialist technology exists in the form of a ‘Discovery Engine’ that could be adapted to deliver leads to websites, newsgroups, bulletin boards and other areas of the Internet where child abuse images may be hosted. If that were to be the case then once our hotline staff have verified the content as potentially illegal, the URLs would be shared with other hotlines and law enforcement agencies and added to our child abuse database service.

 

Traditionally leads to potentially illegal websites are provided by Internet users, ISPs and Police Forces by reports to our hotline. The trend in such reports seems to have peaked which we believe is due to the anti-spamming measures taken by ISPs, a better understanding amongst consumers that they shouldn’t open messages from untrusted sources and the deterrent impact of the constant media interest in reporting the arrest and conviction of people ‘making’ (downloading) child abuse images from the Internet.

 

Unfortunately the number of websites identified by our analysts as potentially illegal show no sign of decreasing.

 

In our draft Corporate Plan 2005/7 and 2004 Annual Report (to be published in January 05) we opine on how the trend in the availability of child abuse images could be changing. With this is mind the deployment of sophisticated technology tasked to ‘seek’ potentially illegal content within our remit, using familiar words known to our analysts and the paedophile fraternity may enable us to step up the removal of potentially illegal content that is being traded by less obvious or different methods by hopefully providing us with additional quality leads.

 

In our 2003 governance review many contributors questioned why the Government didn’t provide us with funding. As that debate ran its course it was widely understood that the Government might assist by funding ‘special projects’ in support of our role and remit.

 

The Board is therefore invited to endorse this project and approve an application for funds from Government. It is understood that such an application would be met with a positive response.

 

Peter Robbins