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Child Porn Is Being Hidden on Legal Commercial Websites (theguardian.com)
People who visit porn websites or search for adult pornography on the Web are facing the risk of being arrested for accessing child abuse images. The Internet Watch Foundation is warning that vicious minds are increasingly hiding criminal content on legal commercial websites, according to a report on The Guardian. The IWF found 743 websites in 2015, compared with 353 in 2013, in which child sexual abuse content was hosted on legal porn websites, and could be accessed if a special link was requested. From the report: "It has really started to become an accepted practice for the commercial side of the paedophilic community because this obfuscation technique is more effective at keeping its content live for longer," said Fred Langford, chief executive of the UK charity. Last year, the IWF found that 21% of the webpages containing illegal images and videos were commercial and those seeking to profit from the abuse were increasingly disguising it behind legal content, usually adult pornography. Langford said the trend raised the risk that people searching for adult pornography could unwittingly access child abuse images on disguised websites.
Please note that I said the previous comment with my tongue firmly planted in my cheek to illustrate the mindset of politicians and much of LE.
* They want access to our data because of terrorist and child pornographers.
* They spy on us because of terrorist and child pornographers.
* They want encryption backdoored because of terrorists and child pornographers.
* List this goes on and on.
By using their logic, it would seem that legitimate site would either need to be banned, or monitoring software installed for LE to see when porn is put on to the site.
Pretty much this. I would bet these "child abuse images" are home-made videos or pictures where the participants look of age. It's difficult to visually guess someone's age. Given there was a fairly well publicized case where a man was charged with possession of child pornography where the video in question was a legally made video with an actress who was 26 years old... but looked young.
Realistically, how is the general public supposed to know if a posted amateur picture or video is of a mature looking 17 year old or a young looking 26 year old?
Yeah, I'm sure that rising number has nothing to do with increasingly weird laws... For example in Germany it can be classified as "child porn" to have an actor act childish and LOOK like they theoretically COULD be under 18 - even if the actor proves to be an adult in front if the camera, for example by providing legal documents. Also even innocent pictures of, for example, children playing on the beach are increasingly classified as porn now. I'm not trying to marginalize a real, existing problem here, but it doesn't help that jurisdictions world-wide actively inflate the statistics for their own agendas. Quite the opposite in fact...
It's also rather unfortunate that the police use child pornography as a weapon. It's not uncommon for them to throw in a few child porn charges, especially if they made mistakes in the investigation. It's sick and it needs to stop.
Its especially nasty when they take photos out of context and declare them "Child porn". Eg you have photos of your kids on the beach. Oh but whats this? There are OTHER PEOPLES KIDS in the background. Kids in skimpy clothing! OBVIOUS child porn, busted!
In the free world the media isn't government run; the government is media run.