Internet Anonymity Very Scary, Newspaper Finds

The McClatchy newspaper chain just discovered that it's possible to be largely anonymous on the web, a discovery it splashed on the front page of its site today with the headline "Net gives child-porn traders anonymity."

Using a data-mining program, [Wyoming State police officer Flint Waters] quickly connected to 165 people from at least five countries who were online to trade videos and photos showing the violent sexual abuse of infants and toddlers.

Waters, a Wyoming State Police agent, runs publicly available software to locate child-pornography traders. Subject lines of Internet conversations boast of fathers sodomizing infant sons. Repulsive as it is, that's perhaps the tamest of the headings.

If Waters were trading child pornography — instead of being an Internet sleuth — he'd be virtually impossible to trace. Internet service providers aren't required to retain data that could help police, and the explosion of free wireless hot spots provides unparalleled anonymity for traders of child porn.

Insert "Hollywood movies," "banned political speech" or "whistleblower documents" instead of "child porn" and see what Kevin Hall's story tells you. You won't learn much new. Much more interesting than this scare piece are concerns from Drew Oosterbaan, chief of the U.S. Department of Justice's child exploitation and obscenity section.

Earlier this year, when speaking at a panel at the RSA security conference, Oosterbaan said the internet's threat was in its ability to unite geographically distant people with shared interests. For instance, he noted that some child-porn traders have user groups where the test and price for admission was getting new images. That hurdle may be enough to turn someone who previously only looked at child-porn to commit and document a real world sex crime against a child.

So yes, the internet was not built to the specifications of the police. But despite the lack of total internet surveillance, it remains impossible to physically molest a child on the internet.

Photo: Waterwin