Dark web paedophile crackdown in UK and US
Crime-fighting and intelligence agencies in the UK and the US have begun monitoring users of encrypted, anonymising online networks – the dark web – in a bid to track down paedophiles posting images of children being sexually abused.
The aim is to track down "criminals who think they are hidden from the law, including those operating on the dark web", says UK prime minister David Cameron, who revealed the initiative at a Downing Street internet summit on 18 November. Such sites – where content is buried in layer after layer of encryption – are known as dark because they cannot be crawled and indexed by regular search engines.
News of the dark web probe comes as a high profile anti-paedophile initiative kicked off on the public internet: Google and Microsoft, working with child-protection charities, have moved to disable 100,000 search terms that are most commonly used to find paedophile content on the public internet.
