The government of the United Kingdom is planning to clean the airway of child sexual abuse images online by inducing, together with the police and internet companies, a campaign to purse both the publishers and those who access the material.
The Prime Minister, David Cameron, anticipated international partnership between police and internet companies to track child abusers and those who viewed images and video online.
He held that from the end of this year all new computers sold would have filters switched on by default; but admitted that the government had first to resolve the problem of how households with one internet connection but multiple devices could balance the internet browsing choices of adults with restricting access to children.
“There is a triangle. We have to stop the people putting up the images, stop those accessing it and ask the internet companies to do better in stopping access to them,” he said.
The prime minister added that the police will be able to monitor peer-to-peer file sharing, where content is harder to track. Live streaming of abuse has also been identified as a developing problem.
Cameron appreciated consumer’s internet companies for increasing efforts to identify and remove links to offensive material and introducing flash warnings to users who may involuntarily be clicking through to illegal material.
The UK Prime Minister admitted to a row with internet service providers who, he said, were objecting to the plans of filtering content. The Child Exploitation and Online Protection agency (CEOP) had been given more powers and Cameron stated that he had sub-contracted someone from GCHQ to work in his office to help in understanding how best to use the technology to stop this.
He added that he had not seen images of child sexual abuse during the drafting of the plans but had had some material, which he described as evidence of a crime scene, described to him.
