How easy is it to get kiddie porn off the Internet? Ridiculously easy. So easy that even if you are checking up on your child’s or spouse’s internet history every day you may not realize that enough child pornography images are on your computer right now that you and every adult in the house could spend serious time in jail. In my hometown of Pensacola, which has more registered sex offenders than all the counties that border it combined, the last few weeks have seen the arrest (and one suicide) of several men connected with either possession or distribution, and in one case making, kiddie porn. When you hear stories about people like these and child pornography, you usually also hear of dedicated chat rooms and web sites that deal exclusively with this deviant behavior. In this era when phone companies and ISPs are willingly handing over your records at the first puff of wind from Dick Cheney’s anus, it seems beyond idiocy that any person would go to a site like that, but deviancy is a drug that blinds the reason.
The sad thing is that people don’t even need to go to these dangerous sites to download kiddie porn. Millions of Americans can download everything from simple images of nude children to the most explicit sexual acts imaginable involving kids without ever putting themselves in danger of having their IP address registered as visiting a known site for kiddie porn. Nor do they even have to go through the difficulty of arranging a masking of their IP site or buying software to preserve their anonymity. This article is not going to become a how-to guide for accessing kiddie porn; I won’t give names or details on how such horrendous exploitation is coming into the homes of oblivious spouses and parents on a regular basis. What I will do is mention how it is being done.
Newsgroups are those things you’ve heard of with strange names like alt.black.helicopters.conspiracy.spy-on-us. The “Alt” newsgroups are a showcase for pornography of every kind you can imagine from mere nudity to fetishes you have never heard and would never believe existed. These newsgroups are also a haven for the distribution of kiddie porn. There are newsgroups dedicated to kiddie porn and if your husband or wife or child has access to them through something called a news reader then by the time you finish reading this article somebody may have just downloaded a hundred images of nude children or a movie showing kids engaging in sex. Equally dangerous are those file sharing programs. These are programs that allow those who share the same interest in kiddie porn to swap with each other the best of their collections. If someone in your house has a file sharing program, but you have not noticed that they are not watching many downloaded movies or listening to downloaded music, then there is a great chance they are using these programs to download porn. That does not mean they are downloading kiddie porn, of course, but it wouldn’t hurt to inquire just why they need a file sharing program if they don’t have any mainstream media to show you.
The dangerous part of the internet as far as kiddie porn goes are not those sites run by deviant capitalists intent on making money in the single most despicable way possible. Kiddie porn is being downloaded on a million computers right this very moment without even coming close to giving themselves away by the police who watch for activity on those high profile sites. Be aware of everything that is going on any computer inside your house or business.
