The dark web of child porn

(NOTE: This is a reprint of a story that was published in the India Today edition date March 2, 2020)

In October 2019, Prajwala, a Hyderabad-based NGO that rescues and rehabilitates sex trafficking survivors, came across some disturbing footage of child pornography on the internet. When Sunitha Krishnan, co-founder of Prajwala, went to meet a child featured in it, she expected a scared, silent, suspicious person. Instead, she found a cherubic 12-year-old girl, bursting with enthusiasm. Praniti (name changed) was no problem child. She attended school, was polite and never begged for chips or soda. She would chat with a close friend online, someone her parents assumed was from school. Nothing prepared them for the discovery that the person was a stranger and that sexually explicit photographs of their daughter were all over the internet.

Praniti’s reaction was different. There was only denial. “She was adamant this person was her friend, that she had done nothing wrong,” says Krishnan. The biggest threat in children being ‘groomed’ through the internet is the complete transfer of trust from the prey to the predator. It destroys the construct of victimhood in a child’s mind. “The child doesn’t know he or she is being exploited. Imagine a childhood spent grappling with the notion of betrayal and abuse,” says Krishnan.

THE CHILD PORN MARKET
Cyber grooming of the very young, like Praniti, is the newest threat in a booming online child pornography market that has reached alarming proportions in India. According to the US-based National Centre for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC), India now accounts for the maximum number of online child sexual abuse imagery in the world, followed by Thailand. NCMEC estimates that Indian users have uploaded 25,000 images or videos in just the past five months. Delhi tops the list for the maximum uploads of child porn, followed by Maharashtra, Gujarat, Uttar Pradesh and West Bengal.

“Innovation and the internet come with their own set of challenges, some of which are alarming as in child pornography,” says Dr Gulshan Rai, chief information security officer in the prime minister’s office. “The IT Act bans the viewing, creation and distribution of child pornography in the country, but it still happens. Moreover, intermediaries like social networks are not removing such content fast enough. They are not owning up to their responsibility towards society, focusing instead on revenue and maximum visibility.”

Anyone—a family member, criminal racket or cyber stranger can create child porn. They need not be paedophiles. “We are seeing an increase in self-generated child porn,” says Siddharth Pillai, co-founder of Aarambh, which runs a helpline for reporting child porn. Government figures also show that circulation of child porn is on the rise. Last year, 377 websites were blocked in India for posting child porn content. According to the latest National Crime Records Bureau (NCRB) report, 781 cases of creating or storing child porn were recorded in 2018. In 2017, it had been 331 cases. Odisha had the maximum number of such cases (333) in 2018, as opposed to only eight in 2017. “Much of child abuse footage is filmed inside homes by known relatives or family friends. This could happen anywhere: urban, rural, poor, rich. There would also be an offline apparatus where victims of sex trafficking could be filmed,” says Pillai.

Reports show that approximately 100 people have been arrested or summoned for viewing and distributing child porn across the country since November 2019. Additionally, Gujarat’s Crime Investigation Department received names of 62 paedophiles in the same month. In October 2019, the CBI filed cases against seven Indians involved in an international child sex racket. What is not mentioned is whether these same people also create content.

According to the NCRB, one child is sexually abused every 15 minutes in India. While there is no single figure for how much of this happens within homes, those working with victims and several independent studies estimate that 70-90 per cent of all child abuse is perpetrated by people known to the child. “Often couples or child abusers film their acts, and this content gets leaked. There is also grave concern over children being groomed to participate in sexual activities through social media friends,” says Pillai.

CYCLE OF ABUSE
Child sex abuse is not just traumatic in a person’s formative years, it creates a cycle of abuse. According to a 2008 study in the International Journal of Adolescence and Youth, ‘pathological family atmosphere with precocious exposures to sexual behaviours and sexual acts, traumatic sexual experiences in childhood, sexual interests and exploration, deprivation and failure in romantic relationships, and young boys who have been coerced into homosexual acts, are at increased risk of becoming young sexual offenders.’

There are also reports of an offline, unorganised child porn industry, perhaps a subset of the larger organised porn industry in India. “Sexual abuse also exists where trafficking does,” says Krishnan. One can assume child sexual imagery could be beginning in areas that are hubs of trafficking-West Bengal, Rajasthan, Maharasthra being the top three, shows NCRB data.

Alarmed by the reports, Rajya Sabha chairman and vice-president Venkaiah Naidu set up a committee under the leadership of the Congress’s Jairam Ramesh in December 2019. The 14-member committee met with social media firms and representatives from the women and child development, electronics & IT and home affairs ministries to discuss two key issues: children accessing pornographic material and the circulation of child porn. Around 40 recommendations were submitted in the final report last month.

At present, instances of child porn are not reported to a governing body or recorded and made public by social media companies, a practice the same firms follow in the US. The US also has cyber crime teams that monitor and track down child porn creators based on these reports. The Rajya Sabha report has recommended that a central body be set up to whom online platforms can report IP addresses of those searching for child porn. While the panel did consider several legislative, technological and institutional measures for those viewing and promoting child porn, it did not include how content creators or those advocating sexual activities to children online will be tracked. The menace is largely to be dealt with on visible circulation channels. And while digital safety education was recommended, nothing was mentioned on sex education for children to be more aware of their bodies and rights. The report’s impact on lawmakers and subsequent implementation of the recommendations remains to be seen.

While the electronics & IT ministry had earlier recommended that automated tools weed out terrorism and child porn, it is likely that the final draft of the guidelines for IT intermediaries will mandate only child porn be monitored and removed. The final call on revised guidelines is expected in the next few weeks.

Among the people the committee consulted and who also helped draft the final report was Amol Deshmukh of research outfit Herd Foundation. “Online exploitation of children is a major concern,” he says. “We have recommended that cyber grooming, advocating or counselling sexual activities with a person under 18, be made an offence under the Protection of Children from Sexual Offences (POCSO) Act. We also discussed setting up a cyber-crime investigative agency in India, especially to monitor the dark web, where a major chunk of child porn is viewed.” However, monitoring of online criminal marketplaces, like the dark web, did not make it to the final Rajya Sabha report.

A DARK ALLEY
Social media giants are beginning to act against child pornography in India. In February 2019, the company website stated that ‘over the last three months, WhatsApp has banned approximately 250,000 accounts each month suspected of sharing child exploitative imagery’. YouTube removed 851,441 videos citing child safety concerns between July and September 2019. Facebook, Twitter and Instagram, too, removed millions of such images and videos last year. However, this is just the trackable surface web. What is available on the dark web can never be fully documented. Playpen, a dark website the FBI shut down in 2015, had 215,000 users and 23,000 sexually explicit images of children, even toddlers.

India is currently among the top 10 countries logging on to the dark web, according to metrics released by the TOR Project, an open-source software for enabling anonymous communication (50,000 Indians logged on daily as of January 2020). Figures can fluctuate depending on how people access the network, and how they cover their tracks. In 2014, the figure was over 200,000 a day for India. According to Hyderabad-based ethical hacker Bharat Rao, “It is now very simple for people to hide their location, thanks to online tutorials and virtual private networks. This makes it harder to track actual user numbers. I don’t think the figures since 2014 have reduced, people are just accessing the dark web differently and more covertly.”

Unlike the surface web, where websites are indexed on search engines, the dark web helps sites achieve total anonymity. Software like TOR directs internet traffic through hundreds of virtual tunnels. These tunnels are created between nodes (or relays). Each time data is transmitted, a random route is picked between these nodes. TOR also goes a step further and deploys the ‘onion routing’ of data. Imagine driving from Delhi to Jaipur-instead of taking the direct NH-48, you drive through a number of other towns and cities to reach it. None of the cities will know which other city you visited except the one before and after it. And each time you go, you take a different route. This is essentially how a user connects to the deep web; the convoluted, hidden route maintains blanket secrecy.

A user can access the dark web very simply. All one has to do is download a TOR browser (available as an app on smartphones and downloadable on desktops), and connect. On the deep web, there is no Google. Instead, you have search engines like The Hidden Wiki, Duck Go and TOR Links. These will not show you any results for child porn, which is ‘officially’ banned just as on the surface web, complying with the guidelines of the offline world.

However, logging on to specialised encrypted search engines like Onion Land and Onion Dir takes you to a different world. On Onion Land alone, a search for ‘child porn’ throws up over 130 website links, and a search for ‘child porn India’ around 50. There are websites which sell children as slaves, host videos of child torture, images of children with aggressive animals and of children taking nude selfies. A search for ‘nude child Indian’ on Onion Land reveals 42 links, and one listed images by caste, state, colour, gender and age.

Rather than names, websites on the dark web are a random alphanumeric sequence strung together with the domain name ‘.onion’. For example, a link describing ‘india child stripping to bra’ was ‘jnsbixyz32lsex82nm.onion’. Transactions to access such content are made in Bitcoin. On jnsbixyz32lsex82nm.onion, the price to view five images was about Rs 6,000 in Bitcoin. To gauge the popularity and cost-effectiveness of these links, you only have to visit the various crowdfunding platforms for child porn. One website-uh3xkebozq5n6ygv.onion (listed on a Reddit forum)-lets you view images and videos only after 500 users have paid around Rs 800 in Bitcoin.

Content is also sold on the hundreds of marketplaces of the deep web. Popular ones include Empire, Berlusconi, Cave to R, Black Mart, Dream and Elite. Most of the products on sale here are drugs or weapons. All marketplaces have the disclaimer that selling child porn is banned. And it is indeed not a product for transaction, until you start a chat. Encrypted, chats are where cyber groomers peddle content. On Elite, a buyer for static images quoted the following rates: ‘Child Front: Rs 4,000/ Child Back: Rs 6,000’ (rupee equivalents of Bitcoin). More can be offered for videos, children with objects, children with other children, or children with adults. These chat rooms are heavily monitored-even something as inconspicuous as taking a screenshot of a conversation can trigger off an alert, and instant blocking out.

Currently, India does not have the resources to crack down on such operations. “The dark web cannot be regulated and it will require a full-fledged investigative agency to even try. At present, we don’t even have one for the surface web,” says Mukesh Choudhary, a cybercrime expert who has trained close to 5,000 armed forces officials and police in India on cyber crime investigations. “Hunting for users through the dark web is very hard,” he adds. “Websites change links, people hide locations, routes of data transfer are hidden and different each time.”

Rai makes a similar point: “The dark web is extremely time-consuming to regulate. At times, it can be impossible.” Tracking a single user on the dark web can take 3-4 months; tracking a website even more. A US-South Korea crackdown on a child porn dark website called Welcome to Video took over two years. Transactions in cryptocurrency, onion routing, encrypted chats and Protonmail (which also cannot be tracked) are the biggest hurdles for dark web investigators.

THE ROAD AHEAD
Various stakeholders are involved in child protection, each playing a different role. Social media platforms are clear there is zero tolerance for any kind of child abuse. A Twitter India spokesperson says, “We have been at the forefront of responding to the challenge of preventing the exploitation of children on the internet and will continue to fight online child sexual abuse and invest in essential technology and tools.” What these tools are, the company is unwilling to divulge.

ShareChat, however, is open to sharing that they use artificial intelligence (AI) to detect child porn. “AI tools usually detect skin or movement. Some videos have only audio, or the bottom half will be cut off to trick the AI,” admits Berges Malu, public policy head at ShareChat. A similar problem with AI has been detected on Facebook too. Krishnan tried to report a group called Kochu Sundarikal (Little Pretty One), an English-Malayalam community of 3,000 paedophiles openly discussing child abuse. The AI could not spot a ‘community guideline violation’ because it was in a vernacular language. Similarly, Ankit Mitra (name changed), 31, a cyber-hacker from Ahmedabad, says he recently helped bust a WhatsApp group called Bhabiji ghar pe hai, where 150 paedophiles shared images and links to child porn on the dark web. Despite consultations with social media companies, the government has not mandated accountability or punitive measures for failure to remove or report content.

The government has banned child porn but is yet to set up a dedicated agency to investigate cases of those who view, distribute and create it. There is a general consensus on the ineffectiveness of moral bans. “Generally, harm reduction is a more successful approach because even if pornography is banned, people are likely to continue watching (as they have for centuries). Typically, a ban does not stop use, it just moves use into the shadows and stigmatises the behaviour, which is antithetical to the goal of decreasing negative health effects,” says Kimberly M. Nelson, professor, Boston University, and co-author of the study, ‘Pornography is not a public health crisis’.

Public shaming or humiliation is often used as a deterrent for crime in China and some American states. Psychiatrists, behaviouralists and even judges are divided on whether this is an effective form of discipline, though it’s viewed as a stronger message than moral policing. The justice system, however, needs to be speedy and robust for such punishments to have an impact.

EMPHASIS ON SEXUAL EDUCATION
A blind eye is being turned towards sexual education, even though academics argue for its benefits in deterring child abuse. “Children need to be educated about sex. If they know about their bodies, they knows about their rights,” says S.K. Khandelwal, head of psychiatry, AIIMS, Delhi. Chennai-based sexologist Prakash Kothari, who has been practising for 48 years, thinks likewise. “I have seen the age of puberty speed up from 14 years to 11 now. This is largely because of exposure to sexual content through movies, news, songs, social media, chatrooms etc. However, the mind still matures at age 21. This is why it is imperative for schools to educate children about their bodies, to help them understand exploitation,” says Kothari.

Arun Kapur, director of Delhi’s Vasant Valley School, says, “Parents need to be parents, not friends. Discipline and awareness about digital safety begins at home. There is only so much schools can do. Most children today are on phones even before they start school,” says Kapur. Indeed, parents are the first responders here. In the UK, Papaya Parents, a collective of concerned parents who wish to battle phone, porn and internet addiction among their kids, advises being involved with children, having open discussions and clear guidelines on usage. Many also access their kids’ social media accounts, and will monitor it till they turn 18. India has no such support group.

Despite media scrutiny and suggestions for stricter legal measures, creation of, and access to, child pornography has never been simpler. In 1991, when Freddy Peats was arrested for sexually exploiting children at his Goa orphanage, the police discovered 2,305 porn photographs of minor boys engaged in sexual acts with white men and 135 film negatives of child porn in his possession. What took Peats 20 years to achieve can now be done in a few weeks.

A search on a dark website reveals 300,000 images of children being forced to engage in sexual acts with other children, children being tortured by adults, being bitten by animals and nude selfies of young schoolgirls and boys. This is the threat of the internet, where the hunter and the hunted exist on the same platform with nothing to distinguish one from the other. With close to 66 million children from India scouring the web every day (according to a 2019 study by the Internet and Mobile Association of India), each one is at risk of becoming a silent victim in an advancing pornography market.

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