Toward New Paradigms to Combating Internet Child Pornography

Child pornography is an increasingly visible problem in society today. Methods currently employed to combat it may be considered primitive and inefficient, and legal and technical issues can exacerbate the problem significantly. We explore the area from social and technical perspectives, and call for viable solutions based upon distributed network infrastructure mechanisms. We also outline the use of classification systems, which, using statistical analysis are appropriate in this context. Such methods for identifying offensive material are potentially attractive to law enforcement and can be accomplished with acceptable overhead in the routers of a network infrastructure. These classification systems may be of independent interests in other contexts such as homeland security