Credit Cards Key to Fighting Online Child Porn

Sept. 19, 2006 — -- If you cut the money flow, can you end online child porn and its ability to evade criminal prosecution?

That is exactly what the Senate is considering this week.

Attorney General Alberto Gonzales and Ernie Allen, the head of the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC), said today that they hoped to eliminate child pornography from commercial Web sites entirely by 2008.

Their plan: Close down the financial networks that peddle images showing children and even infants being sexually abused.

Appearing before the Senate Banking Committee, Gonzales said, "These are shocking images that cry out for the strongest law enforcement response possible. … This is an important fight for the future of our country."

Since the late 1990s, the scourge of child pornography has spread internationally as pedophiles have found individuals with the same thinking around the world in just a few keystrokes on the Internet.

Online child porn is now a billion-dollar-a-year underground industry, and one of the fastest-growing businesses on the Internet.

"While the Internet is undoubtedly one of the greatest inventions of our generations, it has also greatly facilitated the exploitation of children," Gonzales said.

Describing the scope of child pornography, Gonzales cited a recent study by the University of New Hampshire and the NCMEC.

The study found that a third of kids ages 10 to 17 who used the Internet were exposed to unwanted sexual material. Gonzales said much of this material was "extremely graphic."

The nation's chief law enforcement office detailed for senators the disturbing nature of the material that Justice Department investigators had come across in cases they had brought for prosecution.

"I have seen a young toddler tied up with towels, desperately crying in pain, while she is brutally raped and sodomized by an adult man," he said.

Gonzales said some pedophiles were now engaged in competitions to create the most disturbing images and movies, and share them with other pedophiles.

The NCMEC has found in recent years that the victims are becoming younger.

According to NCMEC data, images recovered from pedophiles show that of the images they had, 19 percent of the offenders had images of children younger than 3 years old, 39 percent had images of children under 6 years old, and 83 percent had images of children younger than 12 years old.