The Power of the Paedos - another high profile case hits the 'never happened' wall?

[Jan Klimkowski]

Cameron has announced a "crackdown" on "web porn" today.

Here's an expert response from the former head of the UK's child abuse investigation unit, stressing that that most paedophiles do not share images of child abuse via google style searches but rather via peer to peer communication.

Peer to peer communication can be policed but it requires specialist teams of child abuse investigators with IT expertise and search warrants.

Oh yeah, and it costs money.

Paedophiles will 'laugh at' web porn crackdown, says ex police chief
New rules: The Prime Minister said he wants Britain to be the best place to raise a family

Evening Standard

Joe Murphy, Political Editor

Published: 22 July 2013

Updated: 10:47, 22 July 2013

Child abusers will "laugh at" some of David Cameron's new measures to counter extreme pornography, one of Britain's top anti-paedophile investigators said today.

Former police chief Jim Gamble predicted that plans to confront people with a pop-up warning if they appeared to be putting phrases like "child porn" into a search engine would fail to stop abusers sharing images with each other online.

"Let's create a real deterrent, not a pop-up that paedophiles will laugh at," said the former deputy chief constable and chairman of the Child Exploitation and Online Protection Centre (Ceop).

"There are 50,000 predators we are told by Ceop downloading images from peer-to-peer, yet from Ceop intelligence only 192 were arrested last year," he warned. "That's simply not good enough."

The criticism by Mr Gamble, who built up Ceop into a world famous centre for tracking down paedophile networks, took some of the shine off Mr Cameron's announcements made in a speech at a children's charity in central London.

Internet search engines claim a "pop-up" will not affect the results of searches but could deter people from legitimate searches.

Google says it already blocks child abuse images. A person entering the term "child porn" would be shown newspaper articles about the Prime Minister's announcement, for example, but not illegal images. Internet providers say legitimate inquiries could be suppressed.

The new measures include:

* Every Internet customer will be required to choose "yes" or "no" by the end of 2014 to having filters against pornography installed on their home service. New customers will have "yes" ticked by default.

* Possessing violent pornography containing simulated rape will be made a crime in England and Wales.

* Videos streamed online in the UK will be subject to the same restrictions as those sold in shops.

* Ceop investigators will get new powers to investigate the so-called dark Internet which operates outside the reach of search engines.

The Prime Minister admitted that stopping peer-to-peer sharing by abusers was "very tough". But he insisted that extra police powers should make paedophiles nervous. "People should know there is no hidden place on the Internet where they cannot be caught," he told Woman's Hour.

But challenged whether Page Three-style images of topless women should be banned from newspapers, he refused, saying: "It's an issue of personal choice whether people buy a newspaper or not."

His measures were welcomed by women's groups. Fiona Elvines, of Rape Crisis South London, said: "The Government today has made a significant step forward in preventing rapists using rape pornography to legitimise and strategise their crimes and, more broadly, in challenging the eroticisation of violence against women and girls."

Professor Clare McGlynn, of Durham University, said: "The extreme porn law can be swiftly amended to send a clear message that rape should not be a form of sexual entertainment."

A Google spokesman said: "We have a zero tolerance attitude to child sexual abuse imagery."