The Internet Watch Foundation's report for 2005 shows that the number of reported sites with child porn was up by 80% over the previous year but they are putting that down to extra vigilance by members of the public.

The part that surprised me though was that 40% of all sites traced with illegal material were in the US. I had assumed that the most would be from Russia or parts of Asia but the Russian figure was 28% and the whole of Asia was 17%. Mainland Europe amounted to 13% but it was heartening to see that the UK was at just 0.4%. That figure was down from a sickening 18% in 1987.

Please do not take this as an anti-US posting, I realise that the US is a huge country with a large internet use so figures are distorted due to that but even so it did make me wonder. Why do you think the figure is so high?

Do you think the level of investigation is lower in the US?

Maybe their sites are more easily traced, as in Russia's figure could be higher but they are better at hiding their exact country location.

What other reasons?








4

"The ethics of a nation are only as good as its leaders, never better" said Will Rogers. While Bush wraps himself in the robes of Christianity he drops bombs and uses depleted uranium on innocent children. The "culture of life" he touts is shown to be a veil of hypocrisy, and the value of children ends when they leave the womb. The US is a corrupt and violent society so I'm not surprised at all that child pornography proliferates here. We're now being sold the notion that Dubai, a state that practices slavery and open prostitution on an industrial scale, is a suitable manager for our vital ports. And Bush will go to church and bow his head and his base will murmur approval and pray for this "good Christian man," even as he sells their ports to slavers and pimps. Truly we get the leaders we deserve.

Well, like most organizations, they have an agenda to push and funds to raise, so any excitement they can engender is likely to benefit them and their PR should be read with that in mind.

Second, the actual figure is that 40% of all sites with "child abuse content" that they have chosen to "investigate" were in the U.S. That doesn't mean that the U.S. is a haven for 40% of all child porn.

We really don't know what standard they're using to judge abuse or why they choose to investigate one particular site over another.

Without them disclosing their methodology, the conclusions are suspect.

That being said, it wouldn't surprise me if a whole lot of child porn were hosted in the U.S. if only because there's a lot of broadband deployment here and a lot of zombie PC's.