Venu Menon
Wellington, June 27,2024
The Internet Watch Foundation (IWF), a UK-based not-for-profit organisation, will help track internet sites hosting child sexual abuse content in New Zealand.
The Department of Internal Affairs (DIA) is upgrading its Digital Child Exploitation Filtering System, which blocks access to websites hosting child abuse material, by incorporating data supplied by the IWF.
“The Department will incorporate the up-to-date lists of websites hosting child sexual abuse material provided by the Internet Watch Foundation,” Minister of Internal Affairs Brooke van Velden has confirmed.
The department expects to have the IWF filter fully incorporated this year, the minister says.
“This is a major step in preventing children from being retraumatised by having records of their abuse shared online, as well as preventing New Zealanders from viewing this material – including unintentional access by children.”
The IWF filter is updated daily. It uses human analysis and Artificial Intelligence (AI) to identify websites that host material harmful to children.
Once the filter is operational, the number of blocked sites will go up from around 700 to 30,000 on any given day.
The Digital Child Exploitation Filtering System is currently in vogue in New Zealand as well as Samoa and Tonga. It will be extended to the Cook Islands in due course.
The DIA’s upgrade comes as official data shows an increase in online child sexual exploitation both in New Zealand and worldwide.
The National Centre for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC) referred 18,598 reports of child exploitation material to New Zealand agencies over the 2021-2023 period, up 283% compared to 2018-2020.
NCMEC relies on information provided by social media companies which is then passed on to the DIA, NZ Police and the New Zealand Customs Service.
In 2023, the DIA’s Digital Child Exploitation Team undertook 47 investigations, with 44 searches and 15 prosecutions of offenders. Investigators seized 209 devices that contained “objectionable computer-generated material, objectionable adult content, terrorist and violent extremist content, and videos and images of horrific and devastating child sexual abuse.”
Says Tim Houston, Digital Child Exploitation Team Manager:
“The volume of child sexual abuse material being shared is extremely worrying and we hope these findings highlight the scale and nature of this deplorable content.”
He says the images are not “innocent pictures of children, it is serious and abhorrent sexual abuse of children.
“It contains situations and acts that no human being should see or know exist, let alone have to experience and then have distributed online for the despicable satisfaction of online offenders.”
The investigations by the DIA team have saved 35 children in New Zealand from harm or “the potential risk of harm from an offender.”
The DIA team has partnered with other agencies such as NZ Police, Customs and Oranga Tamariki to keep “children out of potentially harmful environments.”
The internet filtering system has been critical in blocking websites with child sexual abuse material, with 1,149,570 attempts to access such websites foiled last year.
The rise of AI generated abuse content has added to the problem.
“AI generated content is becoming easier to create, which normalises and encourages the physical abuse of children,“ Houston notes.
AI generated content can also throw investigations off course.
Says Houston:
“It takes significant resource and time to determine whether a child is AI-generated or not and takes our investigators away from identifying real-world children who are at risk.”
Operators of the “Dark Net” (as it is known) are resorting to End-to-End Encryption to prevent detection. The authorities are worried that as this trend becomes more prevalent, “a lot of child exploitation will go unreported and offenders will increasingly operate with impunity.”
DIA’s Houston sounds a stern warning:
“If you are seeking out this material, please reach out for the help and support that is available, otherwise you will be found, stopped and held accountable.”
Venu Menon is an Indian Newslink reporter based in Wellington
