Officials urge international collaboration to fight child pornography

Federal officials on Wednesday called for improved coordination with foreign investigators to curb trafficking of child pornography, which they said is growing more sophisticated and secretive.

Developments in trafficking prompted American and foreign officials to assemble the Virtual Global Taskforce, an international consortium of officials collaborating on child pornography investigations, in Washington, marking the first conference in two years. The taskforce last met in Belfast, Ireland, in 2005.

At Wednesday's meeting, officials with the Homeland Security Department's Immigration and Customs Enforcement bureau called upon 23 governments to work together to net as many suspects as possible and to promote longer, tougher sentences on child molesters and pornographers.

"The minute you've got an investigation that's multinational, you've got to partner [with other governments] and you've got to partner immediately," said Jim Gamble, chairman of the task force and chief executive of the United Kingdom's Child Exploitation and Online Protection Center.

Gamble referred to Operation Landslide, a 2002 investigation that began in the United States but expanded to the U.K., as an example of how international cooperation was imperative to surveillance conducted on 7,000 alleged consumers or viewers of child pornography.

Gamble said the mentality of some government officials is that "we can resolve an issue ourselves" rather than in teams. He said governments' cooperation becomes more essential as child pornography continues to develop as an illegal industry.

ICE chief Julie Myers called upon law enforcement agencies internationally to "do a better job of pooling their resources," but added that the worldwide investigative community is "well on [its] way" toward reaching that goal.

One foreign government official who asked not to be named said file-sharing Web sites are on the rise and have inadvertently facilitated the distribution of child pornography. This type of site is proliferating as criminals realize that pay-per-view sites always create a trail between the consumer and distributor via payment reports, the source said.

"More people are going out of their way to go underground now," the source said.

Alice Fisher, the Justice Department's assistant attorney general, said pay sites can be linked to "credit card aggregators" and "peer-to-peer file sharing" networks that can turn up suspects. Fisher said American investigations have developed to the point of involving multiple agencies, often from separate departments, for a single case.

Gamble supported U.S. government officials' calls for tougher laws for offenders, and added that new approaches are necessary to tackle a still-developing criminal segment of Internet users.

"We need new thinking more than we need new laws," he said.