Canada's national child-exploitation tip line and eight of the country's biggest Internet service providers are banding together to make it more difficult to access child pornography online.
Project Cleanfeed Canada was officially launched yesterday, with a mandate to block child-pornography sites hosted on foreign servers. The project is modelled after a similar initiative implemented in the United Kingdom by British Telecom. It is expected to be rolled out in Canada over the next few months.
The project is spearheaded by the Canadian Coalition Against Internet Child Exploitation, a group that includes law enforcement agencies, ISPs and federal and provincial governments.
Cybertip.ca, a tip line that allows Web surfers to report child-exploitation sites, has put together a list of sites that will be blocked by the participating ISPs. The list is compiled from reports by the public which are then vetted by Cybertip's staff of analysts. So far, fewer than 1,000 sites are on the list, but that number is growing.
"Because of the insidious nature of the problem and the sheer size of the Internet, the Canadian public plays a huge role" in combatting child pornography, said Cybertip executive director Lianna McDonald. "We're asking people not to just turn off their computers."
Because people might stumble onto the sites accidentally, their IP addresses and other identifying information will not be logged, Ms. McDonald said.
She added that in the year leading up to the launch of Project Cleanfeed, Cybertip and other groups had numerous discussions about the privacy and civil-liberties implications of such a program.
One of the reasons it was decided to proceed, she said, is that the act of accessing child pornography is illegal in Canada. The websites currently on the block list contain images that clearly depict illegal acts, Ms. McDonald said, such as pornography involving prepubescent children.
In the five years since it started as a small pilot project, Cybertip.ca has received more than 15,000 reports related to child-exploitation websites, Ms. McDonald said. In the cases of local servers and sites, the information is forwarded to local police. Foreign URLs are sent to a national centre in Ottawa.
Cybertip focuses on four categories of websites: luring, sex tourism, prostitution and child pornography.
Even though the bulk of illegal content found is housed outside Canada, about 21 arrests have been made and 1,600 sites shut down nationally as a result of Cybertip reports, Ms. McDonald said.
