Children’s Online File Swapping Often Yields Porn, Report Says

American teenagers going online to find the latest pop hit by Britney Spears may be downloading more than just a new tune.

File-swapping programs popularized by Napster Inc. and other youth-oriented music services are increasingly being used to exchange pornography, bypassing filters set up by parents to block children’s access to such images, according to a congressional report released Friday.

Children can be unwittingly subjected to pornographic videos and photos when they are simply looking for music, the report found. When searching for Britney Spears videos on the file-swapping service Aimster, investigators discovered that more than 70% of the resulting files contained pornography, including images of underage sex and incest.

Often, however, the search for pornography is intentional. A survey of file-swapping services using the popular Gnutella technology found that six of the 10 most commonly used search terms were related to pornography, including “sex,” “preteen” and “lolita.” The word “porn” ranked second after “divx,” a term usually used to locate pirated movies.

“There’s a new technology that’s widely available that lets children download an entire library of X-rated videos into their home computer,” said Rep. Henry A. Waxman (D-Los Angeles), who along with Rep. Steve Largent (R-Okla.) had requested that the House Committee on Government Reform review the technology. “No credit card is required because it’s all free.”

In a news conference Friday, Waxman said he couldn’t read the titles of the available pornographic files because they were so graphic. He noted that the file-sharing services, which are believed to be most heavily used by those under 18, do not screen users by age.

“It’s a monster let loose on the Internet,” Largent said. He said he had forwarded the study to Atty. Gen. John Ashcroft and urged the Justice Department to step up prosecution of the pornography industry, which he said was the source of the problem.

But besides alerting parents to the danger, both lawmakers said there was little Congress could do to regulate the practice, and neither offered any legislation. In addition to concerns about violating the 1st Amendment, the new file-sharing technologies do not rely on centralized computer servers, and so it is more difficult to trace users or restrict access.

“We’re dealing with a technology that doesn’t lend itself to any sort of intervention that we can think of,” said Waxman, who was alerted to the issue by a father who discovered his son had been downloading pornographic materials without his knowledge. “We don’t know how to stop it. That’s why we need to educate parents.”

Many of the most popular parental-control filtering products, including Net Nanny, Cyber Patrol and Cyber Snoop, are designed to target sex-related Web sites and are not effective in blocking access to pornography on peer-to-peer software programs, the report found. America Online’s parental controls worked only on dial-up connections, not on high-speed connections such cable or a DSL line.

Of the seven filtering products tested, only Internet Guard Dog automatically blocked access to pornographic files, though access to music files also was prevented, the report found. Two others, Cyber Sitter and Norton Internet Security 2001, also could be adjusted by parents to prevent file sharing. None could be set up to block file sharing only of pornography.

“Most of the services out there today are not up to that task,” said Sam Curry, security architect at McAfee Corp., whose parent makes Internet Guard Dog.

Representatives of two of the most popular file-sharing services mentioned in the report, New York-based Aimster and Florida-based BearShare, did not return phone calls or e-mail Friday.

The government report did not specifically criticize the file-sharing companies, but Waxman called on them to develop technology that would prevent children from accessing or swapping pornography.

In grappling with the problem, the government faces the same obstacles confronting the entertainment industry, which has been unable to prevent the spread of pirated music and movies over file-sharing services. Though Napster shut down amid legal woes, dozens of rival sites have sprouted up to take its place.

“It’s pretty well out of their control,” said Ric Dube, analyst at Webnoize, an Internet research firm.

The study is the latest in a recent series of congressional inquiries into children’s exposure to mature material, from explicit music lyrics to violent video games.

But courts frequently have found that government attempts to restrict online pornography were unconstitutional. In 1997, the U.S. Supreme Court struck down the Communications Decency Act, which attempted to make it illegal to disseminate pornography on the Internet.

This year, the American Civil Liberties Union challenged another bill that would require schools and libraries to install Web filters on their computers.