Australian pedophiles are fuelling the market for online footage of children being tortured and murdered, according to senior police.
They say the explosion in the amount of child exploitation footage has become so great they can no longer “arrest our way” out of the problem.
Law-enforcement agencies hold great fears that the world has yet to hit peak levels of child-exploitation material, amid warnings of a massive increase in content when more than a billion people across parts of the developing world get access to the internet through the advent of 5G technology.
Home Affairs secretary Michael Pezzullo said digital encryption had made combating the problem harder and authorities needed industry help to police the dark web.
Australian Federal Police assistant commissioner Debbie Platz said reports of child exploitation involving either Australian victims or offenders nearly doubled to 18,000 last year — with each potentially relating to hundreds of images, videos and live streams. She said the material was also becoming more violent, and the victims were getting younger.
“Why people get sexually gratified from watching a child be tortured and murdered is beyond me,” Ms Platz said. “But that’s what turns them on and that’s what they’re seeking to do.
“Most of the videos and images that we see of the ultimate killing of a child I would say is happening overseas, but being purchased by Australians. So Australians are driving the market, absolutely, but not just Australians.’’
Mr Pezzullo said mainstream tech companies had worked with government and police to modify their systems to take down “both abhorrent material around terror but also abhorrent material around child exploitation” — but the problem lay on the dark web.
“We’re doing a lot of work especially when you start going beyond what’s called the clear web into the dark web, and we really need the collaboration of industry to assist us in looking at managing content at different layers of the web,” Mr Pezzullo said.
Police say government should now explore dedicated services where would-be pedophiles can seek help before they commit a crime — similar to Britain’s Stop It Now program.
As part of a series of interviews conducted a day before Westpac was accused of failing to detect transactions linked to suspected child exploitation, Ms Platz said the government could “give us their whole budget and we will still not eradicate this problem”.
“The government could give me every government worker and I still will have a problem with child exploitation,” she said.
There were also fears about the consequences of 5G coverage being rolled out in impoverished areas of India and elsewhere in Asia that had not previously had reliable internet connections.
Detective Superintendent John Kerlatec, who heads NSW Police’s child abuse and sex crime squad, said law-enforcement agencies feared more children would be targeted as new regions came online.
“What we’re going to see is a whole bunch of people — young people — being potentially vulnerable to predators and everything else that we’re seeing in other countries at the moment,” Mr Kerlatec said. “We’re expecting a large proliferation in child abuse material occurring.”
Tech companies reported more than 45 million photos and videos of abuse last year. It is nearly impossible to completely remove them from circulation.
Research suggests material featuring the abuse of a child is put online every seven minutes.
Former NSW Police detective Toby Dagg, who heads Australia’s eSafety Commissioner’s CyberReport investigative team, said the problem was going to get much worse.
“I don’t think we’re anywhere near peak,” Mr Dagg said. “Network technologies are being introduced that would allow the smartphone to far outpace network connectivity seen by terrestrial networks.
“And the fact that so many billions of humans are yet to come into internet technologies and enjoy the fruits of those technologies — without any of the regulatory mechanisms that have been crafted over decades in countries like Australia, Canada, the United States and New Zealand — means that we are invariably nowhere near peak.”
Queensland Police’s Taskforce Argos, regarded as one of the world’s leading child-abuse investigative teams, last year revealed that more than 100 children were rescued after it secretly took over a dark web child-abuse forum. The forum had more than 3000 active members, of whom 100 had been identified as of March last year.
Mr Dagg said the size of such forums meant it was impossible to arrest every offender.
“In the first six weeks of 2018, we noticed a particular dark web pedophile site increase its membership from zero to 150,000,” he said.
“All of those people are committing some form of criminal offence, and it’s not possible for any police force in the world to arrest, charge and prosecute them.”
Ms Platz said about 50 per cent of the illicit material seized by the AFP featured an Australian victim. Parents and their children needed to be more alert to the risks of online communications.
In one case, a four-year-old was groomed online by a sex offender.