Child porn distributors nabbed

The police have cracked down on multiple people who distributed or owned child pornography in a collaborative investigation with the Homeland Security Institute (HSI).

The Korean National Police Agency Cyber Bureau has uncovered from November 2013 to this month 117 people who post or distribute lewd material featuring children and teens on SNS and video file sites or owning such material (violation of laws protecting the sexuality of children and teenagers). Police indicted without arrest 74 people including an office worker identified as Sohn. Some 33 elementary students who are minors under criminal law, being under 14, and 10 middle and high school students who were of lighter criminal violations were not indicted.

This crackdown on some 100,000 cases of child porn is the result of the police working in collaboration of the Korea branch of the HSI. The Korean police signed an MOU on sharing investigatory data with the HSI in August last year. When Internet operators including Google and Twitter discover child porn, they report to National Center for Missing & Exploited Children (NCMEC) so that the HSI inform the police of the location and IP address of the poster. In actuality, Sohn was seen by the HSI attempting to open a child porn marketing site. The alerted police found 38,000 cases of child porn in his USB memory stick and laptop computer. This new agreement has eased collaborations greatly compared with in the past, where each and every case had to be requested to U.S. investigatory authorities.

The current status of elementary school students’ distribution of child porn uncovered in these investigations is also pointed out as problematic. The 33 elementary students, or 28.2 percent, are known to have photographed themselves naked and distributed them on Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube. "This situation arose as the children wanted to show off among their peers by raising the number of twitter followers," a police official said. "It should be remembered that once leaked, it is difficult to permanently delete data at the Internet."