On the topic of Child Pornography...

[Aractus]

It's extremely difficult to locate servers as they're HTTPS encrypted through proxy servers that intentionally have their logs disabled thus making locating the actual servers nearly impossible (as it should be with HTTPS encryption FYI). They also use partition encryption (eg TrueCrypt) which means that the server appears completely normal, with a normal partition and normal web content and in an instant the primary partition can be resized to consume the encrypted partition as empty space. You might ask - but what if they found the hard drive with a truecrypt partition on it? So what? That's not illegal, all it means is that it has an encrypted partition and the only way to decrypt is via the access key that is stored elsewhere, you would need to also locate it. If you can't see the content on the server it doesn't exist. Unless they can break the encryption, they'll have to return the hard drive. It is not realistically winnable to locate and destroy the world's child pornography - it just can't happen without a very serious security flaw that would affect everyone's security online. Yes I am well aware that smaller operations who do not use full security get caught, but the large ones have their partitions fully encrypted in servers that they have full control over 24/7 so that within minutes they can demount them and remove the partitions whenever they want.

And with bitcoin, which I can only assume would be the preferred payment method now, however there are still near untraceable methods to get money - and the usual way is via an anonymous bank account. No, Swiss accounts don't count, the only banks that will open anonymous accounts seem to be in the middle east, and you would need to physically find one that would agree to open the account for you, and then you can withdraw your funds from an international ATM (ah the one place the authorities can catch you is when you collect your money), and this was the method preferred by the child porn industry - and probably still is if it hasn't been completely replaced by bitcoin. Most however don't have truly anonymous bank accounts, but rather opened them with stolen identities that they got from their spambots. This is the most vulnerable part of the whole operation. Tracing bank accounts has had people caught, but they can't be traced if they are truly fully anonymous, the best you can do is ask the bank to close the account. The other vulnerable part is the digitizing, and I have no idea if it's still done, of the 70's Danish material - if it is then being caught with 8mm reels and magazines is what will get people prosecuted - but that's the double-edged sword come full circle most people only ever get charged with possession, and they rarely charge anyone with distribution of child porn.

How is it a viable business? I don't know, it does seem like an excessive amount of work - especially since to advertise you need to run spambots via viruses from infected PC's since you can't just send them from your servers, you have to keep changing IP's and you have to keep changing proxies. And we all have SPAM filters that stop the material even reaching our inboxes. My guess is it's viable because of the volume of child porn that exists from the 70's until now, and also that paedophiles must intentionally look to find the spam. The fact is though that's it not just going to go away.