Govt looking to crawl web to identify child porn

The security establishment is looking for a sophisticated tool to crawl online space with least human intervention to identify child pornography and revenge porn on the internet and curb its further distribution.

The National Crime Records Bureau (NCRB) has been entrusted to carry out proactive monitoring of the internet and take pre-emptive actions to curb further distribution, circulation and misuse of obscene content under the 'Cyber-Crime Prevention Against Women and Children' scheme.

A government note said crime against women and children such as child pornography, rape and gang rape videos, obscene contents, luring of child and women for sexual exploitation are increasing with the growing use of online space.

"Cyberspace is a complex environment comprising of interactions between people and services. The cyberspace is anticipated to be more complex in the near future with advancement in technology and with manifold increase in network/devices attached to it," it said.

It noted that the use of innovative technology and solutions are required to pro-actively identify such contents in the online space and to take pre-emptive actions.

The NCRB is now looking for an online solution from a private developer, which can "find, collect and parse the online contents to identify child pornography and obscene contents" as well as "crawl online space with least human intervention".

The online solution should be able to mark identified contents with pre-identified severity rating based on criteria like the age of the child, nature of the abuse, scale of availability of the content in the online space, content upload date and time stamp among others.

This should also have the ability to "ingest already identified child pornography and obscene contents from various other sources or services. Based on the feed, the tool will crawl the online space to identify the matching contents. Further, it should be able to provide actionable intelligence such as platform name, website URL, upload date etc. for such contents."

Taking the menace of child pornography seriously, the Ministry of Home Affairs had last year advised states to maintain a list of suspect profiles for monitoring, especially busting rackets of child pornography, human trafficking and blackmailing.

The government had also asked internet service providers to identify websites posting child sex abuse content through a list maintained by Internet Watch Foundation and block it, as it intensified efforts to contain online child pornography.

Expressing concern over the issue, the Supreme Court had earlier asked the central government to take pro-active steps to prevent the menace. The apex court also asked the government to take steps to stop access to websites featuring child pornography.