Internet Watch Foundation

The Internet Watch Foundation (IWF) congratulates the National Crime Squad on a successful operation to deal with distribution of illegal images of child abuse through newsgroups. Their work with a leading ISP member of IWF again illustrates the value of industry, police and government working in partnership on this problem - a partnership which is the foundation of IWF.

 

This exercise also confirms our findings that nearly all the illegal images in newsgroups is concentrated in a very small number of groups. The potential for severely restricting public access to criminal content by ISPs dropping the groups which receive most of it underlies the recent IWF policies on newsgroups. Most UK ISPs, particularly our subscribing members, do not carry the "bad" groups and we are following up our recommendations by contacting all UK ISPs which hold newsgroups.

 

Although there is a continuing international problem with some newsgroups the efforts of industry and police are minimising it in the UK. Newsgroups are a much diminished source of reports to our hotline and we ourselves have to go to overseas sources to monitor some of the worst groups.

 

David Kerr, Chief Executive, IWF