The dark web can only be accessed through special browsers, which connect to networks that are designed to preserve the anonymity of users and the most popular of those networks is TOR.Graeme Roy/The Canadian Press
Canadian child-protection advocates are urging the administrators of the network that underpins much of the dark web to block access to millions of child-abuse images and the thousands of websites that post them.
They are warning that pedophile material is proliferating on the anonymous web, including tips on how to abuse minors and evade the police, which is jeopardizing the safety of huge numbers of children worldwide.
The Canadian Centre for Child Protection, a national charity, says that since 2017, it has found almost three million child-abuse images or videos hosted on the dark web.
The dark web can only be accessed through special browsers, which connect to networks that are designed to preserve the anonymity of users through encryption and other techniques. The most popular of those networks is Tor, which stands for The Onion Router.
The Tor network, which is designed to hide where a server is located, is funded by a number of backers, including the U.S. State Department, and administered by volunteers. Among those who use it are dissidents, whistle-blowers and human-rights advocates, enabling them to communicate without being tracked. It also allows free expression in an anonymous forum for people, including those living under authoritarian regimes.
But child-protection advocates are critical of the network’s failure to act to curb the increasing volume of child-abuse material posted there.
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Jacques Marcoux, the centre’s director of research and analytics, says it has repeatedly contacted the administrators of the Tor network about child abuse on websites known as onion services and asked them to intervene, but with no effect.
He said that since 2017, the centre has identified more than 44,000 websites on the Tor network that have hosted child sex-abuse material.
Using international web crawlers in an initiative called Project Arachnid to identify child-abuse material online, the centre has found 2,853,485 child-abuse pictures and videos hosted on websites on the Tor network.
The volume is so high that, since last year, it has been issuing aggregated notices – rather than the individual ones it issues to identify images on the regular web – to administrators of the Tor network.
Mr. Marcoux said that some users of the dark web would have stumbled across child-abuse material while browsing, but far more have purposely sought it out. Some have been directed to it through forums on the regular web where users are more easily trackable by law enforcement.
Investigators at the centre, which is known internationally for its work to stamp out child abuse online, have found that thousands of anonymous users of the dark web are participating on child-abuse forums, and are not only accessing images but exchanging tactics on how to sexually abuse minors.
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The centre, which is based in Winnipeg, has submitted more than 19,000 notifications to the Tor Project – a U.S. based non-profit organization that develops and maintains the network – about child-abuse material.
Lloyd Richardson, the centre’s director of technology, said “the Tor Project has the technical capability to block access to onion services on the Tor network that host child-sexual abuse material.”
“Choosing not to act while citing concerns about censorship comes at the expense of the privacy and safety of tens of thousands of children,” he said in an interview.
Brian Levine, distinguished professor of computer science at University of Massachusetts Amherst, said the Tor Project could enforce a policy barring images of children being abused, as well as forums for pedophiles.
“One of the dangers of Tor is it allows communities to form and to train each other on how to abuse children and to evade law enforcement,” he added.
The Tor Project did not respond to a request for comment. But a statement on its site says, “we take abuse seriously.”
“Activists and law enforcement use Tor to investigate abuse and help support survivors. We work with them to help them understand how Tor can help their work. In some cases, technological mistakes are being made and we help to correct them,” it said.
“Our refusal to build backdoors and censorship into Tor is not because of a lack of concern. We refuse to weaken Tor because it would harm efforts to combat child abuse and human trafficking in the physical world, while removing safe spaces for victims online.”
“Tor Project does not host, control, nor have the ability to discover the owner or location of a [dot]onion address.”