• silicon.com
• Technology
• Networks

By Suzanna Kerridge, 28 February 2001 00:30

NEWS A silicon.com investigation can reveal that the paedophile newsgroups Thus vowed to take down are still on the Demon service and continue to be updated regularly. Just last week, Keith Monserrat, director of legal and regulation at Thus, told silicon.com that his company would not tolerate paedophilic content and would actively look out for its presence on its servers. "It is shoddy to argue that it is too difficult to police content," he said. However, this week the company has performed a U-turn, and now says that monitoring newsgroups is exceptionally difficult. It has also rejoined the rest of the ISP industry by admitting it is "totally dependent" on information supplied by the Internet Watch Foundation (IWF) when it comes to removing illegal content. Monserrat now says it is impossible to monitor content of the newsgroup or police for child porn. "We have been following the process set by the IWF and we will continue to do that. But it is a dynamic problem and taking down the newsgroups does not kill it [online child pornography] off in the UK. We just try to increase vigilance," he said. The IWF confirmed that two of the newsgroups currently available on Demon are known to regularly contain paedophilic content, and claimed to have notified the ISP about them. Ruth Atkins, assistant chief executive at the IWF, said: "We will be having a word with Demon." A police source familiar with the issue said: "[Thus has] done diddly squat. I've been monitoring their news feeds and at 1.05am for the past few mornings they have updated these groups. If Demon were a high street newsagent we'd have prosecuted them by now." One silicon.com reader contacted silicon.com late last week, claiming it was easy to locate the newsgroups from the ISP's active newsgroup list. The titles of the discussions, which include terms such as boys.kidspank and erotica.child, clearly label the content, he claimed. "Obviously Thus thinks it can get some PR by publicly condemning child porn, while doing nothing about it in practice."