3 held for spreading child porn on Net
Written by Writer on Thursday, November 13th, 2008
3 held for spreading child porn on Net
The Yomiuri Shimbun
SAITAMA–The Saitama prefectural police have arrested three men on suspicion of making child pornography videos available to Internet users living in Japan and abroad via file-sharing software, it has been learned.
It is the first case in Japan of police making an arrest over child pornography involving the use of a popular file-sharing application.
The investigation is part of a joint international crackdown on child pornography using the Internet, which is being conducted by 74 countries including Japan and the United States. The police also raided the homes of several other men living in the Kanto region on the same charges, and are analyzing data contained on computers seized in the raids.
The arrested men are Isseki Ueda, 27, a company employee from Wakayama; Mitsuru Shishido, 37, a company employee from Miyoshi, Hiroshima Prefecture; and Kiyohiko Kikuchi, 36, a company employee from Akishima, western Tokyo.
They were charged with violating the law banning child prostitution and pornography.
According to Saitama prefectural police investigators, in September and October Ueda and Shishido stored child porn videos in a shared folder that could be accessed by a large but unspecified number of users of file-sharing software eMule.
The videos included images of girls about 10 years old, the police said. Kikuchi allegedly posted a pornographic video of a 16-year-old girl in a shared folder on eMule on Oct. 16. Kikuchi allegedly kept 1,128 porn videos, including child porn videos, in the folder.
Through eMule, users can share files for free via the Internet. If a user places a file in a shared folder, it becomes available for use with other users online. As a file-sharing application, eMule is far more popular abroad than Winny, a similar application widely used in Japan.
Ueda and Shishido reportedly told the police that they knew foreign users would obtain the images through eMule, and that their conduct was illegal. The two said they obtained the videos through the Internet.
The police are struggling to crack down on child pornography downloaded using file-sharing software because many of the people downloading the images live outside Japan, and it is difficult to cooperate closely with foreign investigative authorities.
On this occasion, the police were tipped off by a foreign investigation agency that child porn videos were being downloaded from Japan by users across the world using eMule. The police identified the users who had made the video available for eMule users and searched their homes and other places.
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2,000 child porn videos seized
More than 2,000 child porn videos were found on computers and other devices belonging to Ueda and Shishido, police investigators said Wednesday.
According to the police, none of the videos were recorded by the men themselves. The police believe the two collected videos already available on the Internet.
Victims shown in the videos were mainly Japanese believed to be primary, middle and high school students. Some of the videos are believed to have been taken by a child prostitution ring cracked by police a few years ago. The police found some of the images had titles using the name of the girl shown in the video, or the name of the primary school the girl attended.
One of the seized videos had about 240,000 hits in a single week, according to the police. The Saitama prefectural police monitored the content and connection status of the seized data files that people could access using eMule. The police found several Japanese eMule users saved data files of child porn on their own computers and other devices. They then made the images accessible via the Internet, the police said.
The police seized the videos and investigated their access history. The videos had recorded between 90,000 and 240,000 hits from all over the world in the space of a week, the police said. The police believe this constitutes proof that child porn videos are being spread from Japan to the world via the Internet.
(Nov. 13, 2008)
