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WASHINGTON -- Seven providers of peer-to-peer services have promised to attack the problem of child pornography being traded on their networks, as a congressional committee heard that thousands of child pornography files are available on P-to-P services.

Peer-to-Peer United, a newly formed group of six P-to-P services, says it will launch a "Parent-to-Parent Resource Center" with information on how families can guard against child pornography. The center, to be launched within a few weeks, may contain such information as warning signs for parents to watch for and links to law enforcement agencies and organizations working with exploited children, says Adam Eisgrau, executive director of Peer-to-Peer United.

In addition, the Senate Judiciary Committee will get a hand in its crusade against online porn. Alan Morris, executive vice president of Sharman Networks, which operates Kazaa, says his company will help as the committee considers ways to rid P-to-P networks of child pornography and to keep adult materials away from minors who use P-to-P services. Senators and witnesses at the Judiciary Committee hearing Tuesday complained that innocent search terms such as "the Beatles" or "Harry Potter" bring up pornographic materials on some P-to-P services.

Cases Filed

The P-to-P services also asked Congress to act against the criminals, not their services.

"The answer is not to restrict the technology, because technology isn't the perpetrator--criminals are," Eisgrau says. "The answer is to track down and prosecute those who would exploit the youngest and most vulnerable among us, and to put them in jail where they belong."

However, one prosecutor urged Congress to hold P-to-P services responsible. Thomas Spota, district attorney for Suffolk County, New York, filed charges related to child pornography against 12 Kazaa users in July.

"Federal legislation is needed to combat this scourge," Spota says. "We need a federal task force...in order to be able to attack the owners and the distributors of these programs, who are reaping enormous profits."

At the Judiciary Committee hearing, Spota joined Senator Charles Schumer (D-New York) in asking the Department of Justice to create a federal task force to track P-to-P network users who trade child pornography. The Internet is already "bogged down" by spam and other annoying practices, Schumer says. "Now comes word of the dark side of the Internet has gotten even a little darker," he adds. "File-sharing software is an effective tool for someone trying to get their hands on child pornography."

Schumer says he's looking into whether P-to-P networks do all they can to prevent child porn. If not, they should be held responsible, he says.

Kazaa Evaluated

Schumer and the committee members also talked about a report from the General Accounting Office released Tuesday that tried to measure the volume of porn and child porn on Kazaa.

The GAO report finds that the names of about 42 percent of pornographic images on Kazaa hint at child pornography. GAO staff used 12 keywords commonly associated with child pornography and found 1286 items. Of them, 34 percent were adult pornography and another 24 percent were nonpornographic, according to the GAO report. Another Kazaa search for child pornography found 341 image files, about 44 percent of them child pornography.

The GAO report doesn't estimate the volume of child pornography on P-to-P services, although it notes that the Internet has emerged as the "principal tool" to exchange child porn. Committee witness John Malcolm, deputy assistant attorney general at the criminal division of the Department of Justice, says it's difficult to tell how big a problem child pornography is on P-to-P networks.

Sharman Networks' Morris says his company would be "very happy" to assist a task force. He says Kazaa has cooperated with law enforcement agencies investigating child porn, although only four such agencies have contacted his company in the last 18 months. Kazaa client software now has a pornography filter activated by default, he adds.

Efforts Questioned

It's impossible for Sharman Networks to know what files are being traded between users, Morris said in Kazaa's defense. Only a small fraction of child pornography available on the Internet comes from P-to-P services, he says, estimating three-quarters of all child pornography is instead distributed on Web sites. Meanwhile, pop-up ads can expose children to explicit images, he adds.

Schumer and Senator Patrick Leahy (D-Vermont) questioned whether Kazaa is doing enough to discourage the trading of child pornography. Schumer asked if Kazaa had revoked the software licenses of the 12 Suffolk County residents that Spota charged. Morris said he hadn't thought of it until the senator suggested it, even though Kazaa's end-user license prohibits the sharing of offensive or illegal materials.

Leahy questioned how Kazaa could scrub its system of files that appear to be popular songs but contain white noise, but can't get rid of child porn.

"Somehow you are able to check the content of that, and those are taken off the network," he says.

Morris says Kazaa users, not Kazaa itself, warn others about the white-noise files. Kazaa can't look at the content that users trade, he says. "There's no technical way at all; it's like asking Microsoft to look at the content of people's e-mails," Morris adds.

Leahy blasted some P-to-P services for trying to keep users anonymous through new technologies. The networks can be used to lure children to meet with sexual predators, he says.

"So far, the peer-to-peer networks are not only turning a blind eye to this problem, in many cases they are specifically designed so that parents are unable to keep their children off the network with a traditional firewall," Leahy says.

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