GCHQ to get more power to tackle online child abuse images

Prime Minister unveils new initiative between National Crime Agency and GCHQ to tackle online child abuse

Prime Minister David Cameron has announced a new law enforcement unit that will bring together spy agency GCHQ and the National Crime Agency in a bid to crack down on the publication and trade of child abuse images online.

Cameron promised that the same effort would go into tracking down paedophiles operating online as currently goes into fighting terrorism, and also unveiled a proposed new law intended to prevent adults from soliciting "sexual" messages and images from children over social networking websites.

The child abuse images are predominantly traded over the dark net - parts of the internet not indexed on search engines such as Google and Bing. The proposals includes plans to build a database of abuse images and greater efforts made to identify abusers pictured in the images.

"The dark net is the next side of the problem, where paedophiles and perverts are sharing images, not using the normal parts of the internet that we all use. What we are doing there is getting GCHQ, our world-class intelligence agency, together with the National Crime Agency and we are going to go after these people with every bit of effort that we go after terrorists and other international criminals," said Cameron.

He claimed that children were being "abused to order" by some international crime gangs. "One gang in the Philippines was arranging the sexual abuse of children, filming it and then live streaming it to paying customers across the world."

He added that this gang was only stopped by chance, resulting in the arrests of 29 people, after an investigation into a UK sex offender uncovered the video images on his computer. Fifteen children, some as young as six, were rescued as a result.

Cameron was speaking at the "We Protect Children Online" summit in London, and also added that a new law would be included in the Serious Crime Bill currently going through Parliament that would make it "illegal for an adult to send a sexual communication to a child". It would also include laws making it illegal to possess material offering guidance on abusing children.

However, Cameron praised internet companies for helping to make it more difficult to search and find images of child abuse using conventional search services. Google now blocks access to images and videos of abuse for searches in 40 languages, while Microsoft developed technology enabling it to use a "digital fingerprint" to search for and block such images wherever they appeared online.

Google uses similar "video hashing" technology to "scour" the web and block access to such videos on its website.