Authorities have confirmed that a website featuring thousands of sexually explicit images of schoolgirls is back online just one week after getting shut down, yet they’re saying there’s not much they can do about it.
Images of naked and nearly-nude girls as young as 14 have been widely shared across social media without their permission, sparking international outrage.
“I’m appalled that the website was up in the first place,” Tiahna Prosser, one of the victims, told Yahoo7 News. The Queensland bodybuilder said she felt “sold” when she discovered her pictures had been plastered all over the pornography sharing site.
The 18-year-old was outraged when she found out that ‘points’ were being offered to anyone who could upload nude pictures of her to the website. “I can’t believe that the site is back up, more needs to be done,” she said.
Cyber experts had predicted that when the original site was take down, the photos it contained would simply be uploaded onto a new site, and that is precisely what happened, as suggestive photos of young girls are in high demand.
The Australian Federal Police said in a statement:
“It has come to the awareness of law enforcement agencies that a website encouraging users to upload explicit images of young women has re-emerged online. It is important to note that creating, accessing or distributing child pornography is a serious offence, even if you are a child yourself. Such offences have a maximum penalty of 15 years’ imprisonment.”
Australian National University cyber crime expert Roderick Broadhurst explained just how difficult it can be to prosecute the offenders who publish pronographic images of young girls, and why their photos will likely be circulating online forever…
“We sometimes call them bulletproof ISP locations, jurisdictions that don’t have standard cyber crime legislation, that don’t have laws that enable people who use those sites to be extradited. They operate through proxies, in other words, they shift around their location. Although a service might be located in one place, it appears to be operating from another. If those images sit on a database in a foreign jurisdiction, where you don’t have mutual legal assistance, how are we to recover them or stop them moving around? There’s no control, no guarantee of getting them back. These young women possibly have to live with the fact these images are out there forever.”
Here is Yahoo7’s guide to understanding this sort of cyber crime:
•Cyber crime can involve a victim in one country, an offender in another country and content from a third.
•Information can be encrypted (or written in code) and sent through a series of proxies (or indirect network services) so the last address is not the original source.
•This makes it difficult to find the original, but even if it’s possible, there’s still a code to crack.
•Site operators are usually based in countries with lax cyber crime legislation and no mutual legal assistance agreements.
Let this serve as a lesson to young girls in the habit of taking inappropriate photos… If you aren’t conformable with your parents seeing the picture, don’t take it! Even more importantly, if you do take it, don’t send it to anyone. Once it goes online, it exists forever.