PH battles online child sex abuse

INQUIRER FILE PHOTO

Inside an unmarked building in a Manila business district, a war is being waged 24/7 against dark and mostly hidden crimes—the online sexual abuse and exploitation of children.

Here, a system developed by cybersecurity experts at PLDT—the Philippines’ biggest telecommunications company—is blocking millions of attempts by subscribers to access child sexual abuse material every day.

Since last November, PLDT has blocked more than 1.3 billion attempts to access such material with its pioneering child protection platform, a system that checks user searches against a vault of known web addresses hosting sexually abusive content.

“It’s a lot; it’s worrying,” PLDT chief information security officer Angel Redoble told the Thomson Reuters Foundation. “We don’t know how fast the enemies are getting better. We must cope daily.”

The Philippines was named the world’s top source of online child sexual exploitation content in a 2020 study by the International Justice Mission, a US-based nongovernmental organization working against sex trafficking and exploitation.

According to the study, endemic poverty is helping drive a surge in abuse in the Philippines, where about 20 million of the 115 million population live below the poverty line.

An estimated 2 million Filipino children have been victims of online sexual abuse and exploitation, according to a study led by Unicef published last year.

Borderless crime

The country’s justice ministry has told telecoms companies and internet service providers to inform law enforcement agencies of child sexual abuse material and update their technology to block it or face prosecution.

But data privacy laws in the Philippines limit what internet service providers can access—they can see a user’s search activity, but are not allowed to monitor individual users or their communications.

The International Justice Mission said online child sexual exploitation was a “fast-growing, borderless crime” and that perpetrators in Western countries lured Filipinos to sexually abuse children and offer images or videos of the exploitation online.

Livestreaming is believed to be more prevalent in the Philippines than in other countries, it said, due to cheap internet access, robust money transfer infrastructure, widespread English-language proficiency and the country’s reputation as a sex trafficking hub.

Telecom companies and internet service providers are currently unable to block livestreamed content.

As the COVID-19 pandemic pushed more Filipinos into poverty, the country saw a 260 percent increase in reports of online sexual exploitation between 2019 and 2022, the Philippines Department of Justice said.

Role of tech companies

PLDT has been working on blocking child sexual abuse-related material since 2018, but back then it could only stop suspicious domains.

“We thought that to be able to block on a content level, we would violate privacy-related laws by sniffing through the traffic of our subscribers,” Redoble said.

The company built its own cybersecurity group, which came up with a method to screen for child sexual abuse material without violating data privacy laws. But it needed a way to detect the offensive material.

Internet Watch Foundation analysts came to the group’s aid by assigning a unique “hash”—a kind of digital fingerprint—to items online confirmed to contain child sexual abuse.

“It’s a line of code which, crucially, cannot be reverse engineered to produce or access abuse imagery,” said Thomas.

The Internet Watch Foundation provides a hash list of confirmed child sexual abuse material for internet service providers to block. As of last month, PLDT had received more than 400,000 such codes from the foundation.

Thomas said blocking can “protect the victims of child sexual abuse from further victimization, protect internet users from seeing such images and prevent pedophiles from accessing this content online.”

The company’s top competitor, Globe Telecom, has also partnered with the foundation to boost online child protection.

In the first quarter of this year alone, Globe Telecom blocked more than 65,000 sites carrying child sexual abuse.

But because the crime is borderless, the Internet Watch Foundation and telecom companies say blocking is only one way of fighting the abusive material.

“We must bring suspects to court,” said Redoble.

Holistic approach

In Cebu province, international aid group Terre des Hommes Netherlands has partnered with the Bidlisiw Foundation, a local group fighting human trafficking, in a three-year online child safety program called Project SCROL. —REUTERS