Imploding CSAM networks on P2P without damaging the protocol

Author: Carolina Christofoletti

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Peer-to-peer file sharing protocols are based on the ground idea that moves Internet communication protocols: In order to be able to share huge packets of data with so many clients as possible, it is adequate to break things into small pieces, so that bottlenecks can be avoided. And considering that, sometimes, a file one wants is hosted on a server sitting at the other side of the ocean, having “closer servers” would solve, at least initially, the inefficiency that such long distances would nurture.

In a nutshell, the reason why peer-to-peer software’s make their downloaders also uploaders by default are because that is how the protocol survive. The problem is that, once the efficiency of the protocol with its easy-to-use search box was discovered, criminals such as Child Sexual Abuse Material possessors had found in that a new way to reach, with no mandatory invitation request, and in the loneliness of their own computer, criminal sources of Child Sexual Abuse Materials.

My horizons with this article are two: 1) The harmful and efficient spread of criminal material through a default setting 2) The odd criminological feature of whoever uploads, first, those first criminal files.

•  The Default Settings

Credits to be given to the ones who hold them, my inspiration to write this short commentary comes from a text from Muething, M. (2012) called, Inactive Distribution: How the Federal Sentencing Guidelines for Distribution of Child Pornography Fail to Effectively Account for Peer-to-Peer Networks, Ohio St. LJ, 73, 1485, where the author is discussing CSAM peer-to-peer sentences. And, contributive as academia can be, I am using, as part of my very peculiar “watch the footnotes” writing methodology, phrases “highlights” to derive a parallel text, where I will abandon the sentencing parameters for a while and propose, keeping the “intention” problematic in sight, a look back at the protocols.

And my claim is a single one: As long as we are talking about settings that we can turn off, the problem is not with the protocol, but with the fact that some settings are, negligently, set by default.

And I would like you to think, for a while, about a parallel world where, rather than “agreeing” with a warning while entering for the first time a peer-to-peer software (which most users never read), everyone wanting to speed downloads as a reward of having “contributed, through sharing, to the protocol’s efficiency” would have to turn on a button which explicitly warns: In clicking here, you are sharing anything you might be downloading.

Do you really think that criminals read the whole settings of the tools their use? I do not. But if they did really read that, and if they are rational enough, they would make a point of checking it, eventually, they are not sharing it with all the world, and also with the police. Consequently, the CSAM peer-to-peer sink would be promptly fastened: Criminals would still download it, but they would not be making it available to the whole world. Is it not, exactly, what Internet Governance would want in terms of criminal peer-to-peer sharings? Stop the sharings? I believe so.

Having already done this preliminary consideration, there would have been at least two ways of solving that. I will point out the extremes, but calibrating it within its intermediaries (e.g. do not share if) would also have been possible. We can think about, for example, individual sharing permissions given to every download, what could make peer-to-peer file downloading so boring as having to solve a captcha for every website one visits.

Though boring, it would staunch the massive sharing bleed with boredom. Great, so that now collective folders of thousands of CSAM files could be reduced to an individual, non-shared one with, maybe, only hundreds of those. I am working with numbers. Imagine if criminals had to authorize, one by one, their criminal titles to be shared. I am looking at this massive numbers, but through the psychology lens.

The second possible solution is to set non-extensible a time limit of automatic sharing per day, which, per default, would take hundreds of hours for downloading hundreds of criminal CSA materials through those networks.

Default settings: It is about them that we are, once again, talking.

• How different CSAM peer-to-peer sharers are from their URL peers

Having researched on the domain of Child Sexual Abuse Materials for quite a long time, there is something else to note that I repute as highly important: Peer-to-peers criminals are outsiders in the criminal world.

I gave up the thesis that URL CSAM offenders were the same as they Peer-to-peer colleagues when I realized that peer-to-peer are, per nature, a solitary courtyard where talking about clubs is impossible. And we need to figure out, out of the traditional CSAM forum’s socialization, what is going on the heads of whoever is uploading those criminals files on the network for the first time.

Maybe, peer-to-peer was born as TOR hidden service might have been: For a group of people known to each other which should be able to transfer things quickly, as long as their peers knew the keyword (or the TOR address) to look for it. Please be aware that the cyberlogic is a single one, just wrapped in different ways.

But, peer-to-peer CSAM sharings did not stop when criminals realized that they were sharing that with everyone (also with the police), it has, instead, grown. I would suppose, grown by negligent.

From a criminological point of view, I would argue that we shall put the peer-to-peer file uploaders facing not their CSAM downloaders peers, but that guy that, having received a copyrighted book for purposes of writing a thesis, release it freely and without nobody asking for it, as an E-book through one of the peer-to-peer software programs.

In order to “choke” – to use peer-to-peer terminology- the problem, we must work the chess table in two fronts: The uploaders, to whom the criminal compliments seen in CSAM forums never come to, and the downloaders who, if their only intent really only is downloading it, are negligently causing a greater harm than what they wished.

As Muething well noted (2012), talking about communitarian contribution such as those commonly seen on CSAM forums is a non-sense when we talk about peer-to-peer networks. After all, the same files would be available to the user whether the user shared files with others (Muething, 2012, p. 1499).

If someone else is hosting and offering the files, could criminals please disable their sharing functions, so the overall speed of those criminal downloads could be silently and magically, stunned in such a way that getting those criminals files would be highly time-consuming, for the protocol has met its strangling point?

• The peer-to-peer protocols have no interest on that

Yes, they do. And criminals also. If everyone is resharing only legal files, the protocol works completely fine to those. If criminals are, as a matter of safety, disabling their “leaking function”, that is, the sharing ones, in protecting themselves they are damaging the whole protocol, for sharing those very same files that he/she is trying to acquire.

The idea with CSAM networks via peer-to-peer protocols is to implode that, and the trade-off is a perfect one: Either criminals implode the protocol and protect themselves, or they can seat and wait for the police to arrive at their door. Those networks are all monitored, and Police will come.

Think about it!