Created: 09 Jun 2004
Society Guardian reported today that the Police plan to monitor internet chat rooms. According to the National Crime Squad, several countries will monitor chat rooms to ensure that paedophiles are not trying to arrange illicit liasons with children. Does this win the Derek Wyatt award for naive ideas?
The scale of the task facing the NCS and their overseas colleagues is awesome. Even blitzed, a relatively small IRC network, which I frequent, has over 1200 users online on average. How many people would be needed to monitor public channels on blitzed? It is difficult to answer this question. At quiet times, one skilled person, with a reasonably advanced IRC client could monitor many channels simultaneously. However, take a look at the blitzed channel list. Notice anything? There are several languages besides English in use. So let’s be optimistic and assume that the NCS have recruited experienced, multilingual IRC users to monitor blitzed. In that case, perhaps one person could keep an eye on the public blitzed channels. So they would presumably need to monitor the network in shifts. Perhaps two people working eight hour shifts would cover the times where children might be frequenting the channel (leaving of course, eight hours when there would be no monitoring). To provide holiday cover they would need to have three people on the job. Now consider that there are hundreds of IRC networks, some much busier than blitzed, and you have some idea of the futility of trying to monitor IRC. Consider also that IRC is just one form (albeit possibly the most popular) of Internet Chat.
Presumably the NCS has no intention of trying to monitor every chat room in the world. In fact their Assistant Chief Constable, Jim Gamble, said:
“You could be in a chat room, you could be engaging in conversation with children. This internationally recognised logo [to indicate police presense] will appear in the Who’s Here box in the corner and you will be able to engage that individual in conversation.
Just how will this work? Do they hope that IRC will be re-engineered to provide the facility to display some sort of logo and then compell the IRC community to upgrade to a client that supports it?
So let’s imagine that we’re in #teenchat and we see this:
21:53 -!- pcplod \[~bill@chatmon.nationalcrimesquad.police.uk\] has joined #teenchat
So, the most simple way of evading this copper is to send a private
message to the people who you want to chat to. In fact, you could just
set up a hidden channel and invite all the people from #teenchat into
your channel. Or, if you’re an channel operator, you can just
/kickban pcplod and send him packing from the channel. Perhaps
confrontational, but, as far as I know, not illegal.
So, in summary, the measures suggested are not technically feasible, would require significant staff numbers and would be easy to evade. My biggest objection is that they will occupy police resources with no obvious benefit. Perhaps Mr. Gamble should have consulted with people who have experience of Internet chat rooms before airing his ill thought out ideas in public.