It's nauseatingly easy for pedophiles to get their hands on child porn.
All they need is access to the Internet and a credit card.
They don't need to join clandestine file-sharing groups with secret passwords or install special peer-to-peer software in their computers.
It's right out there in the open, on pay websites anyone can find if they're looking for them.
It's so plentiful that at any given moment, it's estimated that upwards of 700,000 people around the globe are on their computers, leering at the filth.
"The good news is, you can't buy crack cocaine using your credit card and you can't buy an illegal handgun with it," says investigative journalist Julian Sher, author of One Child at a Time, the Global Fight to Rescue Children from Online Predators. "The bad news is, you can easily buy child pornography."
What makes this a national disgrace is that a shocking number of the websites peddling this depravity are based in Canada.
The Canadian Centre for Child Protection analyzed 800 websites based in 60 countries that sell child porn. It found that 8.7% were Canadian web-hosting companies' servers, second only to the U.S.
The sites' owners aren't necessarily Canadian, says Signy Arnason, who runs the centre's cybertip.ca program.
They could be based anywhere in the world, she said, and just using Canadian servers. Making it even more complicated is that the sites and all their content can move around the Internet from server to server.
The centre's analysts watched one website cycle through 212 IP addresses in 16 different countries in a 24-hour period in order to stay ahead of authorities.
"It truly is a global problem," Arnason said.
The Harper government was expected to introduce a new bill today imposing harsh penalties on web hosting companies and Internet service providers (ISPs) that fail to report to police when they find child porn on their customers' websites.
The new rules are aimed at smaller, "rogue" net hosters who make it easy for criminals and perverts by not asking questions.
Shawn Hill of Telus, one of Canada's biggest ISPs and web hosts, said nearly all the major players in the country work closely with police and cybertip.ca to shut down child porn sites as soon as they're discovered.
Privacy laws forbid ISPs from monitoring individuals' web activities, he said, but they take complaints from the public and forward them to local police or cybertip.ca.
They also use Cleanfeed, a system administered by cybertip.ca that blocks Canadian subscribers' access to illegal websites. Cleanfeed is voluntarily used by eight major ISPs, representing 80% of Canada's Internet users.
Sher said it's about time Canadian lawmakers started to crack down on child porn.
"Canadians are among the biggest users of the Internet," he said.
"All of the major cases that I've covered, Canadians are always involved. And yet, we have some of the weakest legislation."
Sher recalled one international child-porn ring that was broken up a few years ago. The U.S. citizens convicted in the case got upwards of 10-year sentences, while the Canadians got off with as little as 14 days, to be served on weekends.
"People have to realize that this is not simply pornography," he said. "It's child abuse. When they see pictures and videos of this nature, they're not just pictures. They're crime scene photos."
ANDREW.HANON@SUNMEDIA.CA
