Giganews Increases Funding to Internet Watch Foundation (IWF), Recognizing Their Work Combating Child Sexual Abuse Images

10/6/2008

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Giganews, Inc., the world's foremost premium Usenet access provider, announced today a substantial increase in their financial support of the Internet Watch Foundation (IWF, see: http://www.iwf.org.uk/) based in the UK. Giganews was the IWF's 50th member to join on October 1, 2004 (see: http://www.iwf.org.uk/media/news.archive-2004.84.htm). Giganews is proud to announce that it has raised its level of support to match the level of AOL, BT, Google, MSN, T-Mobile, Virgin, Yahoo, and many other well known companies.

With all of the recent press from the New York Attorney General in his crusade against child sexual abuse images, Giganews performed a study using the information from his office as well as information at Giganews' disposal. They found two things in this study:

First, by using the New York Attorney General's information, 99.9997% of Usenet has been found to be free of child sexual abuse images. It is clear that Usenet is not the haven for child sexual abuse that some have recently attempted to claim. Regardless of the small percentage, Giganews has never and will never turn a blind eye to the problem.

Second, the Internet Watch Foundation is the most effective agency fighting the spread of this filth. Unlike any US based organization, the IWF actively monitors suspected and known newsgroups as well as any specific images reported to them by Internet users. After they verify the materials are, in fact, child sexual abuse, they transmit takedown notices to all member Usenet providers.

Giganews is extremely thankful to have the IWF acting as its "Child Sexual Abuse Department". Through its association with the IWF, Giganews has a method of verifying reports of child sexual abuse imagery. Ronald Yokubaitis, Co-CEO of Giganews, stated: "The IWF is the only electronic mechanism we have that helps us identify and thus delete this material from our Usenet feed. We are glad to partner with them in actually reducing the availability of these materials online."

Peter Robbins, CEO of the IWF, recognized Giganews' efforts in helping our shared fight: "Your leadership and exemplary corporate social responsibility are clear. The IWF's success in minimising the availability of child sexual abuse content around the world is a testament to the funding and cooperation of our member companies so thank you very much for your enduring support, it is truly appreciated."

About the Internet Watch Foundation (IWF)

IWF is the UK's internet 'Hotline' for the public and IT professionals to report potentially illegal online content within its remit. The IWF works in partnership with the online industry, law enforcement, government, the education sector, charities, international partners and the public to minimise the availability of this content, specifically, child sexual abuse content hosted anywhere in the world and criminally obscene and incitement to racial hatred content hosted in the UK.

IWF is an independent self-regulatory body, funded by the EU and the wider online industry, including internet service providers, mobile operators and manufacturers, content service providers, filtering companies, search providers, trade associations and the financial sector as well as other organisations that support us for corporate social responsibility reasons.

IWF helps internet service providers and hosting companies to combat abuse of their networks through its national 'notice and take-down' service which alerts them to potentially illegal content within IWF's remit on their systems and IWF provides unique data to law enforcement partners in the UK and abroad to assist investigations into the distributers of potentially illegal online content. As a result of this partnership approach, less than 1% of child sexual abuse content, known to the IWF, has apparently been hosted in the UK since 2003, down from 18% in 1997. As sexually abusive images of children are primarily hosted abroad, IWF facilitates the industry-led initiative to protect users from inadvertent exposure to this content by blocking access to it through our provision of a dynamic list of child sexual abuse URLs.

Please note that "child pornography", "child porn" and "kiddie porn" are not acceptable terms. The use of such language acts to legitimise images which are not pornography, rather, they are permanent records of children being sexually abused and as such should be referred to as child sexual abuse images.

For more information about IWF visit www.iwf.org.uk

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