Analysis > Forwarding Reports
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Forwarding Reports
Reports of illegal content forwarded to other Hotlines and Law Enforcement for action.
Since 2000 the incidence of unique reports (i.e. excludes duplicates) assessed by the Hotline and determined as being probably illegal child pornography, under the Irish Child Trafficking and Pornography Act (1998) has increased year on year.
All reports, where the content was confirmed as probably illegal child pornography, were traced to locations outside of Ireland and passed for action to other INHOPE Hotlines or to An Garda Síochána to be routed through police channels.
Location to which reports determined as reffering to illegal content were forwarded.
Most of the reports determined as probably illegal under Irish Law were traced to a locations where there is currently no INHOPE member Hotline. In this case the reports are passed to An Garda Síochána who liaise with International police organisations such as Interpol and Europol to try and deal with the reported material.
After Law enforcement, the USA was the next highest recipient of reports from the Hotline. All reports are forwarded to the US INHOPE member Hotline, NCMEC CyberTipline, who work with American Law Enforcement to tackle illegal material found on Internet services. The high incidence of forwarding can be put down to the fact there is a very high penetration of internet usage in the USA, as well as many organisations providing hosting and internet facilities. Because many Internet connections hub through the USA it is also possible that while the apparent location is the USA, the content may actually be located elsewhere. However, taking the Irish Hotline report, the CyberTipline is in a far better position to take over the search in liaison with the local ISP where the trace fro Ireland appeared to terminate.
Report referral failures, are instances where despite best efforts of the Hotline analysts, the source of the illegal material can not be located. The most common reason for this occurs with spam, where the content of the spam itself is deemed probably illegal under Irish law. However, while any URL reference in the spam may be traced as a derived report, the spam itself remains untraceable. Unfortunately in these cases the report must be closed as a report referral failure.
When the apparent location to which the content has been traced is a jurisdiction in which an INHOPE Hotline exists, the close working relationship between INHOPE member Hotlines, allows for very rapid reaction. The detailed information provided by the Irish Hotline assists the local Hotline to quickly access the content. They can perform their own assessment to ensure that it is also illegal under the laws of their jurisdiction. Assuming it is, that Hotline has the necessary local Law Enforcement and ISP contacts to promptly remove the content from public access and notify police so they may quickly initiate investigation to try to find those responsible for placing the material on the Internet facility in that county. This collective Hotline process has led to many successes reported in INHOPE member countries. In the reporting period there have been particular police successes in Spain, Denmark, Sweden, UK and USA, where Hotline provided information contributed to the achievement of arrests.
