The Hotline > Work of The Hotline
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Work of The Hotline
The Hotline's operational process starts when a submission is received from the public or from another international hotline. The submissions are generated through electronic forms that are available on the www.hotline.ie web site, reports can be submitted completely anonymously. The "Report Online" facility on the website is the preferred method for the hotline to receive reports, alternatively reports can be sent by email, telephone, fax or letter.
When a submission is received, the Hotline will send an acknowledgement where contact information has been given. The preference is to provide this reply by e-mail.
A single submission may contain a complaint about a single item or multiple items encountered on the Internet. A report record is opened in the Hotline database for each item (or related set of items) cited in the submission.
Under the legal system in this country, only a court of law can determine that a criminal offence has been committed and that material (i.e. child pornography) relating to that offence is actually illegal. Therefore, the Hotline can only determine that something is "probably illegal" with reference to the criteria given in the Irish Child Trafficking and Pornography Act (1998). Hence this term is used throughout the report. In the case of other types of content, the criteria defined in relevant Irish laws are applied.
Once the report has been logged, a trained member of the Hotline staff will try to find the material on the Internet. Taking as an example a report of suspected child pornography, if the subject of the report is found, it will be assessed as to whether it is probably illegal under Irish law.
If it is not illegal, no further investigatory action is taken. If the content is considered to be probably illegal under this act, the next step is to determine the location of the material as accurately as possible. The Hotline staff use a suite of tools and their experience to attempt to trace and locate the source, be it a web host server, e-mail server or other Internet based service.
If the reported material is traced to a hosting service or server located in Ireland, or is found to have originated from an Internet user account provided by an Irish ISP, the ISP managing that customer is identified. The Hotline then issues notification to An Garda Síochána and simultaneously a "take down" notice is issued to the ISP, where they are a member of the ISPAI. The ISP is responsible for the timely removal of the specified probably illegal content from their servers to ensure that other Internet users cannot access the material. The decision to initiate a criminal investigation is a matter for An Garda Síochána.
If the material is located on a server in a country where there is an INHOPE hotline, then details based on the original report, including the Hotline's findings, are forwarded to the other hotline for processing.
If the material is located in a country having no INHOPE presence, the Hotline will attempt to have action taken by providing details to An Garda Síochána for transmission to the source country through international law enforcement channels.
Once this notification procedure is completed, the Hotline records the action that was taken in the database and closes the report.
