Police target a new venue for child porn

District Attorney Tom Spota does not download Britney Spears songs. But he thinks it's likely his college-age daughter exchanges tunes from Internet file-sharing programs.

So he was incensed when a confidential source told his office that there was child pornography - lots of it - to be found by simply typing Britney's name on such services as Kazaa or Morpheus, Internet sites known for facilitating music-file trading. The Suffok County, New York, district attorney then mounted an investigation, which led to the indictment of 12 people for possessing and promoting child pornography.

"I could have used the full resources of my 150 prosecutors working eight hours a day to prosecute because there is so much of it," says Mr. Spota.

The problem is just now coming to the attention of law-enforcement officials from Wyoming to Long Island. Prosecutors are serving up indictments. Federal agents are actively working on leads and anticipating their own indictments. Earlier this month, the Senate Judiciary Committee heard testimony that the programs represent "a major growth area" for the distribution of child porn. And grass-roots groups are clamoring for more controls, especially a requirement that file-sharing software providers obtain parental permission before minors can download.

Because of the nature of the Internet, it's hard to quantify the problem. But reports of child porn in shared files have jumped up to 400 percent a year recently, according to National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC) in Washington, which acts as a clearinghouse for child-porn tips. And since 2001 the center has received 1,500 reports of child porn in shared files, out of 152,000 leads annually.

"The titles [of shared files, such as 'Britney'] are bad enough, but when you combine that with the natural curiosity of kids, there is a real risk of what they are exposed to," says Robbie Cal-laway, chairman of the NCMEC.

Indeed, investigators say many of the keywords that bring up pornographic files include names such as J Lo and Mandy Moore, or words like "young" and "play." Mr. Callaway, who is also president of the Boys and Girls Clubs of America, recently saw a dramatic demonstration of those cues. An agent typed in "Boys and Girls Clubs" on a file-sharing site. "It had nothing to do with us," Callaway says of the pornography that came up.

Police are preparing to track down offenders. Last week in Connecticut, computer expert Detective Michael Sullivan of Naperville, Ill., taught colleagues from Portland, Ore., South Bend, Ind., Cape Cod, New York City, and elsewhere how to understand the "peer to peer" (P2P) shared files and identify offenders.

The file-sharing networks have attracted pedophiles because of a perception that it's harder to be identified through them. "They think there is far less risk, they leave fewer fingerprints," says Callaway.

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