01x03 - Exploit

[bunniefuu]

narrator: The Web transforms us. We become data... code... uploading our very selves... to a place we call the cloud. But this cloud is grounded in hardware, a chaos of code. But with the right tools, you can find the signal in the noise.

[water running]

David: Nobody ever suspected anything. I was a newspaper editor, I coached, I was volunteering my time. I had really good friends, and I had a really good family. That's probably one of the reasons it came as such a shock to people when I was arrested. I've had to spend my whole life lying and explaining and being worried about, "Is someone going to figure this out?"

I've tried to control myself the best I could.

I've tried to lead the best life that I possibly could. I know that my life would've been different, not wonderful, but at least better, if I'd never gone on the Internet.

[rooster crows]

narrator: A girl on the other side of the world drawn into the darkest corner of the Internet.

Here, you can find child p*rn, dr*gs, g*ns, fake passports, counterfeit money.

It's a place where everyone is anonymous and invisible to law enforcement.

Welcome to the Dark Web.

You might be tempted to see it for yourself.

And what's the harm?

What's one more click?

♪♪

But if you show your body, 3,000, 5,000.

In one show, in 30 minutes, it's easy.

narrator: Child cybersex.

It's an epidemic on the island of Cebu.

Jonna Nunez, an outreach worker for the NGO FORGE is fighting it door-to-door.

Nunez: Even the little boy, even the little girl, they know already what is cyber p*rn.

It's a show-show to remove your clothes, to show your body to the computer, to the Internet.

narrator: Internet access is growing faster in the Philippines than almost anywhere in the world, and 80% of it is broadband.

On the other end of these cables are servers, some hidden in the Dark Web.

You need a special browser to access this part of the Internet, one that conceals your computer's IP address.

The first of these browsers was Tor, the Onion Router, named for its layers of encryption.

Virgin: Tor and the Dark Web was originally a project started by the Navy Research Lab here in the United States to protect the communications of U.S. government personnel.

narrator: Greg Virgin spent eight years working for the NSA and the Department of Defense.

Later, with his own cyber security company, he helped make Tor a useful tool for political dissidents abroad, giving them a safe way to communicate without fear of reprisal.

So, Tor project has servers all over the world, and those servers accept connections from users like our guy here, and then bounces that signal around.

All of these connections are encrypted, so no one can piece together who this person is and what this person is doing.

narrator: The government made Tor freely available, and it was soon put to more sinister use.

The Dark Web was born.

Every day, an estimated 2.5 million people use Tor to visit the Dark Web.

The amount of child p*rn here is staggering... over 100 million sexually explicit images of children, not to mention live streaming on webcams.

Virgin: So, I've just opened up the Tor browser, and now it's possible for us to anonymously browse the Dark Net.

narrator: To avoid breaking the law himself, Greg looks only at text, not images.

This is a site that's live right now.

You can see that there's a really disturbing trend toward younger and younger children that the Dark Web fosters, some ages as young as infants.

There's even a term called "pedo mom" for mothers who are trading their children around in the community.

There have been a number of sites dedicated to child t*rture, conversations about exactly how to t*rture a child.

narrator: Greg's goal is to understand how child p*rn is traded on the Dark Web so that law enforcement can stay a step ahead.

Virgin: Just to gain access to these sites, you have to trade in original child abuse content.

They are getting you to break the law to make sure you're not law enforcement, and weeding out people who aren't authentic pedophiles.

It's a community of relentless users that's becoming more and more difficult for law enforcement, for analysts to break into.

Are you holding Winnie?

I am holding...

Or G.I. Joe?

No, I'm holding Winnie.

So sweet.

Yeah, who knew?

Yeah, well.

That's a sweet picture.

Yeah.

He has one little finger sticking out there.

[chuckles]

David: I think I started having feelings of sexual attraction toward children, probably when I was about 15 or 16.

I can't explain the attraction, all I can tell you is I wish to God I didn't have it.

I watched child p*rn and searched for child p*rn every night.

I looked at pictures of children that were nude, and yes, I did look at pictures and films of children in sexual acts with other children and with adults.

narrator: David says he has never had physical contact or webcam sex with a child.

He was arrested in 2012 for possessing child p*rn and for buying it on the Internet.

The feelings are overpowering.

It just... it runs through your entire body.

The power of that addiction trumps everything.

The only two things that would stop me from looking at child p*rn was being arrested or dying.

Renaud: I'm interested in getting into these individual's minds, this very secret place of being aroused by a situation like that.

narrator: At a high-security psychiatric hospital in Montreal is a darkroom known as La Cave... The Vault.

Here, Patrice Renaud and his team of psychologists probe the innermost thoughts of convicted sex offenders.

[device beeps]

Renaud: We start by installing the EEG cap.

We then proceed with the stereoscopic glasses in which we have a built-in eye-tracking device.

We then ask the subject to install himself the penile gauge, which gives us an idea of the tumescence, that is the level of erection that the guy present at every moment during the procedure.

We then present a series of animations and visual immersion that brings the individual back to a state and the place that brought them to offend.

man: Children are playing in a nearby pool, and you notice a little girl about 8 to 10 years old who is walking away from the pool toward you.

You are thinking about how much you would like to touch her.

narrator: While the subject is immersed in this virtual scene of the crime, the team monitors his physiological responses.

If he tries to suppress his erection by looking away, the eye-tracking catches him.

The results are used to determine how dangerous the offender is and whether he needs to be incarcerated.

Renaud: With the guy that we're working with at the moment, we recreated a scene in which he was molesting a 6-year-old girl in his apartment and k*lling her afterward, sadly.

So, we want to understand what motive the individual had at the moment.

Is the k*lling also a sexual part of the crime?

So, it becomes a way to go even deeper in the psyche of the individual as it comes to his sexual preferences.

narrator: An estimated 1% of men are pedophiles, meaning that their dominant sexual attraction is to prepubescent children, even if they never act on it.

Many psychologists see pedophilia as a deep-rooted preference that can't be changed, only managed.

♪♪

narrator: An undercover investigator with the Children's Legal Bureau, a Filipino NGO, is meeting with his informant.

The couple is allegedly abusing their own children on webcam for foreign customers.

These are photos from the case file.

The older daughter, age 12, and the younger one, age 10.

woman: Okay.

[girl sniffles]

[children shouting playfully]

[sighs]

My name is Sweetie.

I'm 10 years old.

I live in the Philippines.

Every day, I have to sit in front of the webcam and talk to men.

They play with themselves.

They want me play with myself.

But what they don't know...

I'm not real.

I'm a computer model.

narrator: "Sweetie" was the bait in a global sting operation conducted by the Dutch NGO, Terre des Hommes, in 2013.

Sweetie: As soon as I go online, they come to me.

10... 100 every hour.

So many.

narrator: Sweetie fooled more men than anyone could've imagined.

Over a 10-week period, more than 20,000 guys offered to pay her for webcam sex.

1,000 of them gave up personal information from 71 countries.

If you think that's a lot of customers, consider this...

Sweetie was only introduced in 19 chatrooms, but the FBI estimates that there are over 40,000 chatrooms where, at any given moment, 3/4 of a million people are looking for child p*rn.

The original Sweetie was controlled by four researchers in an Amsterdam warehouse.

Sweetie 2.0 will be able to generate her own dialogue and carry on thousands of conversations at the same time, but only if she can gain access to the heavily encrypted sites where child p*rn is traded.

Sweetie may have evolved, but the Dark Web is evolving faster.

Virgin: At some point, doing the investigations is going to become too hard.

I don't feel that there's a way around the encryption, and I do honestly feel that it's only a matter of time before we have very private, very inaccessible sites that perform very well and give this particular class of consumer everything that they need.

I would say it's moving twice as fast as some of the trends in cyber security.

I think we've only got a couple more years.

narrator: As a sting operation, Sweetie was not entirely successful.

Europol warned that some judges would consider it entrapment.

Of those 20,000 men who took the bait, only 6 have been convicted.

But there's no doubt that Sweetie helped raise awareness about child cybersex.

[keyboard clacking]

David: Shortly after my arrest...

Woman: "To me, since my arrest..."

Okay.

And my phone number.

Woman: Oh, and your phone number.

David: I was released on the conditions that I couldn't use the Internet or have a computer in my home, and that I couldn't go anywhere where children would congregate, like parks or recreation centers, swimming pools.

When I was looking at children on the Internet,

I hated myself for doing it.

I knew it was wrong.

I knew the children in child p*rn had been abused, and they suffered horrible consequences for the rest of their lives.

Sometimes I would just stare at these kids and wonder like, you know, where are they now, and what horrible things they've gone through in their life.

You think about it sort of in the abstract, but it doesn't stop you from doing what you're doing.

narrator: Psychologists call this "dissociation"... a screen allows you to detach your real self from your online behavior and create an alternative reality where social norms no longer apply.

David: I'm not defending looking at child p*rn, but if people weren't producing it, we wouldn't be looking at it.

narrator: Producers of child p*rn in the Philippines are being targeted.

Every so often, another raid makes the news.

Children watch the police take their parents away in handcuffs.

The children are relocated to a government shelter where they live until their parents serve out prison terms.

But fighting child cybersex at the source is like fighting the heroin trade by spraying poppy fields.

If global demand is strong enough, there will always be people eager to meet it, especially in poor countries like the Philippines.

♪♪

For over two years, the Children's Legal Bureau has been trying to get the local police to arrest the couple allegedly pimping their own children.

The investigators have built an impressive case, including a floor plan of the house... everything they need for a search warrant.

But every time they schedule a case conference, the police postpone.

You'd think the community would be up in arms.

Nunez: The community, they already know the operation of this family, but some of the neighbors depend on this family because they can easy borrow money from them, so it's better to keep silence and do nothing.

Virgin: What we're seeing right now on the Dark Web is market creation.

So, in much the same way there were a bunch of failed social media site attempts before Facebook, what we see in the Dark Web is sites, forums that are coming and going in a community of relentless users who are really working to build what hopefully I'm wrong about, is this more perfect way of sharing child p*rn.

If 1% of the general population really has these cravings, think about the amount of currently unmet demands these networks could be meeting.

It's a very dangerous time.

Renaud: It's a bit like an arms race, in a sense, because with the advent of Internet and virtual reality, p*rn evolves, and child p*rn will evolve, and we try to be always a step ahead.

narrator: Professor Renaud and his team are exploring the use of virtual reality to help pedophiles control their impulses.

Even if something bad happens here, let's say he has a full-on erection, there is absolutely no children... it's virtual.

narrator: Which raises an intriguing question.

What if child avatars like Sweetie could be used as virtual partners for pedophiles... a safe way to satisfy their urges?

Maybe fewer real children would be harmed.

It's a risky proposition.

For some men, it might have the opposite effect.

Renaud: Using virtual reality to experience sexuality is a very delicate matter since some fantasies may be lived very intensely and can leave traits in the brain.

So where is the boundary? Where's the limits?

What can we really allow an individual to do?

narrator: There's no cure, there's no crackdown that will delete child p*rn from our world.

We're left to our own devices and our ability to learn that every click has consequences.

David: I don't think anybody can explain their attractions.

I think it's the luck of the draw.

We can't control what we are.

What we can control is what we do.

narrator: Meanwhile, child cybersex continues to spread, especially in the developing world.

Virgin: If we can address the poverty, if we can address the vulnerability, that is really what we should be doing regardless of what's happening online.

Nunez: We are fighting this battle for the future of our children.

♪♪