Porn sites using Tonga address [1]
Saturday, November 30, 2002 - 09:11. Updated on Friday, February 19, 2016 - 18:39.
From Matangi Tonga Magazine Vol. 17, no. 3, November 2002.
The international fight against child pornography on the internet has come to Tonga, after it was revealed that six child pornography domains on the Internet are registered to a Nuku‘alofa address.
At the end of July, Mike Echols, the Executive Director of Better A. Millstone, Inc. California, (BAM) an organisation that was formed in 1996 to “relentlessly chase child porn domains off the internet”, sought the help of the Tonga police to try and locate and prosecute the owner of the web-sites.
“These illegal web domains are endangering children all over the world,” said Mr Echols. He said the domains were registered to, “Ricky Wallin, P O Box 2930, Tongatapu, Tonga; Tel. (676) 23891”, although the domains were physically located on servers in other countries, one in Charlotte, North Carolina, USA, and others in St. Petersburg, Russia.
Fisheries
Matangi Tonga checked the contact and found it was a fax number for the Ministry of Fisheries, which does not employ anyone called Ricky Wallin. The Secretary of Fisheries, Hon. ‘Akauola, was not aware the number was being used by the owner of a porn site.
Meanwhile, we found that the post office box number belongs to a Nuku‘alofa family, who had never heard of Ricky Wallin or his illegal business “Who?” “What!” they asked.
The Tonga Communications Corporation Kalianet staff, and the Police, also checked out the contacts and came to the same conclusion that we did, that anyone can register a website with a fictitious name and a fictitious address. A TCC technician said that the Internet Service Providers did not check if the applicants for sites were genuine.
Shut down
On October 26, Mike Echols said that BAM had made big progress, and shut down 3,500 child porn domains on US servers. They had forged strong links with major credit card companies and they had closed the merchant accounts used by porn sites, and shut down the banks processing the credit cards (all in Eastern Europe). They were also providing law enforcement with the names of the card holders who were making purchases on the sites.
Mike said that the final plan to effectively eradicate all child porn on the Internet was to shut down all Internet Host Servers, that were repeatedly found to be hosting child pornography on the Internet.
“To accomplish this will require our convincing all three geographically responsible server number allocating organisations in the world to adopt such a policy,” he said.
The US National Centre for Missing and Exploited Children has linked child pornography to the sexual molestation of children. “Simply stated, child pornography is the visual depiction – whether in photographs or films – of children being sexually assaulted.” Its policy statement declares that, “Child pornography is a criminal instrument used by molesters and pedophiles …statistics reveal that at least 80 per cent of purchasers of child pornography are active abusers…and recent studies show a steady and direct correlation between child pornography and child sexual molestation…there is a significant likelihood that a person in possession of child pornography will also be involved in sexually abusing children… and thereby perpetuating their predatory lifestyle.”