Tonga unfairly vilified in child porn report, says domain admin [1]
Wednesday, May 9, 2018 - 12:39. Updated on Monday, May 28, 2018 - 10:54.
By Mary Lyn Fonua and Eleanor Gee
Meter, an organisation fighting child pornography on the internet has agreed to work closely with Tonga's domain registry, Tonic, after the domain administrator asserted that Tonga was unfairly vilified in the '2017 Meter Report on Pedophilia and Child Pornography' released in March.
The Meter report revealed that pedophiles from all over the world have secretly shared thousands of child pornography files for years by freely exploiting a file-sharing website registered under Tonga's national domain name .TO.
The anti child porn organisation founded by a Catholic priest Don Fortunato Di Noto, and supported by the World Observatory against Pedophilia, reported that it had monitored over 10,000 links of child porn located on .TO websites during 2017 – mostly temporary links found on a single cloud storage site called dropfile.to.
In a press release on March 22 Father Di Noto, based in Sicily, declared Tonga on top of a global "podium of shame". He stated of 37 nations involved in 2017: "The unenviable record for the number of reported sites belongs to Tonga."
Meter, a non-profit organisation, said it has developed sophisticated software to track down and monitor sexual abuses on children on the internet.
The criminal file-sharing by pedophiles operates under the radar of the domain name administrators - unless it is reported to them.
But Matangi Tonga discovered that Tonga was not notified of the disturbing findings during Meter's on going data analysis on dropfile.to between 2015-17.
Dropfile.to appeared to be a regular file-sharing site similar to dropbox. The illicit child pornography sharing on the website was hard to detect because files could be downloaded only by people to whom the link had been supplied. When such links are shared by criminals to their pedophile clients anonymously through "time-based" platforms like dropfile.to, the material vanishes from the sharing site within 24 hours, making it hard for authorities to detect and trace illicit activity.
Shamed
Meter aims to fight child pornography on the internet calling it "A tremendous tragedy under the eyes of everyone." Where young innocents suffer "dramatic and dreadful violence perpetrated by adults."
Fr. Di Noto stated that cyber-pedophiles and infantophiles "camouflaged in society" worldwide, secretly share links to photos and videos recording real sexual violence against infants 0-2 years, children 3-7 years and prepubescent adolescents 8-12 years old.
"But children are not actors, there is no fiction in this horror movie. Children are actually abused, the violence is absolutely real and the damage they suffer can not be removed."
"Meter has analysed 10,096 links referable to the domain extension .to," he said.
Meter sent their '2017 Meter Report on Pedophilia and Child Pornography' to Matangi Tonga and other news media stating, "This island in the Pacific, this Kingdom has totalized 10,096 addresses. Russia follows with 1,150 and Saint Pierre et Miquelon with 1,091. Libya is leading for Africa, with 140 reports, while Hong Kong leads Asia with 7 reports."
Meter gathered spectacular figures from the offending dropfile.to for their annual report.
"When we talk about the 'Podium' of shame we are not accusing citizens of Tonga to be child pornographers," Fr. Di Noto later admitted on April 26.
"Although the domain extension does geographically belong to Tonga, in most cases the platforms and sites monitored by Meter with the .TO extension are provided by servers located in America and/or Europe." He said only three of those links were geographically located in the whole of Oceania.
Zero tolerance
Matangi Tonga forwarded the Meter report to Tonic, who manage the top-level domain for the Kingdom of Tonga, for comment on April 16.
It was the first time that Tonic had seen the report.
Eric Guillichsen, the country code administrator for the .TO domain (ccTLD), told Matangi Tonga, "We have zero tolerance for the despicable practice of Child Pornography," he said. “Obviously, we don't want such sites in the .TO domain. No registries do.”
"These allegations are very serious and we would like to act immediately."
Questioned methodology
Eric Lyons, Tonics Sales and Support Manager, based the United States, also responded to Matangi Tonga, saying: "I am as disturbed and shocked as you are by this report. We actively remove domains that are associated with child pornography whenever reported. Yet, we have never been contacted even once by this 'Meter' organization, nor have we ever heard about them from government or any other source. I find it alarming that an organization that purports to be a legitimate force against child pornography has never contacted our registry nor the Tongan government about their report. The numbers just don't make much sense to us; if the numbers were accurate I think we would have heard from the US FBI at the very least!"
"We have no idea of their methodology for finding these links, and whether they are valid."
Likewise, Guillichsen was annoyed by the failure of the observatory to report the criminal activity to Tonga's national domain registry, which has the power to revoke domain names. He believed that the report "is rather unfair and needlessly vilifies the Kingdom...How does shaming a country without providing evidence help alleviate the problem in any way?" he asked.
"One surprising aspect of this recent report is that we do not receive a significant number of complaints about CP." He said the entire .TO domain is a tiny fraction of names compared to giants like .COM but the report made it seem as though Tonga hosts more child pornography than any other domain.
"It is unclear to me why a credible organization would first contact journalists, rather than the web hosting sites, domain name registries, and law enforcement authorities who are in a position to act against such exploitive sites," Guillichsen said. He demanded that Meter "provide details of these allegations so that we can deal with the issue if there is one."
Evidence
Guillchsen said revoking a domain name was a "drastic step".
"We are of course intolerant of the use of .TO in any way connected with criminal activity as serious as CP ... and in a handful of prior cases we have swiftly revoked .TO domain registrations for this specific reason. But to take an action as drastic as revoking a domain name unilaterally without a court order, we need some sort of evidence beyond an unsupported allegation."
"From what we can ascertain, the dropfile.to site appears to be nothing more sinister than a cloud storage site, similar to the well-known dropbox.com," he said after reading the Meter report sent to him by Matangi Tonga.
"We also do not yet understand how he [Meter] discovered the existence of the alleged links to CP on this site, as we have looked at the site and it appears to be a generic security-aware cloud storage site, similar in functionality to many such "file lockers".
The Tonga Police Commissioner's Office also confirmed to Matangi Tonga this week that they had not seen or heard of the Meter report.
Italian police
When Matangi Tonga asked Meter to explain their figures, Fr. Di Noto admitted that he did not alert Tonga's registry, Tonic, to the child pornography file sharing links the observatory had continually monitored over the years.
"We didn't contact Tonic and FBI because according to our protocol we send our reports to the Italian Postal Police, which files them to the public prosecutor’s office of Catania (in Sicily) and, after a verification of the presence of illicit acts, it puts the sites on the national black list so that they are blocked in Italy,” he told Matangi Tonga on April 24.
Father Di Noto is a member of the scientific committee of the Italian Postal and Communications Police.
"Our collaboration with the police is important not just to obscure CP material but also to find the responsibles of these acts," Fr. Di Noto said.
He did not divulge how many victims had been identified by the Italian police or how many pedophiles had been caught through Meter's on going monitoring of dropfile.to.
Then on April 26 Fr. Di Noto agreed to release the evidence, and collaborate with Tonic to take down the offending site, but on condition that they needed to know the personal data and the role within the company of the workers that will be analysing and visualizing such links.
He sent Tonic nine CP links with the .TO domain, revealing two platforms including dropfile.to being used, telling Tonic: "These links are uploaded on these sharing platforms for determined time lapses, they will be available for just a few more hours; this means that investigations have to be immediate."
Matangi Tonga did not have access to any of the child pornography links.
Revoked domain name
Guillichsen, after investigating the links released by Meter, told us on April 27 that it appeared that the dropfile.to site, which may have legitimate uses, does also host child pornography. "It is still not clear to us how this use was discovered by Meter."
Tonic immediately revoked the domain name of dropfile.to.
"Due to the large number of CP-related links current on this site, I infer that it has the distribution of CP as one of its primary activities. Accordingly the domain name dropfile.to has been revoked and will no longer be reachable once local DNS caches for this name expire."
Meanwhile, dropfile.to registrant Tomáš Mazal in Slovakia protested the revocation, claiming that Meter did not report the CP links to them.
Tonic also warned a second website wo.to registered to a Korean internet service provider to remove an offending user forum under a subdomain - or its domain name will be revoked.
Working partnership
Tonic made a commitment to collaborate with Meter to fight child pornography.
Fr. Di Noto agreed that in future, CP links discovered by Meter on the .TO domain will be reported to Tonic straight away for action.
Guillichsen urged Meter to encourage prosecutions for the illegal activity they discovered.
"I note that dropfile.to used Cloudflare as their DNS provider, this is common for various reasons. Were I in your position, I would ask Cloudflare for the IP addresses of the people uploading and accessing the large list of dropfile.to links you collected. These can then be used to identify the users for prosecution. If Cloudflare requires a court order to release this information, perhaps your contacts at the Italian Postal Police would be able to arrange this with the help of the FBI. The criminals could then be identified and prosecuted," he said.
In Tonga, offensive websites can be reported to the service provider, Digicel or TCC. Illegal websites should be reported to Tonga Police and if validated, the offending website is blocked from Tonga by MEIDECC.
Pedophilia, or paedophilia, is a psychiatric disorder.
Child pornography is exploding worldwide, according to the Meter report. In 2017 "pictures almost doubled, videos quintupled: victims are 0-12 years old." Meter counted over 985,006 child pornography videos – that's nearly a million - last year alone, across a multitude of sites they are monitoring on the internet.
"We can’t permit for the children to become waste and erotic objects for personal and social enjoyment. We have to make clear once and for all that pedophilia and child pornography are crimes!... Crimes against humanity," said Fr. Di Noto.