GCHQ’s know-how will be used to “go after” paedophiles who exploit hidden parts of the internet to share images of child abuse, the prime minister has said.
David Cameron hailed a crackdown by Microsoft and Google on internet searches for horrific photographs and videos as “real progress against the absolute evil of child abuse”.
However, he said tackling the “dark net” was the next stage in the battle against online paedophilia.
New software is to being introduced that will automatically block 100,000 “unambiguous” search terms leading to illegal content on the two search engines, but child-protection campaigners warned that the reforms failed to tackle the “dark corners of the internet” where paedophiles operated.
Calls for action against searching for illegal content reached boiling point following the trials of child-killers Mark Bridger and Stuart Hazel earlier this year.
Bridger, who murdered five-year-old April Jones, and Hazel, who killed 12-year-old Tia Sharp, both used the internet to search for child abuse images before the killings.
Mr Cameron said: “We learnt from cases like the murder of Tia Sharp and April Jones that people will often start accessing extreme material via a simple search in one of the mainstream engines.”
Speaking after a Downing Street meeting with internet companies, Mr Cameron said: “There has been a lot in the news recently about the techniques, ability, and brilliance of the people involved in the intelligence community and GCHQ and the NSA in America.
“That expertise is going to be brought to bear to go after on these revolting people sharing these images on the dark net and making them available more widely.”
Britain’s National Crime Agency is joining forces with the FBI in the US in a new transatlantic taskforce to target paedophiles who use encrypted networks.
Mr Cameron said: “The next stage is now to go after the dark net, where people are sharing images peer to peer away from the Googles and the Microsofts.
“Again, there is a lot more we can do, working with the industry, making sure we have got law enforcement which have got all the modern technological tools at their disposal and we will go after these people and arrest them and bang them up as well.
“Like all these things, if you put in the resources and the effort, if you use the best brains, the brains that are, as it were, the inheritors to the people that decrypted the Enigma code in the Second World War, if you take those brains and apply it to the problem of tackling child abuse online you will get results.”