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David Cameron

Cameron likens online paedophile battle to WWII Enigma code breakers

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By John Glenday | Reporter

November 19, 2013 | 2 min read

David Cameron has compared Britain’s modern day spies tasked with combatting the proliferation of child pornography online to the work of Enigma codebreakers during WWII.

The comparison came as the Prime Minister instructed intelligence officials to train resources on breaking up the ‘dark web’, a shadowy region of the internet where paedophiles can share illegal images peer-to-peer under a cloak of anonymity.

During an interview with Jeremy Vine on BBC Radio 2 Cameron said: “There is more we can do, working with the industry, making sure we have got law enforcement which have got all the modern technology tools at their disposal and we go after these people and arrest them and bang the up as well.

“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 and that expertise is going to be brought to bear to go after these revolting people sharing these images on the dark net and making them available more widely.

“The point is that you use technology which is able to get into the dark internet, which is able to decrypt encrypted fields, which is able to find out what is going on and, like all these things, if you put in the resources and the effort if you use the best brains, as it were, the inheritors to the people who decrypted the enigma codes in the second world war.

“If you take those brains and you apply them to the problem of tackling child abuse online you’ll get results.”

The comments follow an announcement by Google and Microsoft that they had toughened their search protocols to dissuade those seeking illegal images.

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