Operation P-Hunt was launched with the help of a special software provided by the Interpol
A covert cyber surveillance and infiltration operation initiated by the Kerala police with the help of the Interpol in January to crack down on child pornography culminated on Monday with the arrest of 20 persons from different parts of the State, according to top officials.
Additional Director General of Police, South-Zone, Manoj Abraham, who heads the anti-Child Sexual Exploitation Unit (CSE), told media that the police had registered 25 cases in connection with the arrests that unfolded across Kerala early Sunday.
He said the investigators used a special software provided by the Interpol, Argos, to launch the secret operation code-named P-Hunt.
An amalgam of police investigators and resource persons drawn from Kerala's vast pool of IT experts hunched for nearly three months in front of computers at the Government's Cyber Dome facility at the Technopark here to identify persons who obsessively uploaded, swapped and traded child sexual abuse content on instant messaging platforms, restricted chat rooms and internet websites.
Argos, named after the mythical all-seeing guardian of gods of the Greek Pantheon, helped the police scour encrypted messaging groups created to furtively swap child-porn, comb through the hidden matrix of the Darknet, and eavesdrop on secret chatrooms.
It helped law enforcers track the uploading and dissemination of locally generated child abuse content and finally identify the predators individually by zeroing in on their IP addresses.
A Cyberdome investigator said Argos identified child porn images and videos on the web, pinned down their unique digital signature and flagged the prurient images to track their circulation on a cross-section of internet-linked communication platforms.
Argos also helped the police prevent the recirculation of the photos, once they were identified and tagged by investigators.
Mr Abraham said the increasing prevalence of "home-grown" pornographic images, possibly generated by the predators themselves, was worrying.
He said most of the images traded on porn sites were candid snaps of children from water theme parks, schools, beaches, homes and resorts.
Another officer said that Argos had its limitations. For its instance, it could not track peer-to-peer sharing of child porn. He said child predators were increasingly using encryption and data destruction software to shield themselves from the law.
He said social engineering was the linchpin of the policing strategy to tide over such technical hurdles. Enforcers involved in P-Hunt also used deception as a tool to insinuate themselves into groups which shared prurient child content as consumers themselves to expose the identities of the predators. The police would share the intelligence yielded by P-Hunt with their counterparts in other States.
They have also launched a parallel field investigation to identify those who generated the child abuse content. The officers have booked the suspects under the provisions of section 67 of the IT Act. It entails a punishment of up to five years in prison and a fine of ₹10 lakh.
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