Los Angeles - (October 2, 2003) - Adult Sites Against Child Pornography (ASACP) is the organization helping the adult site industry make a difference in the battle against child pornography. Its primary function is to provide a hotline for people to report suspect child pornography sites ( http://www.asacp.org/reportsite.html ). ASACP reviews the reports and sends validated child pornography sites to the FBI, National Center for Missing and Exploited Child, and now to several hotlines in Europe.

Since government investigations can take a long time, people occasionally ask, does reporting child pornography to ASACP really make a difference or are the reports just going into a black hole?  Sometimes it feels like this, even for the staff at ASACP.

For years, ASACP sent reports of validated child pornography sites on terra.es, a free hosted ISP located in Spain, to government agencies and it appeared that nothing was being done. However, when I attended the INHOPE conference in Luxembourg last month, I met Ana Luisa Rotta, the executive of PROTEGELES.com, the Spanish hotline and a member of INHOPE.org. I learned that Ana Luisa had been working directly with TERRA-Spain and with concrete results, said Joan Irvine, executive director - ASACP.

PROTEGELES is one of the hotlines credited with providing leads that helped with the recent breakup of a large child pornography ring in Europe.

Ms. Rotta shared the following information with ASACP:

During 2002, PROTEGELES worked together with TERRA Networks to address the issues concerning the abundance of child pornography content on their servers. As a result, TERRA:

1. Revised the contents of all its personal pages in order to eliminate and report those with illegal content.

2. Is no longer a free site - a symbolic amount of money and a valid email address is required in order to receive the password that will allow a webmaster to create the page.

3. Develop new system that measures the bandwidth in order to detect pages with an excessive amount of viewed images.

4. Does not permit entrance from foreign proxies.

5. Created an internal "hotline" which is linked to PROTEGELES who processes the reports and sends validated child pornography to law enforcement agencies.

6. Hired additional personnel and holds weekly meetings with the company`s directors.

So the next time people wonder if it is worth their time to report suspect child pornography, ASACP wants to assure everyone:

• There is no black hole.
• It is the reports from the public that alert government agencies, ASACP and other hotlines about child pornography.

The PROTEGELES Association, is a not-for-profit organization founded by the Spanish filtering company OPTENET and the Spanish NGO Accin Contra la Pornografa Infantil - ACPI.

Adult Sites Against Child Pornography (ASACP) is the organization helping the adult site industry make a difference in the battle against child pornography.

If you are interested in learning more about ASACP or helping in the fight against child pornography, please view the ASACP site ( www.asacp.org ) or email [email protected]. .

For further information, contact: Joan Irvine, [email protected]