Reports of Child Sexual Abuse Materials (CSAM) on Tor, Freenet, and i2P

This web page lists academic papers, government reports, and criminal cases involving child sexual exploitation on Tor, Freenet, or i2P.

The computer science academic community has a decades-long history of not citing articles that have documented the harms to children that occur on the so-called “anonynous communication platforms” developed by the Tor Project, Freenet (now called Hyphanet), and the i2P project.

As I pointed out in a 2019 in an invited talk at USENIX SECURITY, the authors of papers at PETS, ACM CCS, IEEE Security & Privacy, and ISOC NDSS do note cite these harms when writing papers on these networks, particularly Tor Project systems. The standard line is to say that the Tor Project provides protection to journalists, whistleblowers, and dissidents. These papers make a very serious scientific ommission when they do not cite these papers below, which have document these harms. I also stated this fact in a 2022 Report to Congress that I wrote on behalf of the National Institute of Justice. Nurmi et al confirmed the fact in a 2024 paper as well.

On this page, I have collect references to academic papers, government reports, and criminal cases involving child sexual exploitation on Tor, Freenet, or i2P. And I have made it easy to cite in your next paper by creating a bibtex entry for each item on this page.

Please make use of these references in your next academic publication or news article.

Academic Papers
Government Reports
Cases Involving Tor or Freenet

Bibtex file for these entries: csam.bib

Academic Papers

2011

S. Aked. An investigation into darknets and the content available via anonymous peer-to-peer file sharing. 9th Australian Information Security Management Conference, Edith Cowan University, Perth Western Australia. December 2011
Adrian Crenshaw. Darknets and hidden servers: Identifying the true IP/network identity of I2P service hosts. Not a empirical study, stating only ``There is a fair amount of child pornography out on I2P.”

2013

C. Guitton. A review of the available content on Tor hidden services: The case against further development. Computers in Human Behavior, 29(6):2805–2815, 2013.

2014

A. Biryukov, I. Pustogarov, F. Thill, and R. Weinmann. Content and Popularity Analysis of Tor Hidden Services. In Proc. IEEE Intl. Conference on Distributed Computing Systems Workshops (10.1109/ICDCSW.2014.20), pages 188–193, 2014.
M. Spitters, S. Verbruggen, and M. v. Staalduinen. Towards a Comprehensive Insight into the Thematic Organization of the Tor Hidden Services. In 2014 IEEE Joint Intelligence and Security Informatics Conference, pages 220–223, 2014.

2015

G. H. Owenson and N. J. Savage. The Tor Dark Net. Technical report, Centre for International Governance Innovation , September 30 2015.

2016

D. Moore and T. Rid. Cryptopolitik and the Darknet. Survival: Global Politics and Strategy. (10.1080/00396338.2016.1142085), 58(1):7–38, February 2016.
G. Owen and N. Savage. Empirical analysis of Tor Hidden Services. IET Information Security, 10(3):113–118, May 2016.

2017

M. Bernaschi, A. Celestini, S. Guarino, and F. Lombardi. Exploring and Analyzing the Tor Hidden Services Graph. ACM Trans. Web, 11(4), July 2017. ISSN 1559-1131. doi: 10.1145/3008662.
B. N. Levine, M. Liberatore, B. Lynn, and M. Wright. Statistical Detection of Downloaders in Freenet. In Proc. IEEE Intl. Wkshp. on Privacy Engineering, pages 25–32, May 2017.

2018

J. Dalins, C. Wilson, and M. Carman. Criminal motivation on the dark web: A categorisation model for law enforcement. Digital Investigation, 24:62–71, 2018.
G. Owenson, S. Cortes, and A. Lewman. The darknet’s smaller than we thought: The life cycle of Tor Hidden Services. Digital Investigation (10.1016/j.diin.2018.09.005), 27:17–22, 2018.
R. Portnoff. The Dark Net: De-Anonymization, Classification and Analysis. PhD thesis, Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences, University of California at Berkeley, March 2018.

2019

S. He, Y. He, and M. Li. Classification of Illegal Activities on the Dark Web. In Proc. International Conference on Information Science and Systems (10.1145/3322645.3322691), pages 73–78, March 2019.
E. Bursztein, E. Clarke, M. DeLaune, D. M. Elifff, N. Hsu, L. Olson, J. Shehan, M. Thakur, K. Thomas, and T. Bright. Rethinking the Detection of Child Sexual Abuse Imagery on the Internet. In The World Wide Web Conference, pages 2601–2607, May 2019.

2020

B. R. da Cunha, P. MacCarron, J. F. Passold, L. W. dos Santos, K. A. Oliveira, and J. P. Gleeson. Assessing police topological efficiency in a major sting operation on the dark web. Scientific Reports (10.1038/s41598-019-56704-4), 10(1):73, January 2020.
C. M. Steel, E. Newman, S. O’Rourke, and E. Quayle. An integrative review of historical technology and countermeasure usage trends in online child sexual exploitation material offenders. Forensic Science International: Digital Investigation, 33, June 2020.
B. N. Levine, M. Liberatore, B. Lynn, and M. Wright. A Forensically Sound Method of Identifying Downloaders and Uploaders in Freenet. In Proc. ACM Computer and Communications Security, November 2020. doi: 10.1145/3372297.3417876.
E. Jardine, A.M. Lindner, and G. Owenson, The potential harms of the Tor anonymity network cluster disproportionately in free countries, Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A. 117 (50) 31716-31721, (2020).

2022

Figueras-Martín, E., Magán-Carrión, R. & Boubeta-Puig, J. Drawing the web structure and content analysis beyond the Tor darknet: Freenet as a case of study. J. Inf. Secur. Appl. 68, 103229. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jisa.2022.103229 (2022).

2023

Ball, M., Broadhurst, R. (2023). Hidden Platforms for Cybercrime: Experiences Investigating Darknet Services. In: Díaz-Fernández, A.M., Del-Real, C., Molnar, L. (eds) Fieldwork Experiences in Criminology and Security Studies. Springer, Cham.

2024

Nurmi, J., Paju, A., Brumley, B. B., Insoll, T., Ovaska, A. K., Soloveva, V., Vaaranen-Valkonen, N., Aaltonen, M., & Arroyo, D. (2024). Investigating child sexual abuse material availability, searches, and users on the anonymous Tor network for a public health intervention strategy. Scientific Reports, 14(1), Article 7849.
Divakarmurthy P, Requião da Cunha B, Passold JF, Oliveira M, Menezes R. Unravelling the dynamics of child sexual exploitation material circulation on the Dark Web. PLoS One. 2024 Jul 24;19(7):e0306516. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0306516. PMID: 39046976; PMCID: PMC11268584.

Government Reports

U.S. Dept. of Justice. The National Strategy for Child Exploitation Prevention and Interdiction: A Report to Congress, August 2010.
U.S. Dept. of Justice. The National Strategy for Child Exploitation Prevention and Interdiction: A Report to Congress, April 2016.
European Union Agency for Law Enforcement Cooperation. Internet Organised Crime Threat Assessment Technical Report (10.2813/858843), Europol, 2018.
Broadhurst, Roderic and Ball, Matthew, Tor’s underworld, ‘onion services’ and child sex abuse material: Submission to the Australian Parliamentary Joint Committee on Law Enforcement inquiry into ‘Law enforcement capabilities in relation to child exploitation’ (September 21, 2021).
Brian Levine, Report to Congress: Increasing the Efficacy of Investigations of Online Child Sexual Exploitation. May 2022. On behalf of the National Institute of Justice.
U.S. Department of Justice. National Strategy for Child Exploitation Prevention and Interdiction 2023

Cases of Child Sexual Exploitation Involving Tor or Freenet

Major Cases

Tor Hidden Services (two): Operation Round Table [more info] (2014). The website shared webcam-captured videos of mostly juvenile boys falsely enticed by the operators of the site to produce sexually explicit material.
- Johnson (operator)
- Devor, Foster, Gaw, Gonzalez-Castillo, Jabbar, Jamieson, Korpal, Saine, Schwab, Zdon, Naim,Thong, Eales.
Tor Hidden Service: PedoBook, PedoBoard, and TB2 (2015)
- Cottom (operator)
- Defoggi, Flanary, Cameron, Austin, MacMillan, Peer, Welch, Huyck, Tidwell, Pierce, Spencer, Diberardino, Moore, Reibert, Smith, Pitman, Sebes.
Tor Hidden Service: Playpen (2017)
- More than 150,000 users who actively traded in CSAM.
- 548 international arrests, with 296 sexually abused children identified or rescued; 25 producers of child pornography prosecuted; 51 hands-on abusers prosecuted
- Chase, Fluckiger, Browning
Tor Hidden Service: The Giftbox Exchange (2019)
- Over 72,000 registered users and 56,000 posts.
- Falte (sexual abuse of a toddler-aged minor), Faulkner (sexual abuse of a toddler-aged minor), Leslie (sexual abuse and production of child pornography involving multiple children, including an infant and a toddler), Bedusek (child exploitation enterprise); .
Tor Hidden Service: Welcome to Video (2019)
- “Rescue of at least 23 minor victims residing in the United States, Spain and the United Kingdom, who were being actively abused by the users of the site.”
- Son (convicted in South Korea) and an “additional 337 site users residing in Alabama, Arkansas, California, Connecticut, Florida, Georgia, Kansas, Louisiana, Maryland, Massachusetts, Nebraska, New Jersey, New York, North Carolina, Ohio, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, South Carolina, Texas, Utah, Virginia, Washington State and Washington, D.C. as well as the United Kingdom, South Korea, Germany, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, the Czech Republic, Canada, Ireland, Spain, Brazil and Australia have been arrested and charged.”
- Additional defendants charged and convicted in the District of Columbia include Stengel, Wunderlich, Wagner, Miller, DeJournett, LaPrath, and Ezeagbor.
Tor Hidden Service: Elysium 89,000 members. “The suspected ringleader, a 39-year-old man, was arrested in the state of Hesse. The forum was also used to make appointments to abuse children. Police seized the website’s server. They found that toddlers were among the children sexually abused, reports say.”
Tor Hidden Service: Unnamed
- “30,000 members, who were required to share illicit child pornography images in order to gain and keep membership, including numerous child pornography producers who were actively abusing children, according to the government’s memorandum.”
- Delalio, Gmoser, Davis, Martin, Hoff

Individual Cases