Q: A former private detective from Monona was charged Tuesday with 13 counts of possessing child pornography after using an Internet peer-to-peer network to download the pornography. State agents say they routinely monitor peer-to-peer networks looking for downloads of child pornography. What exactly is a peer-to-peer network?
A: It’s a network of computer users who agree to download the same software so that they can communicate efficiently and directly with a community of people with similar interests, said Dave Matthews, deputy administrator of the state Division of Criminal Investigation.
When users or participants want to share files, they put them in a folder visible and accessible to others in the network, Matthews said.
One early example was Napster, which is now an online music store but started as a free peer-to-peer music sharing service. (It ran into copyright issues.)
The concept has many legitimate business and personal uses but also is used by people to share child pornography, Matthews said. It would be unusual for a computer user to stumble across child pornography files unwittingly, he said.
“You might think that people would hide these files by naming them something else, but the whole peer-to-peer environment is created and served for one purpose – to share files of a common interest,” Matthews said. “We’ve observed that the vast majority of child pornography files shared in the peer-to-peer networks have been named in an extremely explicit fashion to leave no question about what is being shared.”
Matthews said it’s important to note that participating in a network doesn’t give other people in the network access to other parts of your computer, just the folder designed for sharing.
“Also, downloading the software on your computer doesn’t give people the ability to reach out and put stuff on your computer,” he said. “You get files on your computer only when you download them.”
