Original subtitles

[narrator] The Web transforms us.

We become data...

code...

uploading our very selves...

...to a place we call the cloud.

But this cloud is grounded in hardware,

a chaos of code.

But with the right tools,

you can find the signal in the noise.

[water running]

[David] Nobody ever suspected anything.

I was a newspaper editor,

I coached, I was volunteering my time.

I had really good friends,

and I had a really good family.

That's probably one of the reasons

it came as such a shock to people when I was arrested.

I've had to spend my whole life

lying and explaining and being worried about,

"Is someone going to figure this out?"

I've tried to control myself the best I could.

I've tried to lead the best life that I possibly could.

I know that my life would've been different,

not wonderful, but at least better,

if I'd never gone on the Internet.

[rooster crows]

[narrator] A girl on the other side of the world

drawn into the darkest corner of the Internet.

Here, you can find child porn, drugs, guns,

fake passports, counterfeit money.

It's a place where everyone is anonymous

and invisible to law enforcement.

Welcome to the Dark Web.

You might be tempted to see it for yourself.

And what's the harm?

What's one more click?

♪♪

But if you show your body, 3,000, 5,000.

In one show, in 30 minutes,

it's easy.

[narrator] Child cybersex.

It's an epidemic on the island of Cebu.

Jonna Nunez,

an outreach worker for the NGO FORGE

is fighting it door-to-door.

[Nunez] Even the little boy, even the little girl,

they know already

what is cyber pornography.

It's a show-show

to remove your clothes,

to show your body to the computer,

to the Internet.

[narrator] Internet access

is growing faster in the Philippines

than almost anywhere in the world,

and 80% of it is broadband.

On the other end of these cables are servers,

some hidden in the Dark Web.

You need a special browser

to access this part of the Internet,

one that conceals your computer's IP address.

The first of these browsers was Tor, the Onion Router,

named for its layers of encryption.

[Virgin] Tor and the Dark Web was originally a project

started by the Navy Research Lab

here in the United States

to protect the communications

of U.S. government personnel.

[narrator] Greg Virgin spent eight years

working for the NSA and the Department of Defense.

Later, with his own cyber security company,

he helped make Tor a useful tool

for political dissidents abroad,

giving them a safe way to communicate

without fear of reprisal.

So, Tor project has servers

all over the world,

and those servers accept connections

from users like our guy here,

and then bounces that signal around.

All of these connections are encrypted,

so no one can piece together who this person is

and what this person is doing.

[narrator] The government made Tor freely available,

and it was soon put to more sinister use.

The Dark Web was born.

Every day, an estimated 2.5 million people

use Tor to visit the Dark Web.

The amount of child porn here is staggering...

over 100 million sexually explicit images of children,

not to mention live streaming on webcams.

[Virgin] So, I've just opened up the Tor browser,

and now it's possible for us

to anonymously browse the Dark Net.

[narrator] To avoid breaking the law himself,

Greg looks only at text, not images.

This is a site that's live right now.

You can see that there's a really disturbing trend

toward younger and younger children

that the Dark Web fosters,

some ages as young as infants.

There's even a term called "pedo mom"

for mothers who are trading their children around

in the community.

There have been a number of sites

dedicated to child torture,

conversations about

exactly how to torture a child.

[narrator] Greg's goal is to understand

how child porn is traded on the Dark Web

so that law enforcement can stay a step ahead.

[Virgin] Just to gain access to these sites,

you have to trade in original child abuse content.

They are getting you to break the law

to make sure you're not law enforcement,

and weeding out people

who aren't authentic pedophiles.

It's a community of relentless users

that's becoming more and more difficult for law enforcement,

for analysts to break into.

Are you holding Winnie?

- I am holding... - Or G.I. Joe?

No, I'm holding Winnie.

So sweet.

Yeah, who knew?

Yeah, well.

That's a sweet picture.

Yeah.

He has one little finger sticking out there.

[chuckles]

[David] I think I started having

feelings of sexual attraction toward children,

probably when I was about 15 or 16.

I can't explain the attraction,

all I can tell you is I wish to God I didn't have it.

I watched child pornography

and searched for child pornography every night.

I looked at pictures of children that were nude,

and yes, I did look at pictures

and films of children in sexual acts

with other children and with adults.

[narrator] David says he has never had physical contact

or webcam sex with a child.

He was arrested in 2012 for possessing child pornography

and for buying it on the Internet.

The feelings are overpowering.

It just... it runs through your entire body.

The power of that addiction trumps everything.

The only two things that would stop me

from looking at child pornography

was being arrested or dying.

[Renaud] I'm interested in getting

into these individual's minds,

this very secret place

of being aroused by a situation like that.

[narrator] At a high-security

psychiatric hospital in Montreal

is a darkroom known as La Cave... The Vault.

Here, Patrice Renaud and his team of psychologists

probe the innermost thoughts of convicted sex offenders.

[device beeps]

[Renaud] We start by installing the EEG cap.

We then proceed with the stereoscopic glasses

in which we have a built-in eye-tracking device.

We then ask the subject

to install himself the penile gauge,

which gives us an idea of the tumescence,

that is the level of erection that the guy present

at every moment during the procedure.

We then present

a series of animations and visual immersion

that brings the individual back to a state

and the place that brought them to offend.

[man] Children are playing in a nearby pool,

and you notice a little girl about 8 to 10 years old

who is walking away from the pool toward you.

You are thinking about how much you would like to touch her.

[narrator] While the subject is immersed

in this virtual scene of the crime,

the team monitors his physiological responses.

If he tries to suppress his erection by looking away,

the eye-tracking catches him.

The results are used to determine

how dangerous the offender is

and whether he needs to be incarcerated.

[Renaud] With the guy

that we're working with at the moment,

we recreated a scene

in which he was molesting

a 6-year-old girl in his apartment

and killing her afterward, sadly.

So, we want to understand

what motive the individual had at the moment.

Is the killing

also a sexual part of the crime?

So, it becomes a way

to go even deeper in the psyche of the individual

as it comes to his sexual preferences.

[narrator] An estimated 1% of men are pedophiles,

meaning that their dominant sexual attraction

is to prepubescent children,

even if they never act on it.

Many psychologists see pedophilia

as a deep-rooted preference

that can't be changed, only managed.

♪♪

[narrator] An undercover investigator

with the Children's Legal Bureau,

a Filipino NGO, is meeting with his informant.

The couple is allegedly

abusing their own children on webcam

for foreign customers.

These are photos from the case file.

The older daughter, age 12,

and the younger one, age 10.

[woman] Okay.

[girl sniffles]

[children shouting playfully]

[sighs]

My name is Sweetie.

I'm 10 years old.

I live in the Philippines.

Every day, I have to sit in front of the webcam

and talk to men.

They play with themselves.

They want me play with myself.

But what they don't know...

I'm not real.

I'm a computer model.

[narrator] "Sweetie" was the bait

in a global sting operation

conducted by the Dutch NGO, Terre des Hommes, in 2013.

[Sweetie] As soon as I go online,

they come to me.

10... 100 every hour.

So many.

[narrator] Sweetie fooled more men

than anyone could've imagined.

Over a 10-week period, more than 20,000 guys

offered to pay her for webcam sex.

1,000 of them gave up personal information

from 71 countries.

If you think that's a lot of customers, consider this...

Sweetie was only introduced in 19 chatrooms,

but the FBI estimates

that there are over 40,000 chatrooms

where, at any given moment,

3/4 of a million people are looking for child porn.

The original Sweetie was controlled

by four researchers in an Amsterdam warehouse.

Sweetie 2.0 will be able to generate her own dialogue

and carry on thousands of conversations

at the same time,

but only if she can gain access

to the heavily encrypted sites where child porn is traded.

Sweetie may have evolved,

but the Dark Web is evolving faster.

[Virgin] At some point,

doing the investigations is going to become too hard.

I don't feel that there's a way around the encryption,

and I do honestly feel

that it's only a matter of time

before we have very private, very inaccessible sites

that perform very well

and give this particular class of consumer

everything that they need.

I would say it's moving twice as fast

as some of the trends in cyber security.

I think we've only got a couple more years.

[narrator] As a sting operation,

Sweetie was not entirely successful.

Europol warned that some judges would consider it entrapment.

Of those 20,000 men who took the bait,

only 6 have been convicted.

But there's no doubt that Sweetie helped

raise awareness about child cybersex.

[keyboard clacking]

[David] Shortly after my arrest...

[Woman] "To me, since my arrest..."

Okay.

And my phone number.

[Woman] Oh, and your phone number.

[David] I was released on the conditions

that I couldn't use the Internet

or have a computer in my home,

and that I couldn't go anywhere

where children would congregate,

like parks

or recreation centers, swimming pools.

When I was looking at children on the Internet,

I hated myself for doing it.

I knew it was wrong.

I knew the children in child pornography

had been abused,

and they suffered horrible consequences

for the rest of their lives.

Sometimes I would just stare at these kids and wonder like,

you know, where are they now,

and what horrible things they've gone through in their life.

You think about it sort of in the abstract,

but it doesn't stop you from doing what you're doing.

[narrator] Psychologists call this "dissociation"...

a screen allows you to detach

your real self from your online behavior

and create an alternative reality

where social norms no longer apply.

[David] I'm not defending looking at child pornography,

but if people weren't producing it,

we wouldn't be looking at it.

[narrator] Producers of child pornography in the Philippines

are being targeted.

Every so often, another raid makes the news.

Children watch the police

take their parents away in handcuffs.

The children are relocated to a government shelter

where they live until their parents serve out prison terms.

But fighting child cybersex at the source

is like fighting the heroin trade

by spraying poppy fields.

If global demand is strong enough,

there will always be people eager to meet it,

especially in poor countries like the Philippines.

♪♪

For over two years,

the Children's Legal Bureau has been trying

to get the local police to arrest the couple

allegedly pimping their own children.

The investigators have built an impressive case,

including a floor plan of the house...

everything they need for a search warrant.

But every time they schedule a case conference,

the police postpone.

You'd think the community would be up in arms.

[Nunez] The community, they already know

the operation of this family,

but some of the neighbors depend on this family

because they can easy borrow money from them,

so it's better to keep silence and do nothing.

[Virgin] What we're seeing right now on the Dark Web

is market creation.

So, in much the same way there were a bunch

of failed social media site attempts before Facebook,

what we see in the Dark Web is sites, forums

that are coming and going

in a community of relentless users

who are really working to build

what hopefully I'm wrong about,

is this more perfect way of sharing child pornography.

If 1% of the general population really has these cravings,

think about the amount of currently unmet demands

these networks could be meeting.

It's a very dangerous time.

[Renaud] It's a bit like an arms race, in a sense,

because with the advent

of Internet and virtual reality,

pornography evolves,

and child pornography will evolve,

and we try to be always a step ahead.

[narrator] Professor Renaud and his team

are exploring the use of virtual reality

to help pedophiles control their impulses.

Even if something bad happens here,

let's say he has a full-on erection,

there is absolutely no children... it's virtual.

[narrator] Which raises an intriguing question.

What if child avatars like Sweetie

could be used as virtual partners for pedophiles...

a safe way to satisfy their urges?

Maybe fewer real children would be harmed.

It's a risky proposition.

For some men, it might have the opposite effect.

[Renaud] Using virtual reality to experience sexuality

is a very delicate matter

since some fantasies may be lived very intensely

and can leave traits in the brain.

So where is the boundary? Where's the limits?

What can we really allow an individual to do?

[narrator] There's no cure, there's no crackdown

that will delete child pornography

from our world.

We're left to our own devices and our ability

to learn that every click has consequences.

[David] I don't think anybody can explain their attractions.

I think it's the luck of the draw.

We can't control what we are.

What we can control is what we do.

[narrator] Meanwhile,

child cybersex continues to spread,

especially in the developing world.

[Virgin] If we can address the poverty,

if we can address the vulnerability,

that is really what we should be doing

regardless of what's happening online.

[Nunez] We are fighting this battle

for the future of our children.

♪♪