Mick Moran has spent much of his 34 years as a police officer investigating child sexual abuse and bringing offenders to justice.
Now, merely days from hanging up his garda uniform for the last time, Mick is continuing his work — this time trying to clean up the availability of child abuse imagery online.
Approached by the board of Hotline.ie — an online watchdog comprising industry members and part-funded by the EU — the former garda sergeant is now the new chief executive of Hotline.ie.
It’s no surprise they sought him out. As well as working for the Garda Domestic and Sexual Violence Investigation Unit and the Garda Computer Crime Unit, he worked for more than 10 years in Lyon, France, with Interpol, the global police organisation, specialising in crimes against children.
He said much has changed since he joined An Garda Síochána in 1990, but much has stayed the same.
“People are more understanding of if it, now,” he says, “I mean even the term ‘child pornography’ as opposed to child sexual abuse material. You can see that in the law that was passed in 1998 [Child Trafficking and Pornography Act]. “
The massive change was the “explosion in personal computing” around the mid 1990s, which saw men going online and paying with their own credit card to access child abuse imagery.
But now, people can access this imagery in many ways, through files shared with like-minded abusers, on the dark net (hidden internet) and encrypted messages, and openly available imagery, on social media.
He says everyone now has a high-quality recording device in their hand: “It’s high-definition, it has the ability to copy files — images or videos — and transmit those.
“You combine that then with technologies online that allow full anonymity. So all of that is a perfect storm for those people who have this sexual interest in children.”
Figures documented in the annual reports of Hotline.ie give an insight into just how much child sexual abuse material there is.
The 2023 report, published on Thursday, shows the watchdog received 38,500 reports of suspected child sexual abuse material from members of the public last year.
Of these, just over 29,000 were confirmed by Hotline.ie analysts as complying with offences under the 1998 act.
This is more than twice the reports in 2022 (13,799) and 10 times as many as in 2020 (2,852).
The report says the increase in reports is in line with global trends — as reflected in the findings of specialist agencies, such as Britain’s Internet Watch Foundation and Europol, the EU police agency.
Garda Commissioner Drew Harris has also raised concerns at the amount of child sexual abuse material being viewed by people in Ireland.
The Hotline.ie report said this trend “will likely continue in future” based on consistent increases over the last five years.
But it added what is reported to them is “only a small slice of the amount of CSAM [child sexual abuse material]” in circulation.
Mick says there is, then, the “next level” for these offenders: “They use the internet to get access to children, to get access to intelligence on children.”
He says offenders cross all classes and groups: “You name it, it’s any job, it’s any race, it’s any creed. Are we surprised anymore when we see people being arrested for this? We’re not surprised anymore. It just can be anybody, and the old pillar of community thing gets wheeled out.
“Occasionally, people try and rationalise how this person who lived among them can be an offender in this nature. You see that Huw Edwards case in the UK.”
The BBC news broadcaster was given a suspended sentence last month for possessing and making child sexual abuse images, mostly of children between 13 and 15, but some as young as seven.
The court heard Edwards had been assessed as posing a “medium risk of causing serious harm to children”.
Mick says this is the question that is often asked:
“It’s only whether the opportunity presents itself or the fear of getting caught that probably stops them. But you’d have to say it is somebody acting out their sexual interest in children.”
In his experience, offenders caught with this material try and justify their behaviour: “You find all sorts of justifications. When people are caught with this type of material, they’re in with they’re getting help, they’re getting counselling, or whatever.
“A lot of the justification they have relates to the fact that it was out there, and, you know, ‘I just got caught up in it, and I have not, never, any intention of having sex with children’. But yet they’re gaining sexual pleasure from it, they’re masturbating to it. And that, of course, reinforces their normalisation of it.”
He says there are few estimates as to the scale of usage of child sexual abuse material, but cited one recent study done by Edinburgh University.
This research, published last May, estimated 300 million children have been affected in the last year across the world and one in eight children have been subjected to online solicitation (or grooming).
It said 7% of men in the UK and 11% in the US admitted to engaging in behaviour at some point that could be classed as child sexual abuse offending.
The study said possession of child sexual abuse material should be treated like a “global pandemic”.
The European Commission has been pushing for a number of years for a tougher directive on possession of material and child abuse, particularly to take into account technological advances, including making social media corporations legally responsible for scanning encrypted communications, removing it and reporting it.
But its various drafts have struggled to be adopted and privacy groups have campaigned against it, raising concerns over human rights and cybersecurity.
The European Commission is again due to bring fresh proposals for consideration next week.
“It’s a polarised, but there has to be a middle ground,” Mick says. “The purists will also tell you its not technically possible, but we would argue that they can still scan for malware, for viruses and these [abuse images] are just other files. The second option is to have device scanning, which Apple tried to introduce but rolled back on because the privacy people went after them.”
He says in the “real world”, law enforcement can get a court warrant to search a house.
He cited the recent publicity in relation to Telegram — an encrypted messaging app — and the arrest of its chief executive Pavel Durov in France last August.
“Telegram had essentially created a dark space where the rule of law didn’t count and it effectively achieved that by simply ignoring legal process,” Mick says.
“Now we see where the CEO of Telegram was arrested in France and suddenly Telegram is replying to legitimate, legal processes.”
He says “nobody is asking” for so-called backdoors into encrypted communications or direct access for law enforcement:
The Hotline.ie report also highlights significant increases in the amount of self-generated material, often uploaded voluntarily between partners.
Linked to that is an increase in intimate imagery abuse where someone, often an ex-partner, takes those explicit images that were privately shared onto public social media sites.
As reported in the Irish Examiner on Thursday, Hotline.ie has seen a major rise in sexual extortion.
On sharing images, Mick strongly advises parents not to upload pictures and videos of their children publicly on social media and only share them in private groups, for family and close friends.
He says AI is “rapidly developing”, with analysts saying the technology is so advanced it can be very difficult to distinguish between it and images of real people.
Mick wants to see Hotline.ie developing significantly next year, including a possible name change and greater publicity about its work — which also includes taking reports on financial scams and racism, both of which are growing.
He wants his analysts to have the authorisation of the Department of Justice and gardaí to “proactively go after material”. Currently they can only investigate reports they receive and can only take down a site, rather than probe deeper, potentially taking down more.
He also wants to try and bring in more social media giants, most of which have their European headquarters in Ireland.
“X is not a member, Meta [owners of Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp] is not a member, TikTok is not a member. Obviously, I would love them to join,” Mick says.
“The advantages for them from membership is a visibility around their commitment and their reputation, to show they are serious about getting rid of this material.”
