Now, several popular forums across the Deep Web that were once open require illegal initiation rites or have simply closed up registration to new members. Lolita City’s openness was the product of a pedophile community that had grown relatively comfortable behind the powerful veil of Tor’s anonymity.
It was free and open to access with no registration required. 2013, federal agents seized and shut down Freedom Hosting, a Deep Web hosting operation they correctly identified as the “largest facilitator of child porn on the planet.”įreedom Hosting was home to websites like Lolita City, which was then likely the largest child pornography site on the Web, with millions of photos and videos provided to over 15,000 members. That hasn’t stopped many pedophiles from looking for illegal porn on the Deep Web, but it has put them in a new mindset. Pedophile communities were saturated with fear, uncertainty, and doubt. Over the past year, several of the biggest child pornography websites of all time have been targeted and shut down. vigilance against child pornography in cyberspace began over a decade ago-long after the pedophiles had arrived online in large numbers-but the federal crosshairs shifted decisively to illegal abuse material on Tor’s anonymity network in 2013. Make the newbie commit a crime in front of everyone, or else he’s out. That’s the equivalent of a street gang requiring a new member to rob a deli or stab a passerby, a tried-and-true method criminals use to separate the wheat from the chaff. Members also have to describe the content of the porn in detail. If at least one of the participants is 12 years old or less, flat-chested, hairless, and engaging in sexual activity, it most likely qualifies.” An application “must contain clearly preteen hardcore material,” the site rules state. Prospective new members now have to actually commit a crime to gain access.Īfter you’ve claimed a nickname on TLZ, new members are required to post 50 to 200 megabytes of hardcore preteen pornography in order to gain access. For much of the four years since its founding in 2010, the site grew into one of the largest trading posts of illegal pornography simply because of its openness. At one time, registering for the Love Zone was as easy as making a Twitter account.
The Love Zone, likely the biggest child pornography site on the Deep Web today, has over 50,000 members. Today, the pedophile websites and communities of the anonymous Internet are closing ranks and making it more difficult for new members to enter than ever before. His guilty verdict is the latest in a long string of successful investigations, busts, and convictions that have come as American law enforcement wages a war on child pornography on the Deep Web. When FBI agents burst into the home of Timothy DeFoggi early one morning last year, he was sitting at his laptop downloading child pornography videos over the Tor anonymity network.ĭeFoggi, until then the acting cybersecurity chief at the federal Department of Health and Human Services, was recently found guilty of three child-porn crimes, including solicitation and distribution. Being a pedophile on the Deep Web isn’t as easy today.