US, UK enlist spy agencies to fight online child porn: PM

Britain and the US will enlist the help of spy agencies to track down paedophiles who share images of child sex abuse online, Prime Minister David Cameron said today.
A joint US-UK taskforce will work with encryption experts at Britain's GCHQ communications monitoring agency and the US National Security Agency (NSA) to find offenders who operate in the darkest corners of the Internet, he said.
The initiative put the capabilities of US and British electronic eavesdropping agencies in a positive light, after recent damaging revelations that the NSA and GCHQ pried into the private communications of millions of people.
Cameron welcomed announcements by Google and Microsoft, which runs Bing and powers the Yahoo! search engine, to provide 'clean' results to 100,000 searches related to child sex abuse.

But he told BBC radio: "The next stage is now to go after the dark net where people are sharing images peer-to-peer away from the Googles and the Microsofts.
"There has been a lot in the news recently about the techniques, ability, and brilliance of the people involved in the intelligence community and GCHQ and the NSA in America," the prime minister said.

"That expertise is going to be brought to bear to go after on these revolting people sharing these images on the dark net and making them available more widely."
Officials said Britain's new National Crime Agency (NCA) would be joining forces with the FBI to target paedophiles using secret or encrypted networks.

The new role may help rehabilitate the agencies after their role in mass surveillance came under scrutiny following the leaks by fugitive NSA contractor Edward Snowden.
Cameron was speaking after hosting an Internet safety summit with tech companies including Microsoft and Google, child protection groups, the industry-funded Internet Watch Foundation and the NCA.