Senior Delhi Police officers are learning from US law enforcement officers the secrets to enter into 'deep', 'dark' internet to crack it and prevent online child abuse.
A three-day training programme is being organised by Delhi Police's Special Police Unit for Women and Children (SPUWAC) in collaboration with Data Security Council of India and International Centre for Missing and Exploited Children (ICMEC) to train officers to crack complicated cases of online child abuse.
The training programme commenced yesterday and will end tomorrow.
"Criminals are looking at digital mediums to target children who are exposed to technology at a very young age. A lot of criminals first target children through internet and then start harassing them after getting to know minute details of their activities," said Varsha Sharma, DCP (SPUWAC).
Police officers from Florida Department of Law Enforcement, Lousiana State Police, talked to their Indian counterparts about the challenges of investigating cases of online abuse, collection of evidence, forensics and investigative tools.
"There are three types of internet -- deep, dark and surface. The surface internet is easily accessible but for accessing dark internet, you need specific software on public search engines," a senior police officer said.
"Deep internet cannot be accessed through the search engines. This training programme taught us about how we can demarcate between these three aspects of the internet," he said.
There are criminals sitting on the internet and looking for prey. They can gain access to the details posted by children on their social media profiles and then identify their prey online, said Guillermo Galarza from ICMEC.
He also said that educators and parents need to be aware about the dangers of the internet so that they can caution children. As internet penetration increases, cases of online abuse are going to rise.
Galarzo said that India is one of the countries that has legislation for online abuse and there are still several countries that don't recognise online abuse as a crime.
In India, possession of child pornographic material is considered a crime but many foreign countries don't recognise it as a crime.
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