Citywide drive against child porn: 95 held over two days

Update: 2021-12-03 19:19 GMT

New Delhi: Over the past two days, the Delhi Police have arrested 95 people for offences related to the production, dissemination or distribution of child pornography in a citywide operation dubbed "MASOOM". The operation was coordinated by the newly formed Intelligence Fusion and Strategic Operations (IFSO) Unit of Special Cell where all the districts played an instrumental role in making the drive a success, the city police said on Friday.

More than 160 cases have been registered across different police stations in this special drive. "Necessary legal action has been taken against the offenders," police also claimed.

In this operation, the IFSO department of Delhi police received information about child pornographic material being circulated through the National Crime Records Bureau (NCRB), which has an MOU with the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children (NCMEC) — a private non-profit organization established in 1984 by the United Nations Congress, based in the USA.

The organization also has a tie-up with the social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram, and others to help them track and report cases of child pornography and sexually explicit material depicting children. Gathering the contents of the social media platforms regarding children or finding any content violating the privacy of the children, the organization procures the IP address details of the user who had uploaded the obscene content to the concerned department.

Whereas, at the IFSO Unit of the city police, the details received from NCRB are analyzed for identification of any organized nexus that may be running in this regard. The unit analyses all the inputs and identifies the suspects. Thereafter, the information is disseminated to the concerned authorities to take further necessary legal action.

All this information has been shared with the concerned police stations and districts for the registration of cases.

Significantly, in light of the rising amount of such content on the Internet, the Central Bureau of Investigation had in 2019 set up a special unit to deal with these cases. The CBI had taken this lead after it had received tips from German Police (through Interpol) about Indian phone numbers appearing in a global nexus of child pornography distributors. Following this, the agency has cracked down on such offenders — with more than 83 arrested this year alone — many of them from Delhi-NCR. 

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