[narrator] The Web transforms us.
We become data...
code...
uploading our very selves...
...to a place we call the cloud.
But this cloud is grounded in hardware,
a chaos of code.
But with the right tools,
you can find the signal in the noise.
[water running]
[David] Nobody ever suspected anything.
I was a newspaper editor,
I coached, I was volunteering my time.
I had really good friends,
and I had a really good family.
That's probably one of the reasons
it came as such a shock to people when I was arrested.
I've had to spend my whole life
lying and explaining and being worried about,
"Is someone going to figure this out?"
I've tried to control myself the best I could.
I've tried to lead the best life that I possibly could.
I know that my life would've been different,
not wonderful, but at least better,
if I'd never gone on the Internet.
[rooster crows]
[narrator] A girl on the other side of the world
drawn into the darkest corner of the Internet.
Here, you can find child porn, drugs, guns,
fake passports, counterfeit money.
It's a place where everyone is anonymous
and invisible to law enforcement.
Welcome to the Dark Web.
You might be tempted to see it for yourself.
And what's the harm?
What's one more click?
♪♪
But if you show your body, 3,000, 5,000.
In one show, in 30 minutes,
it's easy.
[narrator] Child cybersex.
It's an epidemic on the island of Cebu.
Jonna Nunez,
an outreach worker for the NGO FORGE
is fighting it door-to-door.
[Nunez] Even the little boy, even the little girl,
they know already
what is cyber pornography.
It's a show-show
to remove your clothes,
to show your body to the computer,
to the Internet.
[narrator] Internet access
is growing faster in the Philippines
than almost anywhere in the world,
and 80% of it is broadband.
On the other end of these cables are servers,
some hidden in the Dark Web.
You need a special browser
to access this part of the Internet,
one that conceals your computer's IP address.
The first of these browsers was Tor, the Onion Router,
named for its layers of encryption.
[Virgin] Tor and the Dark Web was originally a project
started by the Navy Research Lab
here in the United States
to protect the communications
of U.S. government personnel.
[narrator] Greg Virgin spent eight years
working for the NSA and the Department of Defense.
Later, with his own cyber security company,
he helped make Tor a useful tool
for political dissidents abroad,
giving them a safe way to communicate
without fear of reprisal.
So, Tor project has servers
all over the world,
and those servers accept connections
from users like our guy here,
and then bounces that signal around.
All of these connections are encrypted,
so no one can piece together who this person is
and what this person is doing.
[narrator] The government made Tor freely available,
and it was soon put to more sinister use.
The Dark Web was born.
Every day, an estimated 2.5 million people
use Tor to visit the Dark Web.
The amount of child porn here is staggering...
over 100 million sexually explicit images of children,
not to mention live streaming on webcams.
[Virgin] So, I've just opened up the Tor browser,
and now it's possible for us
to anonymously browse the Dark Net.
[narrator] To avoid breaking the law himself,
Greg looks only at text, not images.
This is a site that's live right now.
You can see that there's a really disturbing trend
toward younger and younger children
that the Dark Web fosters,
some ages as young as infants.
There's even a term called "pedo mom"
for mothers who are trading their children around
in the community.
There have been a number of sites
dedicated to child torture,
conversations about
exactly how to torture a child.
[narrator] Greg's goal is to understand
how child porn is traded on the Dark Web
so that law enforcement can stay a step ahead.
[Virgin] Just to gain access to these sites,
you have to trade in original child abuse content.
They are getting you to break the law
to make sure you're not law enforcement,
and weeding out people
who aren't authentic pedophiles.
It's a community of relentless users
that's becoming more and more difficult for law enforcement,
for analysts to break into.
Are you holding Winnie?
- I am holding... - Or G.I. Joe?
No, I'm holding Winnie.
So sweet.
Yeah, who knew?
Yeah, well.
That's a sweet picture.
Yeah.
He has one little finger sticking out there.
[chuckles]
[David] I think I started having
feelings of sexual attraction toward children,
probably when I was about 15 or 16.
I can't explain the attraction,
all I can tell you is I wish to God I didn't have it.
I watched child pornography
and searched for child pornography every night.
I looked at pictures of children that were nude,
and yes, I did look at pictures
and films of children in sexual acts
with other children and with adults.
[narrator] David says he has never had physical contact
or webcam sex with a child.
He was arrested in 2012 for possessing child pornography
and for buying it on the Internet.
The feelings are overpowering.
It just... it runs through your entire body.
The power of that addiction trumps everything.
The only two things that would stop me
from looking at child pornography
was being arrested or dying.
[Renaud] I'm interested in getting
into these individual's minds,
this very secret place
of being aroused by a situation like that.
[narrator] At a high-security
psychiatric hospital in Montreal
is a darkroom known as La Cave... The Vault.
Here, Patrice Renaud and his team of psychologists
probe the innermost thoughts of convicted sex offenders.
[device beeps]
[Renaud] We start by installing the EEG cap.
We then proceed with the stereoscopic glasses
in which we have a built-in eye-tracking device.
We then ask the subject
to install himself the penile gauge,
which gives us an idea of the tumescence,
that is the level of erection that the guy present
at every moment during the procedure.
We then present
a series of animations and visual immersion
that brings the individual back to a state
and the place that brought them to offend.
[man] Children are playing in a nearby pool,
and you notice a little girl about 8 to 10 years old
who is walking away from the pool toward you.
You are thinking about how much you would like to touch her.
[narrator] While the subject is immersed
in this virtual scene of the crime,
the team monitors his physiological responses.
If he tries to suppress his erection by looking away,
the eye-tracking catches him.
The results are used to determine
how dangerous the offender is
and whether he needs to be incarcerated.
[Renaud] With the guy
that we're working with at the moment,
we recreated a scene
in which he was molesting
a 6-year-old girl in his apartment
and killing her afterward, sadly.
So, we want to understand
what motive the individual had at the moment.
Is the killing
also a sexual part of the crime?
So, it becomes a way
to go even deeper in the psyche of the individual
as it comes to his sexual preferences.
[narrator] An estimated 1% of men are pedophiles,
meaning that their dominant sexual attraction
is to prepubescent children,
even if they never act on it.
Many psychologists see pedophilia
as a deep-rooted preference
that can't be changed, only managed.
♪♪
[narrator] An undercover investigator
with the Children's Legal Bureau,
a Filipino NGO, is meeting with his informant.
The couple is allegedly
abusing their own children on webcam
for foreign customers.
These are photos from the case file.
The older daughter, age 12,
and the younger one, age 10.
[woman] Okay.
[girl sniffles]
[children shouting playfully]
[sighs]
My name is Sweetie.
I'm 10 years old.
I live in the Philippines.
Every day, I have to sit in front of the webcam
and talk to men.
They play with themselves.
They want me play with myself.
But what they don't know...
I'm not real.
I'm a computer model.
[narrator] "Sweetie" was the bait
in a global sting operation
conducted by the Dutch NGO, Terre des Hommes, in 2013.
[Sweetie] As soon as I go online,
they come to me.
10... 100 every hour.
So many.
[narrator] Sweetie fooled more men
than anyone could've imagined.
Over a 10-week period, more than 20,000 guys
offered to pay her for webcam sex.
1,000 of them gave up personal information
from 71 countries.
If you think that's a lot of customers, consider this...
Sweetie was only introduced in 19 chatrooms,
but the FBI estimates
that there are over 40,000 chatrooms
where, at any given moment,
3/4 of a million people are looking for child porn.
The original Sweetie was controlled
by four researchers in an Amsterdam warehouse.
Sweetie 2.0 will be able to generate her own dialogue
and carry on thousands of conversations
at the same time,
but only if she can gain access
to the heavily encrypted sites where child porn is traded.
Sweetie may have evolved,
but the Dark Web is evolving faster.
[Virgin] At some point,
doing the investigations is going to become too hard.
I don't feel that there's a way around the encryption,
and I do honestly feel
that it's only a matter of time
before we have very private, very inaccessible sites
that perform very well
and give this particular class of consumer
everything that they need.
I would say it's moving twice as fast
as some of the trends in cyber security.
I think we've only got a couple more years.
[narrator] As a sting operation,
Sweetie was not entirely successful.
Europol warned that some judges would consider it entrapment.
Of those 20,000 men who took the bait,
only 6 have been convicted.
But there's no doubt that Sweetie helped
raise awareness about child cybersex.
[keyboard clacking]
[David] Shortly after my arrest...
[Woman] "To me, since my arrest..."
Okay.
And my phone number.
[Woman] Oh, and your phone number.
[David] I was released on the conditions
that I couldn't use the Internet
or have a computer in my home,
and that I couldn't go anywhere
where children would congregate,
like parks
or recreation centers, swimming pools.
When I was looking at children on the Internet,
I hated myself for doing it.
I knew it was wrong.
I knew the children in child pornography
had been abused,
and they suffered horrible consequences
for the rest of their lives.
Sometimes I would just stare at these kids and wonder like,
you know, where are they now,
and what horrible things they've gone through in their life.
You think about it sort of in the abstract,
but it doesn't stop you from doing what you're doing.
[narrator] Psychologists call this "dissociation"...
a screen allows you to detach
your real self from your online behavior
and create an alternative reality
where social norms no longer apply.
[David] I'm not defending looking at child pornography,
but if people weren't producing it,
we wouldn't be looking at it.
[narrator] Producers of child pornography in the Philippines
are being targeted.
Every so often, another raid makes the news.
Children watch the police
take their parents away in handcuffs.
The children are relocated to a government shelter
where they live until their parents serve out prison terms.
But fighting child cybersex at the source
is like fighting the heroin trade
by spraying poppy fields.
If global demand is strong enough,
there will always be people eager to meet it,
especially in poor countries like the Philippines.
♪♪
For over two years,
the Children's Legal Bureau has been trying
to get the local police to arrest the couple
allegedly pimping their own children.
The investigators have built an impressive case,
including a floor plan of the house...
everything they need for a search warrant.
But every time they schedule a case conference,
the police postpone.
You'd think the community would be up in arms.
[Nunez] The community, they already know
the operation of this family,
but some of the neighbors depend on this family
because they can easy borrow money from them,
so it's better to keep silence and do nothing.
[Virgin] What we're seeing right now on the Dark Web
is market creation.
So, in much the same way there were a bunch
of failed social media site attempts before Facebook,
what we see in the Dark Web is sites, forums
that are coming and going
in a community of relentless users
who are really working to build
what hopefully I'm wrong about,
is this more perfect way of sharing child pornography.
If 1% of the general population really has these cravings,
think about the amount of currently unmet demands
these networks could be meeting.
It's a very dangerous time.
[Renaud] It's a bit like an arms race, in a sense,
because with the advent
of Internet and virtual reality,
pornography evolves,
and child pornography will evolve,
and we try to be always a step ahead.
[narrator] Professor Renaud and his team
are exploring the use of virtual reality
to help pedophiles control their impulses.
Even if something bad happens here,
let's say he has a full-on erection,
there is absolutely no children... it's virtual.
[narrator] Which raises an intriguing question.
What if child avatars like Sweetie
could be used as virtual partners for pedophiles...
a safe way to satisfy their urges?
Maybe fewer real children would be harmed.
It's a risky proposition.
For some men, it might have the opposite effect.
[Renaud] Using virtual reality to experience sexuality
is a very delicate matter
since some fantasies may be lived very intensely
and can leave traits in the brain.
So where is the boundary? Where's the limits?
What can we really allow an individual to do?
[narrator] There's no cure, there's no crackdown
that will delete child pornography
from our world.
We're left to our own devices and our ability
to learn that every click has consequences.
[David] I don't think anybody can explain their attractions.
I think it's the luck of the draw.
We can't control what we are.
What we can control is what we do.
[narrator] Meanwhile,
child cybersex continues to spread,
especially in the developing world.
[Virgin] If we can address the poverty,
if we can address the vulnerability,
that is really what we should be doing
regardless of what's happening online.
[Nunez] We are fighting this battle
for the future of our children.
♪♪