Highly mobile child porn

Child pornography images are being stored on increasingly portable devices and so are getting harder to find in investigations – from flash drives to cellphones, law enforcement officials say. Still, it is being uncovered. "Of the nearly 125 child porn cases annually investigated by Bergen County prosecutor's detectives, the majority now involve some sort of digital storage media," NorthJersey.com reports. It adds that "they've confiscated digital storage as mundane as burned CDs and as crafty as a ballpoint pen that unscrews to reveal a flash drive." Flash drives (those little digital storage devices people carry on their keychains) are most popular, a few months ago, investigators from the Texas Attorney General's Office raided a home and "found an iPod containing videos of child pornography." Meanwhile, the US Congress has been much less effective than law enforcement in combating this horrific crime. "Two recent legal cases [involving the Child Online Protection Act and the PROTECT Act] illustrate overreach and ineffectiveness by Congress in a worthy fight," according to a Los Angeles Times editorial. In related news, the UK's Internet Watch Foundation found in its annual review that online child porn "is becoming more brutal and graphic, and the number of images depicting violent abuse has risen fourfold since 2003," the Associated Press reports.