By Branko Miletic
Following the arrest of some 70 people in Australia for child pornography this morning in the so-called Operation Centurion, the investigation has also revealed that those engaging in this nefarious activity have a penchant for new technology.
According to a number of media reports, police became aware that the offenders were using web-enabled devices such as Playstation 3, X-Box and the latest mobile phones to access the images.
"Most people don't know games consoles can be linked to the web", said one police spokesperson to the media, adding that this was one way to hide images that traditionally were stored on computer hard drives.
And a couple of months ago, it was found that some UK pedophiles were hiding child porn picks on their sat nav systems. The UK police have also found that an increasing number of offenders use various digital gadgets and hand-held game machines to escape detection.
Earlier this year, reports from the US suggested that some PS3 users were demanding soft porn game titles for their games consoles but it seems that Sony has knocked this idea on the head.
However the arrests in Australia this morning had to do with illegal porn, specifically the worst form - child pornography and all the arrests dealt with the downloading of it on various devices, including games consoles.
And the very fact that both the Xbox and PS3 come with hard drives and internet connectivity makes the temptation to store such illicit and unsavoury images on these devices must be tempting.
At the time of publication, channelnews.com.au was still awaiting responses from both Microsoft and Sony.
