GCHQ will be ordered to crack down on online child abuse images being shared across the internet, David Cameron, the UK prime minister has said.
Talking to BBC Radio 2, Cameron said the "techniques, ability and brilliance of the people involved in the intelligence community," will be "brought to bear on these revolting people sharing these images on the dark net and making them available more widely."
"That expertise is going to be brought to bear to go after on these revolting people sharing these images on the dark net and making them available more widely," he said.
The UK’s major internet monitoring service, Internet Watch Foundation (IWF), is investigating illegal child abuse images on restricted parts of the internet that it does not have access to.
IWF CEO Susie Hargreaves hailed everything that Google and Microsoft are doing to eliminate online child sexual abuse from the internet.
"From April, our team of analysts will be proactively seeking child sexual abuse content using their accrued experience and intelligence," Hargreaves said.
The regulator will start a six month trial with Google, Microsoft and the Child Exploitation and Online Protection agency (Ceop),eveloping modules to detect and ostracise links to child abuse material on so-called peer-to-peer (P2P) networks.
"We will be working in partnership to identify pathways to illegal material being shared via torrent feeds and subsequently remove access via the two market leaders in search," Hargreaves added.
"This is a day when we can make some real progress against the absolute evil of child abuse and what happens on the internet," Cameron added.
"The next stage is now to go after the dark net where people are sharing images peer to peer away from the Googles and the Microsofts.
"Again there is a lot more we can do, working with the industry, making sure we have got law enforcement which have got all the modern technological tools at their disposal and we will go after these people and arrest them and bang them up as well.
"The point is that you use technology which is able to get into the dark internet, which is able decrypt encrypted files and that is able to find out what is going on."
