The search engines are going further. Google CEO Eric Schmidt said in the Daily Mail, "We've listened, and in the last three months put more than 200 people to work developing new, state-of-the-art technology to tackle the problem." Results include 13,000 queries that will return warnings from both Google and children's charities pointing out the illegality of child pornography and offering advice on where to get help.
He also talked about technology to detect and remove illegal images. Once a picture is identified as illegal, "each image is given a unique digital fingerprint," he explained. It can then be identified anywhere on the internet and removed. "Microsoft deserves a lot of credit for developing and sharing its picture detection technology," he added.
But since child pornography is increasingly being filmed, "our engineers at YouTube have created a new technology to identify these videos" – technology that will be shared with other internet companies when fully tested in the new year. Such co-operation between the different companies is unprecedented.
According to the BBC, Microsoft's general manager of marketing and operations, Nicola Hodson, said: "Day-to-day we're fierce competitors, and we collaborate on this issue because it transcends that. It will be much harder to find that content on both Bing and Google. We are blocking content, removing content and helping people to find the right content or also sources of help should they need that," she said.
But Cameron was quick to add that promises will not be enough, and repeated his threat of legislation. "The threat of legislation has not gone away. I believe we are heading in right direction but no-one should be in doubt that there is a red line: if more isn't done to stop illegal content or pathways being found when you use a child abuse search term, we will do what is necessary to protect our children," he told the Daily Mail.
Critics were quick to point out that the majority and the worst of the child pornography cannot be found by Google and Bing, but are hidden on the dark web and private networks. Cameron has responded to this by suggesting that he will use the intelligence services – who have already shown limited success in navigating Tor to track down and eliminate illegal content on the dark web.
It is a double political win for Cameron. Firstly he has scored a notable success in forcing the search engines, against their initial wishes, to comply with a policy that has huge public support – especially in the UK in a year of repeated legal action against celebrities over child abuse. Secondly, he has provided a publicly acceptable use of GCHQ surveillance following months of criticism after the Snowden revelations. GCHQ, for its part, now has direct political backing for its attempts to subvert Tor.
The potential problem for the future is that a technology developed to censor child pornography can easily be adapted to censor other areas.