WASHINGTON, Sept. 21 — Executives from credit card companies, including Visa, MasterCard and American Express, told a Congressional panel Thursday that they were determined to eliminate the use of their services in the Internet child pornography business.

But they also said it was difficult to keep pace with those who seek to exploit children on the Web and called for broad collaboration among those in the financial services industry and law enforcement authorities around the world.

“Child pornography is a global problem in need of a coordinated response,” said Mark MacCarthy, a senior vice president for public policy for Visa U.S.A.

Mr. MacCarthy said that by working together with other financial services companies, the industry could “enhance our efforts to identify Web sites and pinpoint merchants that are trafficking in this illicit activity, cut them off from use of our network and provide assistance to law enforcement to put them in jail and shut them down for good.”

“The way forward lies in collective action,” he said.

Mr. MacCarthy and other executives testified at a hearing of the oversight and investigations subcommittee of the House Energy and Commerce Committee. The hearing was the sixth this year convened by the subcommittee to examine the growth of child pornography online.

Others who spoke to the committee included Ernie Allen, the president of the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, and Christopher J. Christie, the United States attorney for New Jersey, who led an investigation that in 2004 dismantled an Internet child pornography service stretching from Eastern Europe to Mount Laurel, N.J.

Mr. Allen described tactics adopted in recent months to combat child pornography Web sites, including the creation of the Financial Coalition Against Child Pornography, a group of major financial institutions and Internet companies. The coalition will seek to “follow the money,” Mr. Allen said, in an effort to eradicate such business by 2008. MasterCard, Visa, American Express, Bank of America, Citibank, PayPal, Yahoo and AOL, among others, have joined the coalition.

“We have changed our process for monitoring the Internet,” said Arne L. Christenson, a senior vice president for federal government affairs at American Express. “In the past our search for child pornography sites took place as part of our broader efforts to enforce our Internet pornography policy, and there was not always a clear differentiation between the two in our review and reporting.”

Among purveyors of child pornography, Mr. Christenson said, there is a “growing trend toward steering visitors of these sites to various alternative payment methods.”

Mr. Christie said one of those methods involved granting access to Web sites in return for explicit photographs of children. “That phenomenon is something that we are very concerned about,” Mr. Christie said.

By JOHN FILES
Published: September 22, 2006

Quote:Among purveyors of child pornography, Mr. Christenson said, there is a “growing trend toward steering visitors of these sites to various alternative payment methods.”

Sadly I fear there will always be a way around measures put in place to stop this type of thing like child porn.