An assistant ISU professor will be testifying in front of the full Senate Judiciary Committee in Washington, D.C., Tuesday at a hearing concerning peer-to-peer networks and how they are used to transfer pornography.

Doug Jacobson, associate professor of electrical and computer engineering and president and chief technology officer of Palisade Systems, Inc., a company he founded in Ames in 1996, was asked to testify at the Senate hearing because of his company’s research on searches on a file-sharing network. He will present the results and statistics to the judiciary committee.

For the study, the company acted as a user on a file-sharing network from February 6-23, 2003, collecting 22 million search results, according to the peer-to-peer executive summary on the Palisade Systems, Inc. Web site, www.screendoor.com.

“Part of the reason [the Senate] contacted me was because the study shows quite a bit of searches were for pornography,” Jacobson said. “42 percent of all requests were for pornographic material.”

Six percent of the total requests were for child pornography, he added.

When most people think about file searches and downloads they think about MP3s, not pornography, Jacobson said.

According to the executive summary, a strong reason for using peer-to-peer file sharing looks to be for easy access to pornography.

The summary reported pornography was requested in 63 percent of video file searches and child pornography in 10 percent. It also reported that 75 percent of image file searches were for pornography and 24 percent were for child pornography.

Jacobson said he was shocked by the overall number of pornographic materials requested on the network, but not as much with the child pornography results because of the anonymity of peer-to-peer networks.

The Palisade Systems, Inc. research summary explains that peer-to-peer networks are made up of individual computers that use similar software to communicate over the Internet. KaZaA, Napster, Morpheus, LimeWire and BearShare are all identified as peer-to-peer applications. A user who connects to the network connects to a web of computers that are all linked by the peer-to-peer application, which allows information and files to be freely exchanged among users.

“[Peer-to-peer] is like anything — it’s a tool,” Jacobson said. “There are few legitimate uses of peer-to-peer networks.”

Steffen Schmidt, professor of political science, said the government is becoming more interested in these networks because of their increased use.

“The problem of peer-to-peer file-sharing has been growing over the last few years,” Schmidt said.

He said at first there was much reluctance from the government to get involved or pay attention to the issue because exchange of information was considered a part of the freedom of the Internet.

It was when people started exchanging intellectual property, things a company has rights to own and keep from duplication, that Congress started looking into it, Schmidt said.

Jacobson warned users should be concerned when searching and downloading from networks because much of the material is copyrighted and illegal to possess.

“Be aware of what you’re doing,” he said.

This warning is backed up by results from the Palisade Systems, Inc. study. Ninety-seven percent of all the searches tracked by the company on the peer-to-peer network could have resulted in a criminal or civil suit for copyright infringement, sexual harassment or felony-level charges.

The music industry first began filing lawsuits for the exchanges of copyrighted material on peer-to-peer applications.

“Many said that they were suing their own best customers,” Schmidt said. “So the music industry started looking around for a tastier and more powerful way to control peer-to-peer networks.”

He said they began to research what users were exchanging to control file-sharing, and it was then discovered that many of the files were sexual in nature.

The Senate hearing is titled “Pornography, Technology and Process: Problems and Solutions on Peer-to-Peer Networks.”

Other witnesses testifying are representatives from the U.S. Department of Justice, National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, Verizon Communications, Recording Industry Association of America and the U.S. Copyright Office, according to the Senate Committee on the Judiciary Web site, http://judiciary.senate.gov.

Jacobson said Tuesday’s hearing is the second on peer-to-peer networks.

The first hearing, held June 17, dealt with the personal and national security risks that peer-to-peer networks pose, according to the Senate Judiciary Web site.

“A hearing is really to get the facts and then have the [Congressional] staff draft legislation that will impose some sort of restriction on peer-to-peer applications,” Schmidt said.

“Now the question is, how much are they going to regulate?” he said.

“How much are they going to regulate without destroying what is really so great about the Internet?”