An associate ISU professor testified at a U.S. Senate hearing Tuesday that the majority of searches conducted on peer-to-peer networks are for pornographic material.

Doug Jacobson, associate professor of electrical and computer engineering and president and chief technology officer of Palisade Systems, Inc. presented results from a study his company performed earlier this year.

Jacobson reported to the full Senate Judiciary committee that 42 percent of all the search requests in the study’s 18-day period were for pornographic material. Six percent of these requests were for child pornography.

“[The hearing] really focused quite a bit of effort on child pornography,” Jacobson said.

He said representatives from the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children and New York law enforcement, who indicted several individuals for downloading child pornography, were present at the hearing.

“It was a little surprising how much [child pornography] they were claiming to be out there,” he said.

Eric Schnack, chief operating officer of Palisade Systems, Inc. said it was important to present his company’s findings to the Senate.

“[The statistics] are so stunning and counter to popular opinion and knowledge,” Schnack said. “The common knowledge is that peer-to-peer and file sharing is for access to music and movies.

“Really, the single largest use is access to pornography. That is a wake-up call.”

The Palisade Systems research summary explains that peer-to-peer networks consist of individual computers that use similar software to communicate over the Internet. A user who connects to the network connects to all users linked by the peer-to-peer application, which allows information and files to be freely exchanged.

Alan Morris, executive vice president of Sharman Networks Limited, creators of KaZaA, a peer-to-peer application, also testified at the U.S. Senate hearing.

Jacobson said the senators aimed almost all of their questions at Morris, who offered the explanation that KaZaA simply offers a service and can’t track what kinds of files are transferred.

Jacobson said that out of all peer-to-peer applications, KaZaA is “actually the best-behaved” because it has parental filters and limitations. KaZaA doesn’t allow users to search for files with certain words, such as a “sex.”

“Unfortunately, there are still files that show up without bad words that are still bad files,” he said.