• Operation Marcy
  september de 2003
  Operation Marcy was one of the most successful operations against child pornography on the net. The investigations, which lasted more than a year, were started by a report that PROTEGELES received through its hotline and which we referred to two German hotlines: FSM and Eco ( http://www.fsm.de ) and ( http://www.eco.de/ ) in May 2002. On its side, Eco referred the information to the German Federal Criminal Police (BKA). As a result, in September 2003, the authorities of the state of Saxon-Anhalt, East- Germany, dismantled a huge international web of child pornography. The investigation involved 166 countries and around 26.500 people from many different places around the world. Just in Germany, more than 1.500 police officers worked on this operation. Hundreds of police raids took place and 745 PC were confiscated.
• Operation in Gijón
  march 14, 2003
  A report from PROTEGELES initiated in October 2002 another investigation by the Spanish Brigade of Technological Investigation. 700 pictures and videos with extreme pornographic content involving children were found in the PC of a man who was arrested in Gijón, north Spain. This operation also involved internet users in United States, Mexico, Colombia, Venezuela and Argentina who exchanged files of similar content. Their personal data were referred to the Interpol.
• Operation in Méjico D.F.
  3 juny, 2003
  The Cybernetic Police unit of the Federal Mexican Police arrested another paedophile thanks to the information that PROTEGELES passed to them. This man had pictures of prostituted girls which he showed to his clients for them to choose which girl they liked best. After his arrestment, the police found many CD with child pornography on them and a mobile phone with his clients’ telephone numbers, who were also prosecuted.
• Operation Tarragona
  july 2003
  In July 2003, the Spanish Brigade of Technological Investigation arrested in a village near Tarragona a man who uploaded child pornography material from his PC. He uploaded all this material using an Internet community that PROTEGELES had previously reported to the above mentioned Brigade
• Operation Dominant
  23 september, 2003
  In this date, the Brigade for Technological Investigation arrested in Madrid a man who was distributing child pornography images through the Internet. Investigations were started in November 2002 thanks to the data facilitated by PORTEGELES. This case was particularly difficult and up to seven warrants by the Judicial Authorities were needed to obtain the necessary pieces of evidence.
  
  During the search that the police undertook in the arrested man’s home, his PC was also examined in front of the judicial commission and the images that he had uploaded to the Internet were found. The computer was then confiscated as a piece of evidence to be used during the prosecution.
• Operation Comunidades
  february 2004
  In this operation, the collaboration between PROTEGELES and the Spanish police enabled the identification of up to twelve Internet places were child pornography was being distributed using Spanish servers. During Operation Comunidades, which took place in Valencia, Alicante, Tarragona, Barcelona, Jaen, Tenerife and Salamanca, a big quantity of material was confiscated: 9 UPC, more than 200 CD, 43 VHS tapes, 2 cameras, a memory pencil and 172 disks.
  
  All this material was carefully examined to find out evidences of child abuse committed by the involved people, among whom there was a school teacher, two university students, a food handler and a carpenter. They were aged 21 the youngest one and 51 the oldest one
• Operation Anamtomía
  september 2004
  During September and October 2004, several police operations against child pornography on Internet initiated by information facilitated by PROTEGELES’ took place. One of them was called OPERATION ANATOMÍA.

• hild pornography on the Internet is steadily growing and the number of total reports on child pornography received by all the hotlines working in the European territory is certainly appalling. Between March 2003 and February 2004 –nearly a year- the organizations members of INHOPE received a total of 96.217 reports on child pornography on Internet which were referred to the law enforcement units of the concerned countries.
• B. Awareness among Internet users is also growing, as well as their trust towards the Spanish hotline PROTEGELES, which receives reports from nearly all Spanish-speaking countries and even from other ones.
• C.The work of the hotlines like PROTEGELES is very efficient and beneficial, not only because of the good results concerning the arrest of paedophiles, but also because of its awareness-raising function and because they help law enforcement units to save a lot of time and effort. For instance, PROTEGELES “only” referred to the police 5.113 reports out of 28.992 because the remaining 23.879 were not considered to be hosting any illegal content, which means that we saved the police all the work of receiving and going through that huge quantity of pages to check their content. Checking all these thousands of pages is the work of several people working full time for more than a year.
• D. Most of the Internet users, or at least those using our hotline, don’t have a clear idea of what is illegal and what is not on Internet as we have realised by the fact that many of the reports we receive are not on illegal content. Therefore we think that some kind of general education on this aspect is necessary.
• E. Collaboration with the main Spanish ISPs has proved to be very effective. We have obtained excellent results in our fight against child pornography in Spain where this kind of content has been reduced by a very high percentage. Some or the ISPs have reduced child pornography by 95%, which means that now there is only 5% of the child pornography there was a month ago.
• F. Due to the easy use of Internet, anybody can create an Internet community or group in just a blink, and this is leading to a proliferation of hundreds of paedophiles communities where they can upload countless pictures of child pornography. Then, thousands of people have free access to thousands of pictures.

As a conclusion, there are still many things to be done and to be improved, but we can’t deny that we are in the good direction and have made good progresses. It is worth mentioning that the reform to the Spanish Criminal Code in October 2004, that includes possessing child pornography material as a crime, and not only distributing it, should suppose a big step forward in the fight against child pornography in the short term. We hope that this reform will be a deterrent and will put to an end the impunity feeling that paedophiles have when using Internet.