Look at the affidavit: https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/3216737-Freedom-Host...
I only skimmed, but at least 1 of the Websites required users to upload their own CP, to be approved by the admins, before they could download any.
I only skimmed, but at least 1 of the Websites required users to upload their own CP, to be approved by the admins, before they could download any.
They surely would have all the easiest CP to find already.
If not everyone would upload the same content pretty much.
So again, uploading does not imply production capability, at least the way I see it.
Additionally with how laws are structured in many places selling CP is a worse offense than possession, hence the trading scene is an easy way to legally cover your ass to get a reduced sentence or no sentence at all. But this also means that there is either direct production or contracting for this material from developing nations since otherwise everyone would be trading the same thing, about 9-10 years ago I've volunteered with the police and we were tracking sharing and downloading back then over P2P.
Once there was sufficient evidence they would flag the person and check their travel history, quite a few of them had traveled back then often (2-3 times a year or more) to either the Balkans/Central Europe and Asia and they were going there to effectively purchase or produce it for self consumption and trade.
Sadly there are way to many places where you can have sex with a child for money, and not for a lot of it, child prostitution in Mexico even in border towns it cheaper than normal street prostitution in the US not to mention higher end call girls.
Get a laptop or a camera and for a few 100$ you can produce quite a bit of content.
Financially you can always donate to international NGOs and local organizations that battle and assist the victims of CP but overall I don't think they have much actual impact other than the feel good factor, I doubt they have the reach for it, maybe Mexico, but Thailand et. al highly unlikely.
These days it seems that anti-CP operations are pretty much centralized on TOR and a few other networks, P2P and Usenet used to be the spot for that but over the past 10 years everything moved to either private internet sites that domain hop frequently or TOR and similar networks.
Encryption, VPN's and other privacy tools make the job of tracking people down en mass without any exploits nearly impossible, even 10 years ago besides the usual rehashed crap that one could find with a few search terms on P2P file sharing apps everything was already encrypted.
CP users were pretty much encrypting everything way before anyone else, on P2P/Usenet they were running PGP rings and they would exchange keys via side channels and share their content encrypted so only people that were in the ring could decrypt it (this was in effect running your own private site over P2P or a specific newsgroup).
Back then the best LEOs could do is try to get into the PGP rings and lure some of their members to meet in person or reveal their identity (no one even thought of using malware to track them down, that tradecraft wasn't there, nor would it have been admissible most likely) via other means.
Today this type of well effectively state level intelligence agency operations is pretty much the only way of combating CP at any reasonable scale, and even this scale is likely quite underwhelming when compared to the amount of content produced and traded each year. But AFIAK probably the only LEO worldwide that does this is the FBI, local police departments don't have the resources, Interpol and Europol are mostly a joke, and most countries have considerable constraints on active network exploitation by law enforcement.