The police have set up a new unit to detect and locate traffic for online pornography – particularly child pornography – in real-time.

Speaking to the New Straits Times, Bukit Aman's Sexual, Women and Child Investigation Division (D11) principal assistant director Ong Chin Lan said the new Malaysia Internet Crime Against Children Investigation Unit (Micac) will build a "data library" of pornography users and their surfing preferences.

These details, Ong said, may come in handy if they are to be prosecuted later.

“We will pick up those who visit these sites regularly. We use a software that was specially developed to allow us to identify, locate and track visits to porn sites, especially those involving child porn.

“The intelligence we get will be passed on to the Communications and Multimedia Commission (MCMC), so we can obtain the internet users’ details," she said, adding that those being monitored could be called in for questioning or even arrested from their homes.

Internet users who view pornography from the "relative safety" of their mobile phones will not be spared from scrutiny under this system.

The NST reporter who wrote the article was given a tour of the monitoring system, which showed the IP address of those surfing porn in balloon markers, their location, the websites they were on, the material they have uploaded or downloaded, as well as the time the content was accessed and the duration spent.

According to Ong, a Dutch police study has shown that close to 20,000 IP addresses on Malaysia had been actively uploading and downloading explicit images and footage of minors, and established that Malaysia had the highest number of people uploading and downloading child pornography.

Micac has the power to seize mobile phones, computers or laptops to check for pornographic material, on a "case to case basis" Ong said.

Officers of the D11 unit are being sent overseas for training with the support of the US Department of Homeland Security and the Federal Bureau of Investigation.

Meanwhile, NST also quoted MCMC’s network security, new media monitoring, compliance and advocacy sector chief Fadhlullah Suhaimi Abdul Malek as saying that the commission had blocked 3,781 pornographic websites from 2014 until the end of March.