Tech industry gets involved in fight against child pornography

A head of the exploited children's division of the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children in Alexandria, Virginia said that authorities are having trouble keeping up with the fight against child pornography online. Michelle Collins, who said that the organization has reviewed 105 million child sex abuse images since 2002, said that the technology companies should acknowledge the fact that their services aided the proliferation of child pornography, and that they should take part with rights groups and authorities to help control the problem.

Some tech companies have heeded the call. Bloomberg said PhotoDNA, the software that aided Collins' organization to identify the pornographic images, was donated by Microsoft Corp. The company also donated the software to law enforcement agencies, and uses its own SkyDrive service to help alert the police for flagged accounts.

Bloomberg said that the biggest challenge so far is The Onion Router, or TOR, which a network ironically created ten years ago by the US Naval Research Lab. While the creation of TOR was for communicating to people in countries with authoritarian governments anonymously, the network is now widely used for illegal activities including finding child pornography. On the other hand, the US government have managed to turn the tables around recently when American law enforcement were able to successfully arrest 14 mean who operated a TOR porn site which have victimized over 250 children on March 18, the news agency said. Another success story is the arrest of Jesup, Georgia-based Stephen Keating, who had abused 15 children including a toddler thanks to the probing of the suspect's TOR images by the combined efforts of Danish police, US Immigration and the Customs Enforcement's Cyber Crimes Center and the PhotoShop methods of one of the original creators of the photo editing tool, John Penn II.

Perhaps the most prominent tool that helped catch perpetrator of child pornography is the Sweetie program courtesy of a Dutch nonprofit to unmask child predators online. The program collected dossiers on a thousand suspects across the world to Interpol to follow up on.

Interpol Crimes Against Children unit head Mick Moran said, "There's limitless potential for technology to help solve the problem (of child pornography)."

Tags

Adobe, Google Inc, PhotoDNA, Sweetie child predator program, National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, Interpol

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