Fight Against Child Abuse Goes High-Tech
Originally published by Reuters, December 19, 2001
YOKOHAMA, Japan (Reuters) — Per-Eric Astrom spends his days hunched over a computer in his tiny Stockholm office, measuring out the hours with the click of a mouse. In this way he busted Sweden's biggest child pornography ring.
Astrom, manager of an anti-child pornography hotline run by Save the Children Sweden, is one of a growing band of "infiltrators" who use the latest technology to combat computer-savvy child abusers on their own turf.
"What it roughly means is that we from time to time take part in the child pornography community, and sort of go under cover," he told Reuters at a conference near Tokyo on the commercial sexual exploitation of children.
"That's the only way to gather enough evidence to bring pedophiles to court."
New technology has proved both a curse and a blessing in the fight against child sexual abuse, making the production and distribution of pornography easier than ever before but giving authorities important tools to hunt down offenders and trace victims.
Earlier this year, Astrom helped police smash a Swedish pedophile ring involving 52 people. Seven were brought to court.
The technology involved remains a guarded secret, but it enables investigators to slink invisibly through underground chat rooms and seedy Net hostels, performing sting operations forbidden to police under Swedish law.
In a recent case, Astrom was able to track down a child rapist in a neighboring Scandinavian country through painstaking analysis of a photograph the offender had distributed on the Internet.
Digital tide
No one knows exactly how much child pornography is on the Internet, but experts agree cases of pedophiles prowling cyberspace in hopes of luring children into off-line sexual encounters are on the increase.
The FBI says online offences against minors appear to be rising 10 percent annually in the United States, and police have identified chat rooms where abusers even provide live pictures of child rape.
"The Internet is unlocking a dark door," said John Carr, author of a report on child pornography that estimates the U.S. child porn market at $2-3 billion a year.
In a bid to stem the tide, Interpol has invested in a massive database of child pornographic images culled from the Internet and elsewhere, available to police in all 179 member countries.
"The purpose of it is not to amass millions and millions of images," said Hamish McCulloch, an officer at Interpol's Trafficking in Human Beings Branch in Lyon, France. "The purpose is to identify children who are being sexually abused."
Advanced software developed in Sweden enables high-speed comparison of pictures, helps determine if photographs are old or new, and allows the cross-referencing of evidence. It has helped trace a number of victims.
McCulloch said the technology was useful in analyzing images to establish in which countries acts of abuse were committed—a prerequisite for launching a criminal investigation.
"For example, you have a clock," he said. "If you spend enough time, you could identify where that clock was manufactured."
High-tech war
Carol Howlett, deputy assistant commissioner of the London Metropolitan Police Serious Crime Group, said British police had taken the database idea a step further with a facial-recognition system that has so far helped to identify 17 abused children.
Sharon Girling, a detective constable with Britain's National Crime Squad, said it would be technically possible for Internet service providers (ISPs) to scan their own content against that database and filter out any matching material.
Under British law, ISPs can be required to remove illegal material from their servers if ordered by police, but are not responsible for monitoring their own content.
"Technically, we could shut a lot of this down, but it would be illegal to do so," said Girling, who was involved in Operation Cathedral, a 1998 investigation into the cross-border Wonderland Club child pornography ring.
More than 100 people were arrested in 12 countries in that Interpol-led operation, at the time the largest multinational effort in policing history.
Nearly everyone says such an international approach is the only way to go in battling the scourge of Internet child pornography, with pedophiles increasingly shifting images to servers in countries where law enforcement is lax.
"It started as a battle," Girling said. "It's now become a war. Hopefully, we can bring it back down to a battle."
