While the Internet has facilitated communication to reach previously unimagined levels, it has also played a huge role in the growth of dark activities, such as child pornography and human trafficking.
So says Sam Doerr, senior manager of Microsoft's Digital Crimes Unit, speaking this week at the Microsoft Security Development Conference, in San Fransico. She says paedophiles have formed massive online communities, aimed at sharing child pornography, and the scale of the problem is escalating dramatically. "Since 2002, there have been 30 million reports of child pornography."
The flip side of the coin is that the unit is using technology to help fight this terrible trend, which is even more disturbing, as the images are increasingly of younger children, with 10% of all images of babies and toddlers. And the images are getting increasingly violent, she says.
Doerr says the unit is working on photo DNA, or image matching technology, which creates signatures of photos and shares them with online service providers, in conjunction with the National Centre for Missing and Exploited Children. This enables them to detect when child pornography images are shared online.
While far from a silver bullet, the technology is a reliable means of detecting known images, which helps improve the quality of reports to law enforcement, and gives them strong leads. Photo DNA is not a means of finding new images. She says law enforcement is also now using this technology in their own systems to weed out matches, and in this way, they find images previously undiscovered.
Trafficking
Sadly, Doerr says child trafficking is falling through the cracks, and is too often unreported. Not enough is being done, and technology can be used here, too. She says the unit is focusing on technology being used for the advertising and selling of victims, and the searching and purchasing of victims by 'Johns'.
"Technology can be disruptive, too, and we need to come up with stronger interventions. Focusing on these two areas could be potentially really helpful, to find out how perpetrators are doing this."
Unfortunately, unlike child pornography, trafficking is motivated by money, not compulsion. "Gangs are moving away from drugs and towards child trafficking. They do this for several reasons. Firstly, their 'inventory', for want of a better word, can be resold. They can sell the children over and over again. Secondly, it is far harder to catch and prosecute them. We need to change this risk and profit model in order to change the criminal behaviour."
Hopefully technology can help create a fundamental economic wedge, to be used against this.
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