OREM, Utah - SurfRecon Inc. is developing software to help law enforcement officials identify pornographic images with minimal exposure to the images.
Vice President of Sales Andrew Brandt said the software searches computers for images and compares them to a database of known pornographic images. For legal reasons, the software does not store pornographic pictures. It stores only each image's identifying markings, called a hash, a series of 32 letters and numbers that are unique to each picture.
When images are found and matched to a known pornographic hash, they are brought up in thumbnail size and blurred, so officers do not have to view the images.
"Lots of time, you can tell it's pornography without it being completely clear, so you can blur out the images," Brandt said.
When new pornographic images are found, Brandt explained, officers can add them to the software's database and help other agencies identify images. The software also uses Web crawlers to scan known pornography websites for new images.
The database currently contains information on more than 7 million images, with about 600,000 added daily.
The idea for the program, which has been in development for 15 months, came while SurfRecon was working on a project with CP80, a nonprofit group dedicated to fighting pornography.
"As we were working on that project," Brandt said, "we realized that the people who were suffering the most were law enforcement."
Brandt said the program is used by several Utah law enforcement agencies and national agencies such as the FBI, National Security Agency and Department of Homeland Security. He said the software also has been used in the United Kingdom, France and Australia.
Brandt said the software is still in testing and has bugs to be worked out. The program marked certain company logos, including that of Google, as pornography because they were on porn websites, but Brandt said individuals and law enforcement agencies can help improve the software.
In response to demand from law enforcement, Brandt said, the software soon will have a database of pornographic video.
Mark Dell'Ergo, investigation supervisor for the Utah County attorney's Office Bureau of Investigations, has used the program in his department for almost seven months. The department has been testing the software to help streamline it and make it more effective for law enforcement, and plans to use the software in investigations within a month.
"It's still in the beta testing phase, but I've used it on my home computers and work computers, and it's pretty useful," Dell'Ergo said.
One of the most beneficial features of the program is that it shields officers from having to view adult pornography while searching for child pornography for an investigation.
Dell'Ergo said a friend said he would pay any price to never view explicit sexual images.
"It's kind of a soul-saving tool, if you will," he said, adding that sex crimes officers may be susceptible to post-traumatic stress disorder.
The program also will help officers check up on sex offenders. Sex offenders' computers must be checked periodically, but officers often do not know where to start. The software scans the entire computer for images and brings them to one location, so the pictures can be checked, even if they are not immediately matched to known hashes.
Vice President of Marketing Matt Yarro said the company hopes to release a home edition by April 1. The home edition would allow users to rate images they have found.
SurfRecon would like to allow individuals to contribute to the database as officers do, Brandt said, but the program will have to be altered to avoid tampering by pornographers.
In the home version, users will be able to mark images as safe, sexual or pornographic, but different users may have different opinions. SurfRecon plans to devise algorithms to make it harder to label images as safe, in order to prevent pornographers from incorrectly labeling images.
"We would much rather an image be marked as pornography or child pornography than a pornographic image marked as safe," Brandt said.
All versions of the software will be available free through June 1, the end of beta testing, after which there will be a monthly subscription fee to fund constant updates to the software.
The program can be downloaded at SurfRecon.com.
