Would you believe the world's largest child porn collection might soon be owned by Uncle Sam? The Justice Department's Child Victim Identification Program, in development, will let law enforcement nationwide use image recognition to compare digital images - building a catalog of thousands of child porn images seized from suspects or collected during online investigations.
"The primary goal is to identify and rescue children who are currently being abused,'' said Mike Netherland, acting director of the Cyber Smuggling Center at the Bureau of Customs and Border Protection, which developed the system, to the Associated Press.
The system will be able to tell whether particular images are new or longtime circulators - and whether any actual child in the image was ever previously spotted by law enforcement or missing children's groups, the AP said. ''When we see a picture that no one has ever seen before," Netherland told reporters, "that's a pretty good sign that we have a new victim we should be trying to find.''
The program came online in January and is expected to be at full strength and catalog capability within the next ninety days, the AP said, eventually including "most" of the child porn images now snaking around the Internet. The program may not yet be able to make a firm individual facial match, the AP added, but it can match shades, shapes, and colors of a new image with possible old images.
But there could be at least one problem with this child porn image catalog - hackers or unscrupulous law enforcement officers abusing it, even if agents can't just browse the system and look at the images. The government plans limited access to images that are not involved in an incumbent investigation, Netherland told the AP, adding that agents won't get the children's identities if they make an image match, they'll be sent to the agency that first identified the child in question.
