The founder of the COPINE database, an Irish database of child porn that's said to have helped to bag hundreds of pedophiles and child porners around the world, may have found a home with Interpol.
That's what the database founder, Rachel O'Connell, told the Irish media this week about COPINE, which helps identify children in Internet child porn images. O'Connell also said researchers were always hoping to make such a database an international crime fighting tool.
“The database has gone off to Anders Persson in Interpol, that is its natural home," O'Connell was quoted as saying in the Irish press. "It is best placed there, that is where you are going to get the best value out of a resource like that.”
The COPINE database was transferred a few months ago, reportedly, from its University College Cork base to Interpol's offices in France, making it more accessible to European and international law enforcement, according to IrelandOnline. Interpol is also believed to be taking over the funding of COPINE, which stands for Combating Pedophilic Information Networks in Europe.
Adult Sites Against Child Pornography executive director Joan Irvine applauded the database transfer.
"In the U.S., you have the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, which is really the clearinghouse for all information as it relates to child protection," she told AVNOnline.com. "And, in Europe, with trading members of INHOPE, they trade information among themselves, but there has not been a centralized database. By going to Interpol, it's going to probably act like the clearinghouse for the European communities. And, because [Interpol is] a law enforcement organization, it's most likely the best place for this information to be housed."
University College Cork told IrelandOnline Interpol was the most logical home for COPINE and that the transfer had nothing to do with funding issues. "The original funds were to cover research development," an unidentified university spokesman told the news site, 'it was never about the database but it became a necessary output in order to do the research.”
But UCC Professor Max Taylor and a small team are said to be continuing pedophilia and child porn research from their base at the university.
COPINE has been used in several significant child porn investigations including Operation Amethyst, which among others caught Tim Allen (not to be confused with the U.S. actor), the husband of television chef Darina Allen, downloading child porn.
O'Connell said her next project is working with Microsoft to warn children about cyberstalking and pedophiles' online grooming techniques used on children in cyberspace.
