Child porn hunting could become a lot less arduous for Canadian law enforcement, with Microsoft and Canadian authorities launching a joint software package known as the Child Exploitation Tracking System, a program aimed at hunting computer-savvy child porn makers and distributors through credit card purchases, online chat room messages, and arrest and criminal records.
The open-source CETS was developed jointly by Microsoft Canada, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, Toronto police, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, Scotland Yard, and Interpol as an open-source program aimed at putting law enforcement, as Microsoft Canada president David Hemler said at its April 7 unveiling, “on the same level as the bad guys.”
The CETS is “a great use of other data like [credit card] transactions,” said Brandon Shalton, the chief technology officer for the Association of Sites Advocating Child Protection (formerly Adult Sites Against Child Pornography), when reached for comment by AVNOnline.com. Shalton said that the problem of both the producers and the buyers of child porn needs to be addressed.
“ASACP’s route is to uncover the [child porn] websites through the reactive method–of people telling us the leads that we research–and then proactive, to scan for use of ‘banned’ keywords, that turns up additional [child porn] leads, which feeds back into the ‘reactive’ system, and then to find if any of those leads are using affiliate programs that belong to ASACP members for their high pps payouts to inadvertently fund the operator.”
The CETS project began when a Toronto police sex crimes unit member, Detective Sgt. Paul Gillespie, asked Bill Gates himself for help in the child-porn battle, in a January 2003 e-mail that provoked Gates to call on Microsoft Canada to develop software to help law enforcement with the problem. Gillespie told reporters several child porn suspects have already been arrested in initial tests of CETS.
The keys to the CETS’s success, Microsoft said, is the ability to let police departments around the world share and track information regarding suspects and investigations that was previously unlinked. And with the FBI describing a 2,000 percent hike in child porn images online in the past decade and Canadian police estimating that more than 100,000 websites feature imagery of child sex abuse, that linkage is critical in attacking the epidemic.
There was one arrest in Toronto after a tip plugged into the CETS program tied to two prior reports on the suspect, Gillespie said. “When we pulled all three,” he said, “it gave us the ability to physically identify somebody and grounds for an arrest warrant.”
Microsoft has committed $4 million to the CETS program, which Homeland Security deputy assistant secretary of immigration and customs enforcement John P. Clark called the first such program aimed at child protection. Clark said the Department of Homeland Security lent the project expertise because the department has “established tracking systems.”
Child porn chat room information and credit purchases involving another suspect arrested several months earlier had been plugged into the system as well, Gillespie said. "It identified a link between one of those people on the credit card list with one very small consistency in this chat room in the UK," Gillespie said. "Both pieces of the puzzles were put together and out of that we were able to identify somebody—an abuser of a young child taking pictures with his own camera."
