Computer-Edited Photos Lead To Child-Porn Locale

Leilah writes "Toronto police have found a new application for computerized photo editing. The police released edited photos on Feb. 3 from a series of child pornography pics in an attempt to locate where the photos may have been taken. Two days later, they have identified the Port Orleans hotel in Disney World as being the location. This seems to be the first time photo editing has been used in law enforcement this way and strikes an interesting line between protecting the victims and being able to get public tips. It looks like it may be used quite heavily in the future given this success."

Comments

Double-Edged Sword?

[fembots]

Will criminals take this as a warning and digitally edit out the background (or replace it with vanila ones)?

Re:Double-Edged Sword?

[Class Act Dynamo]

I understand what you are saying, but that shot was not set up for special lighting or composition. He was driving somewhere with his son and as he passed that area saw a once in a lifetime shot. He got his camera out, plopped it down and took the picture. Granted, he knew the camera so well that he could prepare the apeture and other settings instinctively in seconds, but he certainly did not spend a lot of time setting that picture up. He said that if he had waited even a few minutes to set it up, it would have been gone.

Creepy pictures

[Lisandro]

...the ones the police edited to leave only the background, that is - you can still see silhouettes here and there. For some reason they made me extremely uneasy.

Homeland Security?

[drayzel]

From the article...
"...prompted his team to alert the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, which dispatched investigators to the alleged crime scene."

Um.. why would they have jurisdiction? I thought they were supposed to be protecting us from terrorists? Wouldn't the FBI be the ones working on this?

I sure don't know my legal jurisdiction rules, anyone care to explain?

~Z

Disney World and Child Exploitation

[Gallenod]

Stop thinking that. This isn't a slam at Disney about making money off of kids.

I work with people who investigate the child sex trade. It's not a surprise that those pictures showed a Disney hotel, as Disney resorts used to be a popular place for child peddlers to hand over the kids they were selling. There are so many kids running around there, who's going to notice that a little girl in a yellow dress comes in with one person and leaves with another?

Disney knew nothing of this at the time, though they're aware of it now. They have a great security team, but they're focused on pickpockets and and the garden variety perverts who want to cop a feel on Snow White, not child traders.

Child porn is a dirty business, perhaps the dirtiest. The people responsible probably get some perverse pleasure from trading their sex toys at a place like Disneyland.

Then again, one thing DHS has done right over the last 18 months is arrest and dispose of over 3,000 of the bastards who trade in kids. It's just too bad disposal only consists of deportation or detention. If any crime deserves the death penalty, sexual abuse of children is it.

(Yeah, I take it personally. I have a nine-year old daughter. If you'd seen what these bastards do with kids, you'd scratch their names on a few bullets, too.)

Sorry about the rant. But this subject touched a nerve or two.

Re:Disney World and Child Exploitation

[Tezkah]

The scary thing is: there have been times when they did this, people DID get the original photos. They distributed digital photos with black bars over the abuse, in order to find the location.

Problem? They forgot to make it impossible to remove the black bars, probably by sending them out as PSDs.

Heres an even worse case of negligence:

Hopefully no one is whipping themselves over this one, because it would be fatal. As it is, it'll probably be fatal to someone's career. Australia's Education Department intended to alert principals to children who are at risk by distributing their faces, cropped photographs from kiddy porn images at the request of the police. But somewhere between human error and bad software, the images didn't get cropped and the emails went out with the full sexual images. Which were opened by 80% of the recipients. Which has the police department groveling in guilt and shame, and promising "a full internal investigation." Read the original story on News.com (Australia): link

Re:Disney World and Child Exploitation

[WhatAmIDoingHere]

Have you ever seen a child without a soul?

If you were abducted when you were 8 years old and some old guy kept you away from everyone, taking your photo and molesting you.. Would you think murder was worse? At least the victim is dead.

It's.. They're both horrible, but a child who was abducted and molested has to REMEMBER it for the rest of their lives.

Re:Disney World and Child Exploitation

[NSash]

Would you say that child abuse is worse than child abuse followed by murder? After all, in the latter case the victim doesn't have to remember it.

Also, since you believe sexually abused children would be better off if they were dead, do you think they should be euthanized?

Child "super model" sites

[Turn-X Alphonse]

It's all fine and dandy doing this sort of thing but theres also many sites which sell themselvs as "Child super model" sites and feature little girls (preteen) in bikinis and panties. Quite often with camel toes and such, right now they are legal (as is buying a nudist video filmed at a 9 year old girl's birthday party!), as long as it isn't sexual then you can have any number of naked children in a photo.

Now I'm not trying to go "OMG KILL IT WITH FIRE!" here, but I think the law needs to be refined a bit to take this exploit out of it. I don't want it to become illegal to have a picture of your family nude (Hell my aunt has some of me and my cousin in the bath completely naked she brings out at "big" birthdays to embrass us both), but these sites are clearly ment to whack off too, it's plain disturbing yet totally legal.

Re:Yes, but?

[Jardine]

Have you ever spent time relating to a nine-year-old child? They dont know what the hell they're doing. If they did, we'd let them vote, drink and buy property, as well as give their consent to engage in sexual activity. But they don't

The hard part is figuring out at what age to draw the line. Most cultures agree that 9 is too young, but the age of consent where I live is 14. Many other places set it at 16, 18, or somewhere between.

The odd thing is that although a 14 year old can consent to sex in this country, taking pictures of that act would be illegal.

If two people under 18 videotape themselves having sex, they could be considered guilty of creating child pornography. A very strange world we live in.

Chucky Cheese

[ajiva]

I took my son to Chucky Cheese (a pizza/arcade place), and on entering they stamped the three of us (my wife, son and I) with a hand stamp with an identical picture. At first I had no idea why they did this, but on exit they checked the stamps on our hands to see if they matched. Then I understood why, it would be really easy to take a kid away from there.

Re:Fine Line? What Fine Line?

[BitterOak]

There is no 'interesting line' between privacy and law enforcement.

Okay. Here's the problem I have with the tactics the Toronto police used here. Nobody's going to want to stay in the hotel room where these indiscretions took place. Who would want to sleep on a bed where a 9 year old girl was raped? The hotel owner's not to blame, so why should they be penelized?

You might say the hotel owner should take some responsibility to police its guests. Fine, but do you want hidden security cameras in the hotel rooms you stay in? Would you mind if the midnight desk clerk sat in the back room secretly looking in on you to make sure you're not doing something illegal? The technology to do this is very inexpensive nowadays, and video cameras can be made incredibly small and easily hideable. We don't want to give hotel owners any incentive to do this, but if this kind of police work becomes routine, I fear it will be inevitable. So much for any privacy in your hotel room.

Re:google this

[poptones]

[i]I'm saying this is very close to child porn to the point where it's softcore porn in some cases.[/i]

Thanks for illustrating my point on a very personal level.

As I said: there are people who wank to pictures of kids in catalogs. There are people who don't even care about the stuff you're demonizing, they want kids wearing Bratz and Powerpuff Girls playing on swings and climbing on monkey bars. So when do we outlaw ALL pictures of children because some pervs want to wank to them?

It's not a fucking "loophole" you moron. It's called freedom of thought. I realize that's a challenge to folks like you, so think of it like this: you just admitted you found these pics akin to "softcore porn." So when do we call the thought police to come haul you in for re-education?

Re:Fark.

[big tex]

There's a line where it's effective, though.

In that linked gallery, there's a shot where a person on a bed has been blurred out. If they did a real good job, it would be another bed. As it is, the picture has the feel of a murder scene with a white sheet over the body - you can't actually see it, but you see enough to get your blood boiling and actually want to do something and catch the bastard.