Slashdot Mirror
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."
Will criminals take this as a warning and digitally edit out the background (or replace it with vanila ones)?
Rock that crushes, Paper & Scissors that don't matter.
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
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.
TLR
A man no more knows his destiny than a tea leaf knows the history of the East India Company
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.
I like muppets.
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.
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.
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.
If I can be modded down for being a troll, can I be modded up for being an orc, or a balrog?
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.
I think I need a new sig here.