Microsoft Collaborates On Child Porn Buster

pmike_bauer writes "Microsoft and Canadian authorities on Thursday launched a software program designed to help police worldwide hunt down child porn traffickers. Police departments can use it free of charge." From the article: "The program was developed by Microsoft Canada, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police and Toronto police, with the help of the Department of Homeland Security, Scotland Yard and Interpol." Update: 04/08 18:09 GMT by Z : Modified to reflect the fact that it's not Open Source.

Comments

Noble cause, but

[TequilaJunction]

WTF does Homeland Security have to do with this?

Re:The real world just got a whole lot scarier

[swillden]

No, it didn't. If anything it just got the tiniest bit safer.

This isn't some massive database of everyone everywhere, if you RTFA you'll see that it's just a database of kiddie porn clues. Like the example given (with a lot of my own guessing/extrapolation): Cops bust a kiddie porn web site and grab a bunch of photos but can't identify who made them. Separately, cops monitor a chat forum where kiddie pornographers hang out and someone posts a (legal) image. Both sets of images are put into CETS along with information about where and when they were obtained. The system matches the images and determines they were taken with the same camera (EXIF headers or whatever). Some other clue ties in a credit card number so that the owner of the camera can be tracked down. The result is enough information and evidence to get a search warrant, which in turn provides enough evidence for an arrest and conviction.

This sounds to me like a tool to automate part of the analysis that detectives do every day, connecting apparently unrelated bits of information that have been legitimately collected. But the system only knows what the investigating agencies put into it, and there's no indication of any kind of massive effort to connect it to other databases, or to put information about everyone in it. Such efforts would likely be counterproductive, since the volume of information would overwhelm the system's ability to cross-check everything.

I'm a Libertarian who doesn't believe we should give up any of our rights to privacy just to make cops jobs' easier, but I really don't see any problem with this, and not just because it's kiddie porn. I think police *should* be using such tools to cross-check bits of information about suspects of all sorts of crimes. I'm all for criminals getting caught and punished under the law. We have some bad laws that criminalize some things that shouldn't be criminal, but the solution to that isn't to handicap the cops, it's to fix the laws.