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Google Aims To Cull Child Porn By Algorithm, Not Human Review
According to a story at VentureBeat, "Google is working on a new database of flagged images of child porn and abuse that can be shared with other search engines and child protection organizations. The database will help create systems that automatically eliminate that sort of content. ...
If the database is used effectively, any flagged image in the database would not be searchable through participating search engines or web hosting providers. And maybe best of all, computers will automatically flag and remove these images without any human needing to see them." Here's the announcement.
What is the point of automatically removing child porn so it's not searchable. That's not the problem with child porn.
The problem with child porn is real children are being really abused to make it.
Making it "not searchable" doesn't stop that. Arresting the people who are making it does.
If they mean "all underage" and not just "blatantly children", good luck with that. There are no characteristics that will distinguish between 17 and 18, or even older. What is the software going to think of Kat Young, for example? What about models who are just small?
Also are they going to attempt to sort through drawings at all, considering they are legal in some jurisdictions and not others?
I sense false positives and angry models in Google's future.
How is the Riemann zeta function like Trump rallies? Both have an endless number of trivial zeros.
How do we know it will only flag illegal content? What if iPhone gets flagged and only Android phones shows up in searches? Intentionally or not. This is just like when they came up with the idea to avid searching for certain words. I instantly stated "will this ban the party, which writes on their homepage that they will increase the jailtime for such offenses?".
Don't get me wrong. I think it's great if the intended pictures aren't available or better yet, they aren't made in the first place. However my experience with auto detection tells me that it always include some false positives.
This is a really good idea.
How about instead you compile a list of where these images are HOSTED.....and then DO SOMETHING about that? Notify local law enforcement of the images and give all garnered info about said images to them.
Police are legally allowed to possess contraband in the course of an investigation; private-sector entities aren't, absent some exception in the law permitting them to. For example, you can't keep a large collection of drugs for research purposes (e.g. training drug-detecting sensors) unless you apply for special permits.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
Let me be clear about this. I DO NOT condone child pornography at all; I find it foul and disgusting. But there is a over-reaching that I think may go on here. If I purchase a server and I engage in a P2P network, then it is not Google nor any one else's business what I transmit. If the server is a public server or one owned by a company (such as Google), then I would agree they have every right to remove such foul content from their servers.
Yes I would rather that the people who engage in this be stopped. But whenever programs like this are created they tend to start out being put to use with the best of intentions, but will likely be used for other more nefarious purposes. If this algorithm is used to sniff out child pornography, it could be modified to sniff out a information about a political party and quell it, or news that a government agency doesn't want people to know about.
With all that has recently come to light about the spying by the US Govt. can you really say that this with 100% certainty that this technology won't be abuse for other purposes? I can't.
Again I DO NOT condone Child Pornography.
Life takes interesting turns, but the most interest is when you're off the beaten path.
Removing child pornogragphy is a laudable goal.
We just have to realize that it won't stop at that. From the what the article says it seems like that technology could be used for any image. At the very least I expect we'll see general copyright enforcement from this. Worst case we will see things like various regimes being able to use this to suppress images they don't like. Oh you have pictures of us slaughtering our opponents well we better put those on the bad list.
Do you think it could be possible to reconstruct those images by brute-force trying all combinations until you get a positive answer from the database ?
It would take time, but doesn't sound impossible...
My reaction was something similar. I question the value of a search engine when it is no longer neutral. Now I will only see what Google has decided it is in my interest to see. This technology will be used in the future to skew political searches for example, or to favor one company's products over another's. (If it isn't already.) Now if they said 'we are using Google's search engine to catch child pornographers' I would say good for you please continue.
This posting is provided 'AS IS' without warranty of any kind, implied or otherwise.
This will increase child abuse. As soon as it becomes invisible, perpetrators are completely free to do whatever they like, as the public will not be aware it is a problem. The reason is that it addresses the wrong problem. Distribution of CP is a minor issue. Creation of CP (and all the child abuse that is not documented or does not end up on the Internet) is the real problem. It seems politicians have become so focused on distribution of CP, that nothing is being done anymore to fight actual child abuse. After all, distribution of CP gives nice and easy convictions and to hell with the children themselves.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
Google and other search engines filter content already - like Google's "safe search" options to block images showing naked people to appear in their image search. The technology exists, and "safe search" appears to actually analyse images to judge the content, while this child porn database only compares file hashes against known offending content.
The technology is there, it's not new, this is just a new application of it. And I have to say I'm quite confident that it's not being used for political purposes, partly because it's Google themselves that take the initiative, not the government.
Also if it becomes known that Google actively filters certain political content or skews search results intentionally to push a political agenda, they may end up losing their #1 spot as search engine really fast (especially if at the same time the competition, most notably Bing because that's the only one that I know wiith serious money behind it, finally gets their act together and provides a proper alternative).
This is certainly, unarguably, a useful tool that can be used in order to accomplish a worthy societal goal; I don't think our criteria for such things should be: "Well, it could be used for bad things, so we should stick our heads in the sand instead." No cars because they might be driven by bank robbers! No knives because they might be used to cut people instead of carrots! etc.
In any case, content recognition algorithms already exist and are already used for nefarious purposes. Why not use those tools towards a worthy end?
I think we should be praising and supporting any organisation that is trying to protect innocent children from being subjected to this. We should not only lobby governments and organisations to do more to stop the practice and bring these people to justice but also praying for the poor children that are at the centre of this.
Also, spare a thought for the poor Google employees who are going to have to test this algorithm. I sincerely hope that Google ensure that these people are given any support and counselling they might need.
sheesh
See the old story, by CM Kornbluth called the marching morons
The age of consent in spain is 14, in the uk 16, in the USA 18 , so if there's a picture of a nude 15 or 17 year old in what country does it get to decided if its legal?
While this may be a laudable effort I have the sneaking feeling the USA once again will be pushing its legal system and morality onto the rest of the world.
You are absolutely correct that this won't make child porn disappear. But from Google's standpoint, it will help keep their top-notch search engine (and other search engines) from being used to find it. In addition, it's more than making it "not searchable"; RTFA. This will also have "hooks" into law enforcement and ISPs.
It seems unlikely that there is much (or any at all) CP that can be found using a search engine (have not tried, but others have), as everything findable with a search engine is easily reported to law enforcement and traceable back to the ones putting it there. This strongly indicates that Google wanted (or was coerced) to implement image censorship and is just using CP as an easy and plausible to the clueless excuse. It is, of course, completely bogus. Once you look at the facts, it makes zero sense. And it is by far not the first attempt to justify a general censorship infrastructure with CP. The infamous German stop-signs come to mind (by now abolished as completely ineffectual for the stated purpose, but the amoral scum that established the law is still in office).
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
I don't think they're going to be using computer vision to try to identify child porn, they'll probably be using a database of hashes (either file hashes, or some kind of "image hash" that can identify pics even if they've been resized, recompressed, added a watermark etc) of known child porn. It's slightly helpful and has a vanishingly small chance of false positives.
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
The technology is out there. It will only get better (by a magnitudes of a 1000) in the next decade or so. It can be used by governments for all sorts of purposes - so the solution is not to limit the technology (which can't be done) but by limiting the government (which can be done).
If you're scared of your govt then you need to further restrict its powers
Vote 3rd Party in 2016 and beyond
"It's research, I swear"
Next step
A goatse detection algorithm?
I think that's stretching things a bit.
In my 15 years on the Internet I've seen A LOT of nude imagery, but never ONCE come across child pornography. I get the feeling it's extremely rare, and the people who do find it spend a lot of hard time actually digging it up. What has happened now that urges Google to find new ways of combatting CP? Is there a sudden increase in posting of CP on public, easily accessed and indexed adult web sites?
Signature intentionally left blank.
The summary "By Algorithm, Not Human Review" implies that the algorithm is somehow evaluating pictures. In fact from TFA it is clear all it is doing is looking for copes of known existing images by hash-code. If it were examining images I would be worried about false positives, but as it just looks for know child porn I cannot see any down-side - this is a good move.
Judges have already declared that porn is basically undefinable, and I disagree with them that you know it when you see it.
Added to this that you cannot tell the difference between a 15 yo and a 21 100% of the time, sure 95% you would get it right with that big of a range, but not always.
And trying to tell the difference between 18 and 17 or 16 if more like a 50% chance of getting it right, regardless of if you are a computer or a human being.
Troll is not a replacement for I disagree.
So google is trying to control the supply of CP images? That itself will only increase the price of these images or worse violation of these children. If google is seriously wanting to help, they should help law enforcer to track down these people and bring them to justice.
1. Upload to Picasa picture of kids at birthday pool party holding balloon animals with long noses.
2. End up on floor being beaten by local SWAT team.
3. ??????
4. Prison
If Slashdot were chemistry it would look like this:Cadaverine
If this system were 100% effective and preventing all known CP images from being searchable or even downloaded, then wouldn't that drive demand for brand new images to be created that don't trip the filters?
It would be a good thing to keep people from clicking on this sort of thing by accident ("accident?")
I'm not too sure about that part.
Consider a world where child porn exists but is totally hidden from everyone else's eyes.
If people don't know that something is going on, or how prevalent it is, then they're less likely to take or support any action to stop it.
Don't get me wrong, i not saying everyone should be exposed to CP, all i'm saying is that hiding it away may make the problem worse.
Now I will only see what Google has decided it is in my interest to see.
They've been doing that for years.
What is the point of automatically removing child porn so it's not searchable. That's not the problem with child porn.
The problem with child porn is real children are being really abused to make it. Making it "not searchable" doesn't stop that. .
The point, I would expect, is that by removing the channel by which it circulates puts a barrier between the demand and the source, and hence reduces the incentive to make it. That would reduces the amount which is made.
Arresting the people who are making it does.
I don't think that this proposal was intended to be instead of arresting the people who make it.
With that said, your point "The problem with child porn is real children are being really abused to make it." is a good one. By that argument, any such material which was not produced using real children-- anime, comics, art, even photorealistic digital modelling-- should not be included in the category.
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
i think the problem with this system lies not in its intent but in its effects. I'm less concerned about whether it is searchable than about the abuses involved in creating it. I'm also concerned about the fact that we've seen charges involving 14-17 year old girls sending 14-17 year old boys their own pictures via their cellphones, marking them as felons and sex offenders for life. We need to figure out what is and isn't acceptable in our society and make it clear where that line is before matters get worse. There's true "child porn" and then there's "child" porn. There is a vast difference between the two, and while I'm not in favor of either personally, I do have a problem with treating them as if they were the same.
In SOVIET RUSSIA... erm...NSA AMERICA, the Internet logs onto YOU!
And if anybody protests, they can just report them for searching CP.
At which point plausible deniability adds reasonable doubt. See also CP (disambiguation).
How come corporate Anti-Virus scanners don't scan (or have an add-on module to scan) for signatures of illicit images? If various government agencies have a collection of known infringing images, signatures could be generated, like viruses. Sure, there would likely be a way to fool it, but it would be step in the right direction.
Competition Good, Monopoly Bad.
of course, child porn/abuse is illegal
Singing "Happy Birthday to You" in public is illegal too. There are cases where current law is out of sync with social norms.
Good grief, how hard is it to not be paranoid is this day and age? They don't want child porn to show up on their searches so they find a way to flag the images and not display them : that's it. If there comes a time when the technology is used malevolently to suppress political ideas, then you'll be able to bitch about it but going all "tinfoil hat" on it because there might me an hypothetical use which you don't like is just ridiculous.
At the moment, Google uses mostly human beings to review flagged content so if their algorithm makes those reviewers sleep better at night, I'm all for it.
I'm more worried they'll go after the loli stuff.
If they went after Lowly Worm, that'd be Scarry.
In building an algorythim that can detect CP. Then they can combine it with their location detection methods to identify where it was produced. The big question is, are they then going to inform the LEO's based on the suspicion and ruin an individual who did not commit a crime? Are they becoming the new Thought Police ala "Orwells 1984"?
Some of the things that Google has done are worthy efforts but this has the seeds of some serious abuse right from the beginning because if Google can do this for images, then they can do it for Music, Videos and everything else that people want censored.
Mod me up/Mod me down: I wont frown as I've no crown
What about borderline content such as non-pornographic nudity, sexually explicit drawings of imaginary minors, and pornographic images of adults who look like teenagers? It's likely these will be branded as "child pornography", leading to images being suppressed that are legal in many jurisdictions including the United States.
Once service providers start censoring content based on third party reports of alleged child pornography, it becomes much easier to supress other content as well. Organizations such as RIAA and MPAA would love to be able to flag arbitrary content as infringing and have ISPs block such content automatically, bypassing even the need to file DMCA takedown notices. Think of how often YouTube videos are incorrectly flagged as examples copyright infringement and extend this to all ISPs who check against Google's database, and you can see the problem.
ISPs who participate in this system delegate the right to make judgment calls on material that isn't obviously illegal to the maintainers of a central database whose judgment may or may not be consistent with local law. Anything in the database is assumed to be illegal regardless of its actual legal status, and the ISPs just follow along instead of deciding individually whether or not the content is likely to survive a legal challenge. Once the system becomes widespread, ISPs may even feel it is necessary to follow it to avoid secondary liability for content posted by their users.
This is yet another example of a worrying trend, where content alleged to be illegal or infringing is removed without due process and often with little regard for the law and relevant jurisprudence. It's no way to run a network that for many has become a primary means of communication.
Internet users deserve better than to have their content blocked according to extralegal judgments with perhaps no bearing on local law, little or no chance of appeal, and no way to establish legal precedents protecting certain kinds of content.
"In prison you just have to shut your eyes and take it. Here you have to shut your eyes and give it."
If they get their employees deputized or otherwise "blessed" by the powers that be, then it's okay.
You know who else is allowed to see child porn?
Lawmakers and their staff members in the performance of official duties that require looking at it.
According to someone I talked to in Washington a number of years ago, if a Congressperson needs some porn pulled for official use, the staff member he picks to get it for him is usually an older woman who presumably would have no interest in the contents beyond what is needed to verify it is what the Congressperson needs.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
Also if it becomes known that Google actively filters certain political content or skews search results intentionally to push a political agenda, they may end up losing their #1 spot as search engine really fast (especially if at the same time the competition, most notably Bing because that's the only one that I know wiith serious money behind it, finally gets their act together and provides a proper alternative).
Bing? Hardly. I'm betting more on DuckDuckGo powered by Yandex.
They could give the algorithm free range over their entire database of images and see if it flags the ones that are already flagged. But I agree, I don't see how you could be sure the extra ones it flagged or didn't flag are correct without viewing the images.
What is the point of automatically removing child porn so it's not searchable. That's not the problem with child porn.
The problem with child porn is real children are being really abused to make it.
Making it "not searchable" doesn't stop that. Arresting the people who are making it does.
Similar statements can be made for most other crimes.
If you make it hard to obtain drugs, only those really determined to get them will go to the effort.
If you make it really hard to rob bank, only those really determined will bother.
If you make it really hard to find child pornography, only those really determined will keep searching, the rest will give up.
Of those who are looking for child porn for a sexual thrill, you've got several categories:
There is also the issue of "perceived demands drives supply" - if those producers who are doing it for revenue or for the thrill of seeing their "hit count" go up have more customers, on the whole the supply of "new" child porn is likely to be higher than if they believe there is little demand for their images. More "new" child porn being distributed in the future pretty much means more actual, real-world abuse in the future.
My very strong hunch is that making it very hard to find child porn will be a net win for children, even if in particular situations you may have significant numbers of children whose dads molest them in person because he can't find his "methodone/child porn."
Arresting the people who are making it does.
I'm all with you but if these people are in a country with weak law enforcement in this area, there's not much that Interpol or *insert child-porn-hating country with good law enforcement here* can do in the short term to put the abuser behind bars.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
I get to see the REAL "dark Internet" every time my ISP's service goes out. *cue rimshot*
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
I doubt that any sane person would have their browser start up with such things (even it they were into it). With that in mind, I would wonder how that happened.
Either a virus/hijack or something as simple as some site changing the start page would be my guess, but would be scary as heck for a normal person. I could see some sick-minded people jacking other people's PC for lulz with such stuff, or just to taint the pool a bit. At the various least it warrants DBAN and a full reinstall, but in many cases it might be safest just to scrap the drive.
At least it was visible. Worse would be if they were using hidden iframes or something like that to cause cache-tainting...
Thankfully I've not run into anything like that on a personal machine. I did once work on a win2k box where an idiot contractor preferred to turn on anon FTP rather than creating himself an account, and left it on over the weekend. I never looked at the actual content stored on the box, but the filenames were repulsive enough that it got new drives and the old ones got the drill.
In the early 1980s there were only two practical ways to transfer child porn: "Locally," which meant in person, by local courier, or by a "drop" or similar means, or "non-local" by courier, shipper, or the Post office.
Finding other people to trade the stuff with in a way that the cops wouldn't easily find you was also very difficult.
The US Postal Service inspectors and other police agencies were so effective that by the early 1980s it was said that child porn trading through the mail was virtually wiped out, AND that police were finding virtually zero "new" images.
The advent of the computer scanner, particularly the color scanner, changed all of that. Now people could use computers to send images to each other 1-on-1 or via invite-only bulletin boards and, well, I don't need to go on from there.
I remember the "bulletin board lists" of the 1980s. The "adult" boards were typically marked or in a separate list. I can't help but wonder how many of those had "secret, invite only" areas that held illegal images. If you know, please don't tell me. Unless the answer is "0" I don't want to know.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
there was less alcohol during prohibition (a 30% reduction).
So THAT'S why Grandpa complained that the bootleg booze he bought tasted 30% watered down!
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
At least this way reduces the number of workers they have which require serious therapy after viewing those images for manual filtering purposes;
This actually makes sense.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
Why don't they implement a filter for gay images? Or for all that Hollywood does not approve? Will governments be given some sort of "plug-in" access so they can remove what does not follow the state policy?
I didn't click on the link, but based on the domain-name this actually might be marginally on-topic.
+1 on-topic
-infinity flamebait
The question nobody will dare answer here and really nobody here wants to know is does the person who took the photograph get "+5 years - jailbait" or "+ 50 years - much too young to qualify as jailbait". I'm just going to assume "neither" so I can sleep at night.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
If more than a few minutes of screen-time of a feature film were similar to a given image or video clip, would that film receive an NC-17 (United States) or equivalent (non-US) rating based on sexual content or sexual content in combination with other content (e.g. sexual violence, etc.).
For a video longer than about an hour, would the video as a whole receive an NC-17 or equivalent rating based on sexual content or sexual content in combination with other content (e.g. sexual violence, etc.)?
If the answer is "yes" then it's almost certainly porn in the legal sense of the word.
If the answer is "no" then it may or may not be "porn" in the legal sense of the word but IMHO it is deserving of "free speech" protection in countries with "free speech" protections as strong as those in the United States.
One modification that would apply in "non porn" sexually suggestive images of minors or which appeared to be minors:
If the actors or characters in the film are believed by the rating agency to be underage (18 in the US) or they appeared to be underage (or the ages were ambiguous), then modify the above to be "if the movie was re-shot so the actors and characters were believed to be of legal age and they appeared to be of legal age" to remove the situation where a given scene would be "rated R" if it had adult actors and characters but "NC-17" if the actors or characters were either minors or their status as adults was not clear.
All of the above applies to live-action shots. It's my understanding that in the United States at least, the Supreme Court has ruled that non-obscene hand-drawn and computer-drawn imagery which does not rely on an actual child being filmed is outside the scope of "child pornography" laws because it is protected as "free speech."
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
Most models are just small. The average female porn star is a 5'5" brunette woman who weighs 117lbs and has B-cup breasts, and measures 34"-24"-34". So half are smaller. The lightest is apparenly only 74lbs.
Beta is broken and the link to classic doesn't work. Stop wasting our time or there won't be anybody left here.
"Look at us fight CP!! (Pay no attention to the NSA man behind our curtain.)"
Kinda like there was suddenly a bumper crop of bomb and airplane threats the first few weekdays after Snowden broke.
Well, maybe not Google but the U.S. Department of Justice. They have a database of all child pornography images known to law enforcement. Whenever there is a prosecution, the images go to them to determine if there are any new ones. They also try to identify who the child actually is with some success. So, in conjunction with them, it would not be difficult to create a database of "images" that Google is proposing. The question is why it's taken them so long? This DOJ database has been around for quite a while.
It's really quite a simple choice: Life, Death, or Los Angeles.
If 16 year-old little Johnny is downloading porn at home, it is not unreasonable to think he might want to see images of naked 16 year-old girls, especially if he already has in real life (which is not illegal if consensual). Having the Google child porn block might save little Johnny's father from having to spend 20 years in prison. I have children, so I would definitely use it.
Yes, this is the most likely route they're taking. My fear is that this may actually promote the creation of new child porn. Google only knows to filter for hashes of images they already have, so this would add more value to the having the newest, latest stuff that is not in the database yet.
I don't think it'll make any difference, most of the "market" for this stuff is happening on darknets and the content is just spilling over onto the Web. If Google can filter it out it's no real loss, unless CP sites are somehow operating profitably in the open.
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
Not necessarily. The key distinction appears to be whether or not the images are legally obscene according to the so-called Miller test. Obscenity has never enjoyed constitutional protection, so ultimately the PROTECT Act of 2003 changes nothing.
Besides, USA is not the whole world.
"In prison you just have to shut your eyes and take it. Here you have to shut your eyes and give it."
That is some really bad logic.
Good-bye
I consider that to be a real problem with the current laws. There are some data, which can be used for good or for bad purposes. Google has lots of data, they also have the computing architecture to store and process all of this data, and they have the expertise. I firmly believe Google is in a better position to do this sort of data mining than authorities. It is not just about images of child abuse, but also about correlating that with other data, which would not be illegal on its own.
If Google by performing mining across a little bit of child pornography along with lots of legal data is able to produce an output, which can track down the people who were abusing the child in the first place, then I consider that to be a good use of the data, regardless of what the law says about that practice.
The potential for Google to help track down some of these kids and get them out of the abuse is so important, that it is unfortunate that such efforts are jeapordized by the current laws. That makes it only so much nicer to hear that Google is doing an effort in this area. Whether Google is breaking the law or not in the current effort is not important to me, as the goal of the effort is to go after much worse crimes.
I consider abuse of children to be a much worse crime than possession of child pornography. Most people agree that it is worse, but some people seem to think it is not that much worse. Would the average person think it was ok to let 100 people guilty of possession of child pornography go without punishment, if it meant one more person guilty of child abuse could get caught?
Do you care about the security of your wireless mouse?
No, it isn't are you trying to detect traces of drugs? Why not simply work with microscopic amounts?
Ezekiel 23:20
Because you only need a little of a *specific* drug to be able to detect that drug. If you want to create some sort of sensor that detects *all* drugs in general, you need small quantities of *every* drug, to be able to discover similarities. This is impossible, probably, because 'drugs' is to broad a concept.
Similarly, with child porn, you'd need only one sample of every instance of child porn. There's no use keeping 20 copies of the same image. But because the smallest amount of each instance is that instance itself, you need to keep 1 copy of as much instances as possible.
This is really common sense, so I actually don't even know why I'm explaining such a simple concept.
How does Google get away with storing so much CP? Shouldn't this be handled by some gov entity?
Is this going to flag baby bath tub photos as porn? Or is there an algorithm to detect penetration or other signs of exploitation?
"According to these evidences, that I can not, by law, show to anyone, but that get flagged by the new GoogleThinkOfTheChildren algorithm, your picture named ProofOfPoliceAbuse.jpg is actually child porn and needs to be censored."
Now that people accept the idea that the NSA can read anything in Google, how long will it take them to accept the idea that it also has a write access?
The Wise adapts himself to the world. The Fool adapts the world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the Fool.
Sounds like another trojan horse guised as somehow good for society.
-- Jimtown Kelly
Also, Google's engineers LIKE nifty algorithms. They like to play around and see if they can get a computer to do X, whether that's speech recognition, driverless cars, whatever. Once the engineer had a working algorithm, the suits could choose between two options:
A) show results with child porn
B) show results without child porn
Once you have the option, B seems to be a fairly obvious choice.