Slashdot Mirror
Google Spots Explicit Images of a Child In Man's Email, Tips Off Police
mrspoonsi writes with this story about a tip sent to police by Google after scanning a users email. A Houston man has been arrested after Google sent a tip to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children saying the man had explicit images of a child in his email, according to Houston police. The man was a registered sex offender, convicted of sexually assaulting a child in 1994, reports Tim Wetzel at KHOU Channel 11 News in Houston. "He was keeping it inside of his email. I can't see that information, I can't see that photo, but Google can," Detective David Nettles of the Houston Metro Internet Crimes Against Children Taskforce told Channel 11. After Google reportedly tipped off the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, the Center alerted police, which used the information to get a warrant.
The great things google can offer, 1984 saves the children!
(Yes it's good that pedophiles get hurt - But there is a very very bad precedent here...)
_ _ _ Go for the eyes Boo! GO FOR THE EYES!
This is chilling, not for pedophiles, fuck them, but for the average citizen. While, I absolutely believe it's google's job to report illegal activity they accidentally uncover to the police, this appears google is actively searching your e-mails for things to forward to the police, and that's a chilling thought for free speech, freedom, and prevention of abuse of power.
Both to the pedophile and to the illusion of privacy people had when using Gmail.
(They have an obligation to report child porn if they find it, but they don't have an obligation to look. My suspicion is Google is not happy about what happened.)
Don't waste your vote! Vote for whoever you want, unless you live in a swing state it won't matter anyways
Lay your own cable to all your friends houses, then run your own encrypted email server.
Then learn to accept that the NSA installed a hardware backdoor in your router and is reading your emails (and now they are monitoring your for suspected terrorist activities), and China installed one in your computer hardware and are doing the same.
Troll is not a replacement for I disagree.
An automated tool probably flagged the image, hopeful it wasn't simply probable nudity but probable nudity combined with some other alert, maybe something in the body of the text. Humans probably only review flagged images. The system is working as google has always intended, go read the terms of use. Working with local law enforcement when google deems it appropriate or legally required probably falls under what you refer to as "etc".
Read the full article. There's an agency ("National Center for Missing & Exploited Children") that provides hashes of known child porn images and videos to companies like Google. I don't think it's outside Google's purview to ensure files with hashes appearing on that list don't reside on their servers. Contrary to what the peanut gallery here has to say, Google aren't opening up individual mailboxes for a quick squiz. Not to mention that even if they aren't looking inside mailboxes for these images, they probably do scan messages traversing their network (i.e. incoming/outgoing) for files with known hashes.
They probably found a few thousand by automated scanning, and then selected one that actually had abused children 20 years in the past (and paid for it), because that will kill all reason in the general public. The aim, is rather obviously, to slowly break it to the public that all email content gets scanned. Of course it is in a good cause, like fighting illegal pixels and imaginary terrorists! (Can't do anything about people that actually hurt children, that would be far too expensive. And while the FBI has done its best to create "terrorists", they just cannot deliver enough...) Next, they will be going after people without priors, then anything "inappropriate" and finally, even badmouthing some politician in a private email will get you a visit from your friendly neighborhood SWAT team, after all you could be planning mass-murder.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
that this was discovered via a known hash of known child pornagraphy images.
it seems to me that google must keep a hash table of alot of things sitting around on it's drives,
using hashes to reduce redundant storage requirements means that this very well have been discovered AUTOMAGICALLY, and thus required google to act on it.
i don't think the spin being placed here as it being an 'invasion' of privacy is accurate here considering my prior statement
you should thank google for helping to stop people invading the child's privacy by putting a stop to sharing of images like this
the methods potentionally employed in the discovery of this image are both automated and reasonable
and the reaction of google is not only reasonable and actionable, it's also commendable.
we all can keep our privacy if all they're doing is storage reduction through hash comparison.
fin.
It seems National Center for Missing and Exploited Children has a database of hashes, or "fingerprints" of known child porn images. When you use Gmail, it checks attachments against a database of viruses and also apparently against this CP database.
A distinction can be made here. What the database does NOT do is any kind of image analysis to see if the picture LOOKS like child porn. It checks only against known, reported child porn, apparently.
No, you don't have to prove innocence! The prosecution needs to prove guilt beyond a reasonable doubt. The fact that Google snooped brings up questions, so if this is the only evidence they have the guy will walk (assuming he goes to Jury trial and does not accept a plea).
The intent to distribute you just make up out of thin air, stop with the hand waiving and stick to the case.
Based on the arresting officers comments, they were tracking this guy because he was previously convicted. They were not able to catch him doing anything wrong, which should bring up even more questions about Google finding something when investigators could not. I don't believe it would have been difficult for a cop to get a warrant on the guy if there was actually suspicion.
If this was a random Google employee that was accidentally mailed the photo I may feel differently. I have been working on Servers for over 25 years, and I have never gone though people's mailboxes or files. I have complied with warrants and provided copies of data, but never gone though someone's crap. With no warrant, I think Google did wrong. I'm not biased, I think any company that volunteers your data to law enforcement without a warrant is at least violating the trust of their customers.
Before you "but but.. murder" how would you like to be arrested because you sent a still image from Saw2 to a friend (or any of the millions of murders depicted on tv or in movies, and a measurable percentage of those are children being murdered)? I personally am not into movies so don't worry too much about that one, but I know people that are.
Anyone that trusts a Government known for parallel construction (framing people) or Google (a company known to be handing 3 letter agencies private data) should have their head examined. On this site, I should not have to mention how easy it is to forge file ownership, date stamps on files, email, chat, and logs for the latter two. In case you are not a techie, it's pretty damn easy.
-The wise argue that there are few absolutes, the fool argues that there are no probabilities.
The smart implementations probably hash the image payload excluding EXIF, for exactly that reason - maybe downsample and reduce the colorspace too, so trivial tweaks won't have that effect any more.
(In fact, the implementation I'm working with right now for exactly this purpose - I have a small research project underway with the police in Scotland as part of their Offender Management work - just hashes HTTP payloads for the moment - although refining this is on the drawing board for later.)
I do find this very disturbing in principle though. Is absolutely everything in your mailbox entirely innocent? I have, for example, a list of various Microsoft product keys in mine. As it happens, those are legitimate - all issued to me by Microsoft via MSDN subscription, then I stuck them all in a spreadsheet to keep track of which key was in use for what - but would Google or the police know that just from looking at the list? They might turn up with a warrant looking for the piracy ring I'm obviously running, just because Google got nosy and went vigilante!
This isn't the first time, though; I recall a malware researcher getting rather upset after Google started eating samples from his Inbox - even when they were inside password-protected ZIP files. I can see that they mean well, but to me that crosses a line.