UK Authorities Launching Massive Child Abuse Database

mrspoonsi sends news that "Data taken from tens of millions of child abuse photos and videos will shortly be used as part of a new police system to aid investigations into suspected pedophiles across the UK." The Child Abuse Image Database (CAID) will be available to authorities starting December 11th. It's been populated with data seized in earlier investigations. The database assigns a hash to each photograph, so when a new drive full of illegal images is confiscated, it can immediately be plugged in and quickly scanned to see if there are any matches. It will also catalog GPS coordinates from Exif data.

The purpose of CAID is to eliminate the duplication of effort when investigating these photos. Often when storage drives are seized, they contain thousands or millions of images, and dozens of different police departments could end up unknowingly investigating the same victims. Law enforcement liaison officer Johann Hofmann said, "We're looking at 70, 80, up to 90% work load reduction. We're seeing investigations being reduced from months to days."

Comments

Nice attempt to look like they care

[reemul]

They're worried about DUPLICATION of effort?!? How about putting in some damn effort first. More than a decade and over 1000 girls in just one damn city. All the software tools in the world won't help if you turn them away at the station or refuse to do any of the work for fear of hurting feelings. Spend less on computers and more on prosecutions for those cops who let those girls suffer.

Re:Nice attempt to look like they care

[Mashiki]

There is a win-win situation. Target the perps, and tell the social-justice crowd to shove it up their pie hole along with the muslims that will come screaming out of the woodwork crying that it's racist. Not rocket surgery, not by a long shot. The problem isn't so much that it happened, but that it was allowed to happen. And that it's happened more then once. Europe has a serious problem with problems like this, so does their media.

Re:Nice attempt to look like they care

[jabuzz]

The number seven comes from what the Crown Prosecution Service have chosen to prosecute and got convictions for. They have many more on file. Some will be where the victim is unwilling to give evidence in court, or the CPS believe would not make a good witness on the stand. The job of the CPS is to make sure the bastards rot in jail, this does not necessarily correspond to prosecuting all possible cases of abuse.

It is quite clear that the abuse was wide spread in Rotherham and worse was not confined to Rotherham either. There have also been very similar cases in Derby, Oxford, Bristol and Telford. All involving gangs of majority Muslim background perpetrators sexually abusing and trafficking mainly white girls.

"suspected pedophile"

[arth1]

I have a small problem with the phrasing "suspected pedophile". It propagates the view that being a pedophile is a crime, not that child abuse is a crime.

Would they have a database of people "suspected of having high testosterone levels" too?

The risk of innocents being caught in a dragnet is, in my opinion, not justified by the heinousness of abuse. A pedophile (or a father, a much higher risk group) who is innocent is just as innocent as a child. And someone who is guilty is just as guilty whether they're a pedophile or not.

A child, by the way, is a suspected future drug criminal with a quite high risk. Better register all children as suspects too.

Anyhow, there's a technical solution to every technical problem. In this case, a viewer that changes one pixel subtly every time an image is viewed would make hashes like this useless.

Re:"suspected pedophile"

[AmiMoJo]

Being a paedophile is a crime in the UK. For example, you can produce hand drawn images or written stories about paedophilia and be convicted of a crime for doing it. There is no victim, only your own imagination was involved. Expressing certain thoughts and ideas is a crime in the UK.

When they claim that there are "tens of millions" of images in this database, I wonder how many are of victims and how many are cartoons found on 4chan or scans of children's clothes catalogues and that sort of thing. Yes, clothes catalogues are illegal if kept for the purposes of sexual gratification.

Also, they claim to use more than just images hashes. They say facial recognition and the ability to handle images that have been scaled, mirrored or otherwise adjusted.

Ambiguous headline

[wvmarle]

OK call me old-fashioned, but I totally misread the headline.

I thought this was about general child abuse, not just the sexual subset, which could be a just a small part of overall child abuse. What I was thinking of was things like poor treatment by parents, such as receiving beatings or insufficient food or having to live in a terribly dirty home, all that kind of abuses. The kind of abuse children have to be removed from their home for, placed with foster parents, etc.

In other countries, mostly eliminated in the UK, there are of course also issues such as child labour (children forced to work long hours in dangerous or hazardous conditions), depriving children of access to education (particularly girls in Muslim countries), and other serious and highly widespread forms of abuse.

Not to gloss over sexual abuse, which can be pretty bad as well of course, there's a lot more to "child abuse" than just "sexual child abuse". However equating "child abuse" to "sexual child abuse" makes us forget the other forms of abuse, which I strongly believe are far more widespread than sexual abuse. But maybe those are simply not as sexy, politically.

Re:Muslim Men

[Alain Williams]

Aisha went to live with Muhammad at the age of 9 or 10. A paedophile by today's standards. Was it that unusual in the 7th century ? I do not know. Beware trying to judge peoples in other times or places by your own morals.