Slashdot Mirror


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."

24 of 150 comments (clear)

  1. Nice attempt to look like they care by reemul · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

    --
    You're just jealous 'cuz the voices talk to *me*
    1. Re:Nice attempt to look like they care by whoever57 · · Score: 4, Informative

      This sentence is completely meaningless. Do you even cite, bro?

      Anyone who reads UK newspapers will know what the GP is talking about. This isn't Wikipedia, but here you go

      --
      The real "Libtards" are the Libertarians!
    2. Re:Nice attempt to look like they care by Mashiki · · Score: 3, Insightful

      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.

      --
      Om, nomnomnom...
    3. Re:Nice attempt to look like they care by ShanghaiBill · · Score: 2

      More than a decade and over 1000 girls in just one damn city.

      This sentence is completely meaningless. Do you even cite, bro?

      He is referring to the Rotherham sex abuse scandal. But I suggest you be very skeptical about the "over 1000 girls" part. The actual number of victims that have been confirmed is ... seven ... by five different perpetrators. The scandal has a close resemblance to both the Salem witch trials, and the American satanic ritual abuse (SRA) scandal of the 1980s. SRA was once estimated to involve "millions" of victims, but in hindsight, the number of victims is now believed to have been zero. The Rotherham scandal has more substance than that, but likely not near enough to justify the current hysteria. It has all the best ingredients for a mass panic, with a hidden army of dark skinned men raping young innocent white British girls, and many people with a vested interest in exaggerating it: Journalists wanting to sell tabloids, police wanting budget increases, politicians wanting to be outraged about something, etc.

    4. Re:Nice attempt to look like they care by jabuzz · · Score: 5, Insightful

      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.

  2. Leave Them Kids Alone by mentil · · Score: 2

    Maybe they should, you know, NOT launch massive amounts of child abuse, inflicted by database. That sounds pretty bad.
    Wait, maybe I parsed this wrong.

    --
    Corruption is convincing someone that the selfless ideal is the same as their selfish ideal.
  3. "suspected pedophile" by arth1 · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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.

    1. Re:"suspected pedophile" by arth1 · · Score: 2

      Break down the images in blocks, create a profile of the entire image based on it's blocks and then grade images based on how many blocks fit a given profile.

      Yes, and that turns it into an arms race. Any technological fingerprinting can be defeated.

      The error here is trying to find a technological solution to a sociological problem.

      And, of course, the froth-at-the-mouth desire to punish "pedophiles" instead of reducing child abuse. I think that is spending good money and cops that would be better spent on preventative work. To me, saving one child from being abused is worth a lot more than punishing a thousand people who merely lust after children.

    2. Re:"suspected pedophile" by droptone · · Score: 2

      I think that is spending good money and cops that would be better spent on preventative work.

      Hell, despite the fact that I share the Slashdot hivemind's distaste for police officers, if it reduces the mind-boggling trauma that surely comes from repeatedly looking at child porn, then it's worth it.

      That's got to be immensely psychologically damaging.

      --
      Every post I make begins with the assumption P=~P.
    3. Re:"suspected pedophile" by AmiMoJo · · Score: 3, Insightful

      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.

      --
      const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
      SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
  4. Re:Muslim Men by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Informative

    the Muhammad story has sources.

    What's your source for any bride of Jesus, let alone a child?

  5. Ambiguous headline by wvmarle · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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.

    1. Re:Ambiguous headline by SuricouRaven · · Score: 3, Informative

      In the UK, child sexual abuse has been a tabloid-driven panic-issue for many years. The government is very eager to be seen doing something about it. Not because it's any more common here than elsewhere in the world, but because every time someone gets caught after going undetected for years there's a media field day, which in turn means an investigation into why they weren't caught sooner, and someone has to bear the public's wrath.

  6. This is a complete farce by Idimmu+Xul · · Score: 3, Interesting

    If they wanted to prosecute peadophiles theye'd open and release the dossier from the 80s.

    --
    The problem with slashdot is that most of its users were bullied and stuffed into lockers as kids!
  7. Grammer nazi by rossdee · · Score: 2

    "next year it's for enemy's of the state."

    Just as well its not France, they would want a database of enemies of the language.

    Fortunately for you this website is american, and freedom to mangle the language is implied in the first amendment.

  8. Re:Muslim Men by Alain+Williams · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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.

  9. Re:*sigh* by ACE209 · · Score: 2

    "homosexuality" is the gender neutral term. It includes both gays and lesbians.

    --
    "we are all atheists about most of the gods that societies have ever believed in. Some of us just go one god further."
  10. How hard can it be... by Begemot · · Score: 2

    ... listing all priests in Britain?

  11. More importantly... by MagickalMyst · · Score: 2

    They should create a child abuser database, from which the public has access.

    Most importantly it should highlight prominent pedophiles.

    For a list of names, The Franklin Cover-Up would be a good place to start.

    --
    Political correctness is really just herd psychology pushed by insecure people who desperately seek social conformity.
  12. She's a witch! by pigsycyberbully · · Score: 2, Interesting

    The U.K. is a child abuse state. In the 70s they were sending children to known paedophiles in what they called "children's homes" they were taking children away from their parents for no other reason than being absent from school only the pretty ones of course. You can find pictures on the Internet of Edward Heath, on his boat with children and another politician and a well-known policeman. There are also pictures of Edward Heath naked on his boat with children. Cyril Smith MP would invite himself into these "children's homes" to abuse children. The British government set up a child abuse ring in Northern Ireland in "children's homes" to entrap dissidents. They created child abuse on an industrial scale in Wales, and one in Cornwall and two in Devon.
    Paedophilia in the U.K. establishment makes the Internet look like small time in comparison. The U.K. media love hysteria and the spy agencies love using it to spy on everybody.
    The Art of controlling someone or something to your own advantage, unfairly and dishonestly and often deadly:.
    She's a witch! https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
    17th March 1954 https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
    BBC "Horizon": AIDS (1983) https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

    1. Re:She's a witch! by ihtoit · · Score: 2

      not forgetting Birmingham, Nottingham, Rochdale, Rotherham, Doncaster, Derby, Coventry, Hereford, Watford, Cleveland, Jersey, Isle of Wight, I could go on, I even have something called first-hand testimony from survivors and one of the survivors central to the Broxtowe case (from which the JET Report and the Children Act 1989 which resulted from that) lives all of ten minutes away from me. She could tell you stuff that'd make your hair turn white.

      --
      Political debates have me rolling my eyes so much I think I got optical whiplash. I should sue. - Foamy The Squirrel
  13. Re:Muslim Men by DNS-and-BIND · · Score: 2

    It's totally OK to do that, though. Did you ever read any leftist history books? They judge the whole of American and European history by politically correct standards that didn't exist until after 1990, and they consider themselves completely in the right to do so. Any Western culture that had the misfortune not to foresee centuries in the future is ruthlessly judged.

    --
    Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
  14. Re:Muslim Men by CanHasDIY · · Score: 2

    And the problem with that, of course, is that a good decade of Jesus' life is undocumented - lord only knows (pun definitely intended) what kind of trouble He got into in His 20's.

    --
    An enigma, wrapped in a riddle, shrouded in bacon and cheese
  15. Re:Muslim Men by TheCarp · · Score: 2

    No statistically speaking at least one of them was most probably gay and its likely more than one were. Statistically speaking nothing is ruled out, including that they were all gay or none of them were.

    Lets say it was completely random selection of individuals, and 10% of the population is gay. Since no one selection decreases the population significantly, each choice has a 9 out of 10 chance of not being gay. Which maybe my math is wrong but (9/10)^12 is .28, or 28% or about 1 in 3 chance of picking an all straight group of appostles.

    I wouldn't place many bets on a 1 in 3 chance, but, I wouldn't bet much against it either.

    This of course assumes that there is no bias that would say, make gay men more available or more likely to want to be apostles, which, is hard to quantify, and might skew things a bit, but its hard to imagine enough to offset the starting 1/10 starting proportion.

    --
    "I opened my eyes, and everything went dark again"