Google Helps Police With Child Porn WebCrawler (siliconbeat.com)

The San Jose Mercury News is reporting that the Internet Watch Foundation, "an organization that works with police worldwide to remove images of child sexual abuse from the Internet, has credited Google with helping it develop a 'Web crawler' that finds child pornography." The pilot project makes it easier to identify and remove every copy of specific images online, and the group says "We look forward to the next phase of the Googler in Residence project in 2016." Last year Google also had an engineer working directly with the foundation, and the group's annual report says "This was just one part of the engineering support Google gave us in 2015." [PDF] Their report adds that the new technology "should block thousands of their illegal images from being viewed on the Internet."

Comments

I'm not entirely happy about this.

[SuricouRaven]

The IWB is a well-intentioned organisation, but they have no accountability whatsoever. They publish a list of links they claim are child abuse imagery, and ISPs block what's on the list - but the list, for obvious reasons, is super-secret. The processes by which the list is generated is also secret - even those who are put on the list are not informed that they are now on the list. Some (not all) ISPs actively try to prevent those who are censored from finding out by spoofing 404 error page rather than explaining that a deliberate block is in place - they certainly aren't going to contact the site operator. Even if someone wrongly blocked finds out (as happened with Wikipedia only because the block process inadvertently broke the site) there is no appeals process in place. That's a lot of power for an unaccountable and opaque organisation.

Re:I'm not entirely happy about this.

[EmeraldBot]

The IWB is a well-intentioned organisation, but they have no accountability whatsoever. They publish a list of links they claim are child abuse imagery, and ISPs block what's on the list - but the list, for obvious reasons, is super-secret. The processes by which the list is generated is also secret - even those who are put on the list are not informed that they are now on the list. Some (not all) ISPs actively try to prevent those who are censored from finding out by spoofing 404 error page rather than explaining that a deliberate block is in place - they certainly aren't going to contact the site operator. Even if someone wrongly blocked finds out (as happened with Wikipedia only because the block process inadvertently broke the site) there is no appeals process in place. That's a lot of power for an unaccountable and opaque organisation.

This is my primary concern as well. Child pornography is something that should be prevented, but people are going overboard with this - it's in the same vein as the war on terrorism. Child pornography is definitely despicable, but most of the efforts against it are either extremely creepy - such as this, handing over power to an almost completely unknown organization - or evoke incredible amounts of self-righteousness, especially when people start accusing each other of this crime without any proof. Between the overreach of trying to stop, it's hard to say you support, especially when the countries most against it consume almost all of it.

Furthermore, the approach we use today is fundamentally flawed. Currently, we try to block all images of it, but we can only target those existence that we know of - and even then, it's trivial to add an extra byte here and there to through of the checksumming. This creates a drive to make more of it, which more people get, before that too gets blocked. It's very profitable for these businesses and only encourages the cycle, so with all these programs in effect we're making the problem worse and worse. Most shockingly of all, when you legalize child porn, rates of it actually go down, and sex abuse goes much farther down. Given what we know about ancient societies, where children also engaged in sex and didn't show any signs of being traumatized, it's a really hard issue to grasp, because all of the morals we grew up with are being disproved by numbers. If it weren't for the fact I'd be put on a government watchlist for the rest of my life, I might even suggest that perhaps the issue is more complex than we think.

Re: The "internet watch foundation" wins

[Anonymous Coward]

So what? I'm fine if the internet is purged of that filth and those responsible arrested. We will eventually grow a pair and go after hate speech, racism, violence and political heterodoxy. Do you have a vested interest in having that filth available? Please tell.

Re:Well-intentioned my foot.

[Anonymous Coward]

The results are simple: CP is driven underground, to sites where there is all kinds of CP, even hurtcore, and where membership is granted by invitation and one actually has to be an active producer / contributor of new material.

Meaning, those who consume CP and would be fine with just a little softcore, are exposed to much more materiall including hardcore, and also encouraged to start sexually abusing children in real life.

End result, IWF profits on a circle of itself perpetuating it's own purpose for this initiative, by creating the perverse incentives for more abuse for which it next can argue that it needs more funds to "combat".

Oh and more people start using darknets, which at least is a plus, I guess.

Anyway, good luck jailing everybody who consume what is defined as "CP", including minors that sext.

NEAD MOAR PRIASONS PRECIOUSSSS

In conclusion, fuck the fucking piggies and moral fags.

* "UK pedophiles too many to prosecute": http://edition.presstv.ir/detail/383015.html
* "Children as young as SIX questioned by police over sending indecent images as number of child arrests increases five-fold ": https://archive.is/G1YAO
* "Legalizing child pornography is linked to lower rates of child sex abuse: study": http://phys.org/news/2010-11-legalizing-child-pornography-linked-sex.html

This kind of technology will never be misused

[Required Snark]

1984 Winston Smith

Winston Smith works as a clerk in the Records Department of the Ministry of Truth, where his job is to rewrite historical documents so they match the constantly changing current party line. This involves revising newspaper articles and doctoring photographs—mostly to remove "unpersons," people who have fallen foul of the party.

Orwell couldn't conceive that Winston would be automated out of a job. That may be the only part he got wrong.

Re: The "internet watch foundation" wins

[AK Marc]

They aren't arresting the people making the images, nor those profiting from them. They are deleting them, and going after anyone who viewed them. If they went after the producers of such content, it would be a different story, but that's hard, so Law Enforcement doesn't even try.