UK Authorities Launching Massive Child Abuse Database 150
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."
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."
See comment (Score:1)
Torrent plox?
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+1 Funny
Sure right... (Score:1)
For the protection of the children you see, they should have a huge government database of file hashes they deem illegal. This year it's for the children, next year it's for enemy's of the state. You wait, you will see...
Power corrupts; absolute power corrupts absolutely.
Grammer nazi (Score:3)
"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.
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Grammer nazi
Just wait until the Spelling Bolsheviks find you...
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Catching up with USA (Score:1)
I thought the USA already did this and shared the hashes with companies so they can automatically flag things. De we actually not share our list of hashes? Have we finally uncovered something privacy related the government doesn't share?
Nice attempt to look like they care (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.
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More than a decade and over 1000 girls in just one damn city.
This sentence is completely meaningless. Do you even cite, bro?
Spend less on computers and more on prosecutions for those cops who let those girls suffer.
Hrm ... let's see ... do we spend the money on a one-time cost which reduces workload by 90% ... OR do we spend the money on the start of a recurring cost to investigate and prosecute a small subset who have little meaningful impact on the end result.
Yeah, no, totally, your idea rocks.
Re:Nice attempt to look like they care (Score:5, Informative)
Anyone who reads UK newspapers will know what the GP is talking about. This isn't Wikipedia, but here you go [bbc.com]
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Damn. Talk about being stuck between a rock and a hard place. Target the perps properly, you're racist. Put on the kidd gloves and you don't care about the poor children. No-win situation.
Re:Nice attempt to look like they care (Score:4, 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.
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The muslim angle is just a distraction. The real problem is that when the girls or people around them did complain the police did nothing. They seemed to feel that because many of the girls were from poor or troubled backgrounds that they were probably consenting or wouldn't be convincing as witnesses in court anyway, so just allowed the abuse to continue.
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The muslim angle is just a distraction. The real problem is that when the girls or people around them did complain the police did nothing.
Really it's not. They(police, social services, etc.,) didn't do anything for fear of being labeled racists. There's plenty of proof of that if you go read the articles when it started out. Political correctness run amok is the problem.
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The muslim angle is just a distraction. The real problem is that when the girls or people around them did complain the police did nothing.
Really it's not. They(police, social services, etc.,) didn't do anything for fear of being labeled racists.
Doesn't seem to slow down US cops and social workers...
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And the reason they did nothing about Cyril Smith? Would that be racism also?
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And the reason they did nothing about Cyril Smith? Would that be racism also?
That would be "friends" the UK though has shifted in the last 15 years and bending backwards for the minority element. Wonder why so many people from the UK are fleeing to Canada and Australia.
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pie hole is your mouth, not your anus. Just thought you should know, rocket surgeon. What is it with the mega STOOPID bigotry and racism on slashdot these days?
Oh look, I'm guessing it's a white, progressive male, that doesn't like the fact that "something happened" to a particular segment of society, and when facts come to light that the same segment of society is confronted with it--they immediately come screaming out of the woodwork crying racism. You know it's not the first time that this has happened in the UK, or even Europe. It's simply the largest. There were at least 15 cases last year in the UK alone where muslims were arrested operating underage pros
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The article claims that the majority of the abusers were "asian". It doesn't say muslim.
Here's the nasty bit, that's the codeword for muslim in most european countries. If they're from anywhere else, they'll actually be listed from a particular country, and of course once you start viewing the court records you find that they're exceptionally devout. It's a serious problem, and until they can dig their heads out of their backside they're simply dooming themselves.
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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 [wikipedia.org]. 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 [wikipedia.org] 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 sc
Re:Nice attempt to look like they care (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.
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. 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 ...
Yeah, that was also my take on it, just from the bit of reading I did on it. Kept seeing that "thousands" claim but absolutely no evidence for anything even close to that number. Thanks for the confirmation.
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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.
The cops are a symptom, not the cause of ills in our society. We have to fix what's broken in our basic social systems before this problem is going to go away. All the cops can hope to do is catch offenders after the fact.
Leave Them Kids Alone (Score:3)
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.
"suspected pedophile" (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.
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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.
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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.
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This isn't "guilty of being pedo", it'll be Conspiracy (To Commit) or somesuch. Yes, it's going to be illegal. Yes, we have a crime for it. No, the crime is not "suspected pedo"
There's a fair bit of confusing rambling about forums I don't quite follow. Still pretty sure the irony of posting them in this forum will persist, though.
Best trolling tool evar (Score:1)
I'm more worried about the potential abuse this could cause. Someone takes a child abuse photo, attaches some EXIF data to it pointing to a person they don't like, then uploads it anonymously somewhere. Pretty soon the police are beating someone's door down, stealing all of their computers, and otherwise making their life a living hell.
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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.
While I agree with most of what you say up to that point, I am a bit puzzled by your last paragraph. What "problem" is being solved by your "solution" exactly?
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While I agree with most of what you say up to that point, I am a bit puzzled by your last paragraph. What "problem" is being solved by your "solution" exactly?
The problem is the belief that hashes or other fingerprinting techniques is a silver bullet, infallible. It isn't. You need a human to actually look at the pictures, and until the politicians who control the police understands that, redirecting resources this way is only going to harm their cause.
They may catch more of the minor crimes, like someone looking at pics because he or she is curious and mildly titillated, but it won't stop the tech savvy distributors and technologically advanced networks.
I see
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I'm guessing it'll be a perceptual hash. Most likely Microsoft's PhotoDNA, because it's been used by law enforcement before.
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The problem with perceptual hashes is that the false positive rate is way higher.
That's not a good thing when dealing with something like CP, where mere allegations or investigations can ruin a person's life, even if innocent, because no-one is going to believe that there was smoke without fire.
Re:"suspected pedophile" (Score:4, 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.
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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
Being a paedophile is not a crime in the UK. Actions resulting from it are.
Hand drawn images are illegal, and it's fucking insane. I'm tempted to create a website that shows you an image of a stick man and stick woman shagging, with the label "Man fucking woman". Add a button that changes the word 'woman' to '12 year old girl' and anybody clicking that button will break the law by producing what in the UK is legally defined as child pornography.
I don't however believe that written stories are illegal in the
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I want to know how many are of teenagers. Reportedly the single largest source of child pornography these days is teenagers with cell-phone cameras taking steamy self-portraits.
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Perceptual hash.
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Didn't Google offer their ContentID technology for this a few years past? If you take something like that, the actual file hash is irrelevant, you take a "hash" of the content not the bits that make up the file. This mostly solves transcoding and watermarking.
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Better Headline (Score:1)
"UK Authorities Assembling World's Largest Collection of Child Porn"
Nooo (Score:2)
My first thought was "Good, they seem to have a problem with it in the authorities."
My second thought "Crap, they mean a local databse of all that stuff. What are they going to do, copy it off an MP's hard drive?"
Ambiguous headline (Score:5, 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.
Re:Ambiguous headline (Score:4, 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.
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I know, that's how it works. Too bad the tabloids don't jump on the many many other child abuse stories that do not involve sex.
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To be fair, many of those crimes were detected when the victims complained about them, but they were ignored. That's the real scandal.
I agree about the media lead witch-hunt though. We have had riots against paediatrician's offices because of it.
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Has anyone actually borne the public's wrath over Rotherham scandal? I'm not sure anyone has even resign over it. No, just more tepid 'investigations of failures in processes.'
The problem with Rotherham wasn't that it went 'Undetected for years.' It was detected and ignored, by people who didn't want to seem racist for arresting sexually deviant immigrants. Either that, or they were on the take.
No, Rotherham represents an abject failure of people in society to a
This is a complete farce (Score:4, Interesting)
If they wanted to prosecute peadophiles theye'd open and release the dossier from the 80s.
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mod up. Still waiting to hear from PS on that.
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or the police don't have the name of the victim.
You're a police man, you see a man raping a 4 year old girl so you arrest him. You go to his home and confiscate his computer, and find a dozen images (or more likely tens of thousands) of images of small girls being abused.
Do you know who the dozen small girls are? Do you know whether they're still all 4 years old, or whether they're now in their 50s?
So you're a policeman, so you want to know who those small girls are. They may need help. They may still be getting abused. Sadly the criminal hasn't built a
Bad story (Score:2)
Headline should read: VIP Paedophile Ring Given Boost With Stolen Data
I would like to post survivors' inputs into this story, but the ones I know personally and have already contacted are still in open-mouthed shock at the audacity of it.
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A wet dream (Score:2, Funny)
How hard can it be... (Score:3)
... listing all priests in Britain?
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I actually think that any religion is crazy, so yes, Muslims too.
More importantly... (Score:2)
Most importantly it should highlight prominent pedophiles.
For a list of names, The Franklin Cover-Up [whale.to] would be a good place to start.
Not a new thing (Score:2)
The FBI's DaLAS System [arstechnica.com] has been doing this for several years now, but with things in addition to child abuse imagery. Since we shared the system with the UK they presumably just copied the relevant parts/ideas.
She's a witch! (Score:2, Interesting)
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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.
The irony of this is astounding (Score:2)
UK Authorities making a child abuse database when it's likely that at least a quarter of the people in power are child abusers.
Absolutely fucking stunning!
As I've always said, those that 'think of the children' are usually the ones you need to be wary of.
Statistics (Score:1)
Probably it's emerging that the best predictor for pedophelia is the perps vehemence in proclaiming his religious convictions.
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the Muhammad story has sources [wikipedia.org].
What's your source for any bride of Jesus, let alone a child?
Re:Muslim Men (Score:5, 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.
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The problem is that Mohammed is viewed as a model by which to live your own life, much as Jesus is by Christians.
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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.
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uh... he wasn't, he took a prostitute. Even sired a child (Judah)
(source: the Jerusalem Ossuary)
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not necessarily rejected, they may merely be lost then found (cf. The Dead Sea Scrolls).
Just because the Jerusalem Ossuary was only discovered in 1980 (and quickly authenticated as it was immediately suspected how significant such a find might be) doesn't mean it was to be buried and forgotten. Were that the case, they might just as well have incinerated it.
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A paedophile by today's standards.
It's a modern term, logically, it has a modern standard. But just because people in the past didn't know the notion of brain aneurysms doesn't mean that they didn't occasionally drop dead. This is medical issue, not a cultural one.
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Statistically speaking, at least 1 of the Apostles had to be gay. My guess is Simon.
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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 al
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History holds NO-ONE named Jesus, except in the case of Hispanics.
Jesus is a piss poor Greek transfuckuration of "Yeshua"
Every name you have read in the Bible is a fuck-over of the original Hebrew, for no particularly good reason at all.
Does YOUR name change when you go to another country that doesn't speak your language? NO.
If you are a " Christian" , who the fuck are you praying to? You don't even know!
I bet you don't even know the name of the God you worship, and it isn't "God", it isn't Lord, it isn't J
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