Sweetie looks much like other unfortunate young Filipinas. Just 10 years old, her user profile shows, she spends her days online fielding requests from men who offer her money to perform sexual acts in front of a webcam. When she logs on, invitations pour in — “Are you a working girl?” or “I’m into girls your age” — from strangers keen to get her into a private show via Skype or Yahoo! Messenger.
Unlike her peers, though, Sweetie is a computer-generated avatar created by a Dutch non-profit group seeking to unmask sexual predators on the Internet.
Some 20,000 people contacted Sweetie during the eight weeks she was online last year, while researchers in an Amsterdam warehouse used keystrokes to turn her head, make her stare attentively or reach to adjust her webcam. After luring men in with the hyper-realistic animation, the group gathered e-mails, Facebook pages and head shots, then cut off contact before Sweetie engaged in sexual acts. It then gave Interpol dossiers on 1,000 suspects in scores of countries.
As the Internet makes it easier than ever for people to find and distribute child pornography, companies and organizations are creating technological tools to fight it. Microsoft Corp. has software that matches photos, even if they’ve been altered, so police can concentrate on new images surfacing online. Adobe Photoshop helps identify victims with tools that sharpen pictures to unearth clues. Google Inc. blocks search terms related to child pornography. And Thorn, a foundation backed by Hollywood stars, has created a database for tracking known child sex abuse images and taking them offline.
‘Limitless Potential’
“There’s limitless potential for technology to help solve the problem” of child pornography, said Mick Moran, head of Interpol’s Crimes Against Children unit in Lyon, France.
Pedophiles today find each other on Internet forums, peer-to-peer networks, and hidden websites. The U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation estimates that some 750,000 predators are online at any given moment. Victims, often found in chatrooms and on social networks, are becoming younger and the abuse more violent.
Among the most worrying trends is webcam misuse. As Internet access spreads in countries like the Philippines, Thailand and Sri Lanka, children as young as infants are molested and raped on demand by family members and criminal groups for customers on the other side of the lens. Police in the Philippines say thousands of children have been victimized in this way.
Cottage Industry
In a rare crackdown on such abuse, authorities in the U.K., U.S. and Australia in January arrested 29 adults and identified 15 Filipino children in a case that began when recordings were found on the computer of a registered sex offender in England.
“It’s a new cottage industry,” said Hans Guyt, head of special projects at Terre des Hommes, the children’s rights group that created the Sweetie avatar with a local animation company that prefers to remain anonymous. “It’s fueled by poverty at home and predators around the world with $100 to spare to watch a child get raped,” Guyt said in a café a few blocks from Amsterdam’s notorious red light district.
Since 2002, the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children in Alexandria, Virginia, which analyzes photos flagged as potentially abusive, has reviewed 105 million child sex abuse images – including 24 million last year, said Michelle Collins, head of the exploited children’s division. Tech companies must acknowledge their services can create havens for sex predators and they should take responsibility for helping control the problem, she said.
Digital Fingerprints
“Technology and industry and law enforcement are all important in this fight,” said Collins, who has worked at the group since 1998. “This isn’t a problem that’s going to be solved by arresting people.”
Among the tools used by the center is PhotoDNA, the Microsoft software that can identify versions of the same picture online by comparing so-called digital fingerprints, an analysis of various elements of an image that add up to a unique signature that doesn’t change even if the photo is edited. The program compares this fingerprint to a database of known child porn images to determine if it’s new or has already been in circulation.
Microsoft donates PhotoDNA to law enforcement agencies and Collins’ organization. And the software giant uses it in-house to scan images stored on its SkyDrive service. When a photo is flagged, Microsoft locks the account and alerts police.
Source: Bloomberg News
