If police and ISP providers can remove images of terrorism, why not child abuse?

[yolofish]

I head on the radio this morning that a police task force working the the ISP providers is removing around 1000 images which promote terrorism EVERY WEEK from the web. The aim is to prevent young people from seeing them and being encouraged by them.

If they can do this, why cant they do the same with images of child abuse? Seems like a good idea to me. I will try and find a link...

You're right about following the money. Going by news stories most arrests are people who used credit cards to pay for material. It would be members only so no one could see it anyway without paying.

How they find the sites is another matter. Maybe chat rooms?

The outside of such a site could be blank, it could be pictures of landscapes or it could be legal porn with a 'sign up for more' kind of hint.

And those do get taken down. It's just that it takes time.

is it possible to digitally 'stain' files on the internet?
That's an interesting idea and yes you could, but I'm not sure it helps.

You'd need to leave those ones up for a time to be copied and no one would be keen on that.

So following the money is probably the best route.

If Google/Visa/Paypal etc were starting to face receiving proceeds of crime charges (and if money is changing hands at all then they will be making money from it), I bet finding a way to deal with this problem would shoot up the priority list.

But that will never happen because no govt is going to put that kind of pressure on these very powerful companies.

There are pay-as-you-go phones and plastic cards you can load with value for cash; untraceable.

Which is good, because it makes legitimate commerce possible for people who are rightly not considered creditworthy.

But it has obvious bad consequences; another dual-use problem.

Follow the money is no help where it's bitcoin.

The problem is when you see an image on the internet you're not seeing the actual image, but a copy, like a projection. Follow this metaphor for a minute.

You could stain it but it would be like drawing on the projector screen, it wouldn't affect the original and hence would be totally pointless. It would only affect somebody taking a photograph of the projection. You can turn off that projector, but the person who is projecting the image wasn't using the negative of the original image, they were using the slide they had made of the negative. And they have a machine which can make infinite copies of the slide, not even using the negative, but using any of the copies of the slide that already exist, and they have, and so the slide is already in possession of thousands of other people who might be projecting it somewhere else or might be storing it for future use. The negative might not even exist any more. And everybody who has the slide also has a machine which can make infinite copies of slides, and some of them have projectors of their own.

If Google/Visa/Paypal etc were starting to face receiving proceeds of crime charges

Well and Barclays, Mastercard and all the others.

You could certainly punish them, but they are not the ones putting it up and do not have the ability to stop it.

So it might be a way for the UK to make spending some money out of illegal porn, but nothing to do with fixing the problem. And don't forget those companies are not UK controlled so you might find it tricky to do anything to them.

No one is hiding the solution, there just isn't one. There is no way to stop it short of closing down the internet.

Yes and how are google/paypal/credit card companies to know, without putting much more stringent checks in than they do now.

That would mean no easy, convenient, no-strings form of payment for online transactions which don't go through a channel like ebay/etsy (and sellers of illegal materials could always set up false transactions on these sites, seeing as ebay/etsy etc don't ever personally see the goods traded on there). You could have a website selling images and say "To purchase you must go to my ebay store and purchase this ebook, write a comment with a specific word in and then I will send you the picture". They send the real ebook to anybody who purchases without commenting correctly, no suspicions are aroused.

No quick international bank transfers using these services. I use paypal more often than transferring money between international accounts as I live abroad and it's just quicker and cheaper.

Small companies would have to somehow prove or have themselves verified by an agent of paypal etc in order to allow online payment for their business. In an age where people expect to be able to buy online that could cripple these companies.

It's not possible to put stronger checks on without basically shutting down everything else as well. And if everything else is shut down - they revert to cash, cheques. Or bitcoin.

BertieBotts, Good point about that indirect way of paying. I happen to know of a private torrent tracker site that uses a similar method for donations. Not that donating to them is illegal exactly, but some felt it might look bad to have it show up in bank statements.

Yep, you've got to realise that a lot of stuff which is legal, people might want to hide as well. Affairs, shifty business deals, famous people who don't want newspapers rummaging through their accounts, general paranoia about identity theft, people hiding from abusive family members, use of services which are taboo, like the torrent thing or a sex toy company.

Whether it's moral or not to hide such things isn't really the issue, the thing is, it's not illegal to do any of those things and I'm sure people have other reasons for wanting certain transactions to be private as well. It's just that of course not all reasons for wanting privacy are legal and moral. But the alternative is a police state.

@BeCool

is it possible to digitally 'stain' files on the internet?

If an image has been previously identified then it's really easy to find (but assuming it if it's on the open web and indexable by search engines). This is because each image - even if it's been altered a bit or has it's size or resolution changed - has it's own hash value as described in this stackoverflow discussion:

...with image hashing, if two pictures look practically identical but are in a different format, or resolution (or there is minor corruption, perhaps due to compression) they should hash to the same number. Despite the actual bits of their data being totally different...they hash to the the same thing.

(There is also a very detailed article on Wikipedia)

This is a pretty automated process and doesn't require people to manually search*. It can also be used to find similar images, i.e. ones that may belong in a sequence.

Obviously this doesn't work for new images or anything on less accessible corners of the web.

*You can try it for yourself. If you are using Chrome then right click an image (the mumsnet logo will do) and select 'search Google for this image'. Alternative services like TinEye Reverse Image Search available.

Gah:

This is a pretty automated process and doesn't require people to manually search.

Should say:

This can be a pretty automated process...

Should have also added the following:

Google, along with other big internet companies, already use this (along with other measures). There was a story last year about them reporting someone to the police in the US for having child pornography in their Gmail. If you read the story you see that it was automated scanning that detected. There are some more details in this story here:

Google itself compiles a database of images of possible abuse that have been brought to the company’s attention, sources close to the company said. Those images are then reviewed by a human employee. If confirmed to show abuse, the company assigns each image a unique digital fingerprint, which is entered into its database.

If someone is savvy enough to navigate the darknet, they're savvy enough to remove an image stain.

That said, it's so hard to stop, because unlike terrorism which is typically a group, child abuse comes mostly from parents and it comes from all backgrounds. It's harder to crack down on child abuse because if you caught one abuser, you did just that. If you catch an ISIS recruiter, you might get closer to catching other people in the organization.

Oh it's true you can use automation to look for another identical photo and sometimes for similar ones. However the similar one still has to be looked at by a human to be sure it's illegal and the original had to be looked at by a human too.

Also as said they will likely not be accessible to google in the first place.

And why should google (or paypal) be blamed anyway. If a shoplifter got a bus to the town center is the bus company to blame?

I'm not blaming Google/Paypal etc, but just as we all have to be accountable for our income at some point, so should they. They should not be earning from illegal activity.

The shoplifter analogy doesn't work as you wrote it - if the shoplifter on the way home gives the bus company some proceeds from the crime, the bus company knowing the source of the income, should they be held to accountable for that income? of course they should. Is it proceeds of crime - yes it is.

Take pirate music as an example. End users thought it was free- but massive amounts of money was generated by pirate music sites. KimDotCom etc didn't get stupidly rich from the people downloading pirate music files. He got rich from being paid a share of Ad-click revenue. He was paid by Google for example. So Google also made massive amounts from illegal file sharing. How is that OK? We all woke up to that way too late.

Google (etc) benefitted hugely from stealing income from musicians and songwriters and got away with it for a very long time. Nowdays, the music biz has finally woken up and now "free" music sites such as youtube, spotify, pandora etc all have to pay a share of this income to various collections societies who distribute it to the people who actually own and performed and wrote the music and other content these companies monitise. It's still far from perfect, but they are addressing it with some success.

So just to say "it's impossible" - I don't accept.

I think it is possible but we haven't found a way yet. More pressure needs to be put upon the organisations that control the internet. The claim that internet is an uncontrollable wild frontier of personal freedom is a myth. It is increasingly controlled and monitored and most importantly monitised, on many many levels.

It's simply that the abuse of children and trading in those images, is not a priority - it doesn't generate enough money.

Porn is a massive part of the internet, and is a massive economy. More pressure can be put on that industry to self police.

But govt etc don't want to put legitimate pressure on these online industries to clean up their act re their involvement with child abuse, they don't hold them accountable.

We are experiencing just the beginning of the internet - it's not going to go away. To say it's too hard just doesn't cut it.

Bertie I agree completely with your points about tracking child abuse might interfere with legitimate experiences of using the internet. But that just proves the point that children are at the bottom of the heap re having any power in our society, and it's OK to prioritise everyone else over them.

I'm not for a minute suggesting that this is just a UK problem, and just the UK has to address it. THere are many international trade agreements and alliances and organisations that would be more involved. But again it comes back to money and power leading the motivation.

Audeca thanks for the image info - I'll give that a go.

“Google policy is to get right up to the creepy line and not cross it….
We don’t need you to type at all. We know where you are. We know
where you’ve been. We can more or less know what you're thinking
about.”1
–Google CEO (now Executive Chairman) Eric Schmidt (2010)

www.citizen.org/documents/Google-Political-Spending-Mission-Creepy.pdf

Images of child abuse is not porn, it's not correct to refer to it as "child pornography" or even as "illegal pornography". I'm not going to google for a properly written description of why it's wrong to refer to it as such (for obvious reasons), but what is uploaded and shared is an image of child ABUSE.

The child was not complicit or able to give his/her permission for the crimes committed against them and photographed or filmed.

Pornography implies a degree of consent and active participation in the acts. Children cannot give this consent. Its child abuse, child sexual abuse etc. It's not pornography.

The shoplifter & bus company analogy works fine. The bus company aids the shoplifter and then profits from the money the shoplifter makes from selling stolen goods, but no reasonable person would expect them to know that.

If a site opens with a forum to discuss bunny rabbits, but also secretly swapping zip files of images how is google supposed to know that?

I'm sorry, but your whole argument about google and piracy demonstrates that you don't actually know how the internet works. Google isn't a website at all (though it has one for search etc). The sites with the porn and pirated music on are not 'on google' as you seem to think, but on the internet. Google is just a tool to search the internet. They are not in charge of it.

But google do know that they are earning from illegal sites.

I do know Google isn't the internet - there is no need to be patronising.

The fact is the thousands of child abuse viwers who have been identified are not even prosecuted.

I suspect (as per the judicial inquiries that aren't) that there is a widespread culture of tolerance to pornogrophy and this spills over to a high degree of tolerance to child abuse in many organisations. I find this evil and shocking and hard to believe... but there is so much evidence of it if you can bear to focus on it.

There's a news report here:

www.presstv.ir/detail/2014/10/21/383015/uk-pedophiles-too-many-to-prosecute/

First few paragraphs:

Britain will not charge pedophiles that possess child abuse images because of the high volume of people engaging in such activities.

According to the head of the UK’s National Crime Agency (NCA), Keith Bristow, it was "not realistic" to prosecute the 50,000 people in Britain who have viewed and shared child abuse images.

"Our responsibility is to focus on the greatest risk and tackle those people," he said.

The British Labour party labeled the NCA’s inactivity as "disgraceful" and said that the NCA was not fit to deal with the problem.

“This is a disgraceful policy from the National Crime Agency and the Home Secretary which sees the vast majority of people downloading vile child abuse images not investigated, while children remain at risk,” said Labour’s Shadow Home Secretary Yvette Cooper.

She went on to say that the NCA has details on tens of thousands of offenders who have accessed images of child abuse, but has only made 600 arrests.

I just think it doesn't make sense to shut down or clamp down on perfectly legal things on the internet - you might as well ban people from owning cameras and imaging devices without a licence. Oh, and it happens in houses, so lets stop people from living in houses. Force people to prove their innocent intentions when they have children, etc etc. It's overkill and it won't stop the abuse from happening. I think we're just more aware of it since it's more visible and bleeds into other things like legal porn.

The reverse image search thing is a good point, but the technology (at least google's reverse search that they offer for free) doesn't seem very sophisticated. At the moment it just brings up pictures with similar colours, perhaps the same image (a balloon, a face) if it's very very clear and not confused with other images, but e.g. a picture of a person playing football will bring up things like a green field, nature photos, etc, and a picture with more than one person, not very good contrast etc gets it totally confused.

But google do know that they are earning from illegal sites.

How do they know that? The sites are not marked legal/illegal. Not to mention that legal/illegal changes depending where you are.

Also when you say 'earning from' they are not taking a percentage of the profits. In fact I don't see that they take any money from the site at all.

IF the site has adverts and IF those adverts use the google system then the advertisers whose adverts show on those sites pay google for permission to use the system. The whole thing is automated. Google don't go to each site and look it over before pasting in adverts.

So then perhaps your argument is with the advertisers. They will include just about every company in the world. They will probably include the company you work for. Does that make you an accessory since your company is the one paying them the money really.