News

The RCMP has moved a step closer to having new software to help police identify victims of child pornography and their abusers.

Mounties put out a call to software developers last year to see if they could design programs that would comb through-millions of images in the Canadian Image Database of Exploited Children, or CIDEC, and find pictures or videos that match.

The response, they say, has been very encouraging.

"It was demonstrated very clearly that that can be done," Arnold Guerin, technology manager for the RCMP's National Child Exploitation Co-ordination Centre, said from Ottawa.

Roughly one dozen developers "arrived with their hearts on their sleeves, saying 'we're here because the topic is important to the community.'"

Right now, investigators who seize images of child porn type in descriptions and then key words are used to compare pictures and videos of exploited children already in the database. Investigators go through the painstaking process of comparing the images with their own eyes to see if any of the pictures truly match. The next step is to determine whether an existing image is linked to a victim or pedophile who has already been identified.

Instead of being text-based, the proposed system would compare visual data in the seized picture — a child's face, perhaps — with images already in the database. Searches might take minutes or hours instead of days.

"We see the potential that the technology exists to certainly make a (big) leap in efficiency for an investigator," Guerin said.

Police have already used visual clues to track down an abused child, albeit with a public plea for help.

In 2005, Toronto police released several pictures of a hotel room in which a girl had been abused. Within hours, police received tips from people who recognized items in the room as belonging to a Florida hotel.

The girl was found soon afterward in the United States. Her abuser was already serving a 15-year sentence on other exploitation charges.

The new technology should also make life a bit easier for investigators, who may no longer have to spend days combing through horrific images looking for a match.

"It's going to be a benefit to the investigator as far as the emotional toll it takes," Guerin said.

Police must adapt new technologies because pedophiles are finding new ways to avoid detection, warns the head of Beyond Borders, a Winnipeg-based group that helps raise awareness of child exploitation.

"The nature of the Internet now is that people are using peer-to-peer technology. They are in these deep, dark pedophile networks," said Beyond Borders president Rosalind Prober.

There are "new forms of encryption software ... which basically don't allow [police] to enter into a person's computer and find images."