It started as an unsolicited e-mail that a Toronto police officer sent to Bill Gates's general mailbox, and has developed into what will soon become the leading investigative tool for tracking Internet pedophiles around the world.
Toronto police and Microsoft Canada announced yesterday they are working together on a series of software programs to find, and help prosecute, sexual predators who stalk children on the Internet.
"Right now, people who are inappropriately using the technology have ways to hide who they are and to hide their location," Frank Clegg, president of Microsoft Canada, said outside the Toronto Police Service's international conference on child exploitation.
"What we want to do is to give the police the tools to find out who these individuals are, track them on a worldwide basis and go to the location where they are storing and keeping this information."
Mr. Clegg told the nearly 330 child-welfare and law-enforcement workers at the conference that a recent study has shown that 99 per cent of children in Canada have access to the Internet.
Of those, 25 per cent have had on-line discussions with people they have met only in that way. Fifteen per cent of those who have encountered someone on-line have gone to meet that person, often on their own, he said.
Many of these meetings are harmless, but to help guard against people with malicious intentions, Mr. Clegg said Microsoft has been developing what he called the child exploitation linkage tracking system, or CELTS.
Once completed, the software will go through files on seized computers -- some have been known to hold more than a million images of child pornography -- and quickly catalogue the illegal material without officers having to view each picture.
Mr. Clegg said the program will essentially take a face print of each child in the images. Much like a set of fingerprints, those can be compared with other images seized from around the world.
"This allows [police]to get access to the information more quickly; it allows them to get information before the courts more quickly, and it allows them to find other people," Mr. Clegg said.
"Police officers, because of lack of resources, are always playing catch-up," said Detective Sergeant Paul Gillespie of the Toronto Police sex-crimes unit, who sent the e-mail to Mr. Gates in January. He said Microsoft is working free of charge with the Toronto force to develop the program.
CELTS will allow police to build a profile of accused pedophiles from the information stored on seized computers, one that includes who they chat with and what messages they may have posted to newsgroups.
"If we bust you and we find your machine, then we can go back to all those newsgroups and get all those [user]IDs you've talked to, and start to track all those people as well," Mr. Clegg said.
If successful in Toronto, the program will be made available to law-enforcement agencies to create a vast computer network for fighting Internet-based pedophiles.
Mr. Clegg said it will take years to get the program running worldwide, but parts will be available to the Toronto force soon.