Microsoft extends PhotoDNA tech to lawmen in fighting child porn

After initially lending its PhotoDNA technology to online services including social networking giant Facebook, Microsoft is extending the tech to law enforcers to thwart child pornography.

 

In a blog post, Microsoft Digital Crimes Unit Associate General Counsel Bill Harmon said this is due to the massive scale of the online child pornography problem and the amount of data associated with these types of investigations.

 

"By arming law enforcement with this powerful technology, our goal is to help expedite investigations, limit officer exposure to the corrosive effects of viewing child rape images, and strengthen law enforcement’s ability to quickly identify and rescue victims and get child abusers off the street," Harmon said.

 

He said that for law enforcement agencies, Microsoft is partnering with NetClean to make the PhotoDNA image matching technology available to law enforcement at no cost.

 

The technology promises to empower authorities to more efficiently identify and rescue victims and bring abusers to justice, he added.

 

PhotoDNA will be available to law enforcement at no charge via:

 

 

But Harmon acknowledged the fight does not end here, as more work needs to be done to stamp out the problem and make the online world a hostile place for sexual abusers of children to hide.

 

"While the responsibility for finding and arresting the criminals who exploit and abuse children rests with law enforcement, all parts of society, including the private sector and companies like Microsoft, have an obligation to work together to help protect children and eliminate child pornography," he said.

 

Harmon said everyone can do his or her part to fight this problem by demanding that the online service providers they use act responsibly.

 

"Without innovation and public demand for technology companies and online services to play a more productive and proactive role in the fight against online child exploitation, the technological advantage will remain with the abusers of our children rather than with those working to protect them," he said.

 

65 million images

 

Harmon said that since 2002, the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children (NCMEC) has reviewed more than 65 million images and videos of child sexual exploitation reported by law enforcement.

 

"The images continue to grow increasingly violent and the victims younger, with 10 percent of the images reviewed by NCMEC today being infants and toddlers who can’t tell anyone about their abuse," he said.

 

"When child pornography images are shared and viewed amongst predators online, it is not simply the distribution of objectionable content – it is community rape of a child. These crimes turn a single horrific moment of sexual abuse of a child into an unending series of violations of that child. We simply cannot allow people to continue trading these horrifying images online when we have the technology to help do something about it. Microsoft is proud to make PhotoDNA available to law enforcement, to help in their battle to quickly identify and rescue these children," he added.

 

PhotoDNA is an image-matching technology developed by Microsoft Research in collaboration with Dartmouth College.

 

It creates a unique signature for a digital image, something like a fingerprint, which can be compared with the signatures of other images to find copies of that image.

 

"NCMEC and online service providers such as Microsoft and Facebook currently use PhotoDNA to help find, report and eliminate some of the worst known images of child pornography online, helping identify thousands of these horrific images that would previously have gone undetected," Harmon said. — RSJ, GMA News