Paedophile snared as Google scans Gmail for images of child abuse

Hundreds of millions of email accounts are now being routinely scanned for illegal images, thanks to spophisicated new Google software.Technology giant Google has developed state of the art software which proactively scours hundreds of millions of email accounts for images of child abuse.
The breakthrough means paedophiles around the world will no longer be able to store and send vile images via email without the risk of their crimes becoming known to the authorities.

Paedophile snared as Google scans Gmail for images of child abuse

Now i am all for getting the scum of the scum caught. Child molesters and people who abuse women children and animals ranks the worst in my book. But we all know where this is going to lead just more and more reasons to invade and take our right s away. Instead of police going after pot smokers and the like they need to worry about real scum. Like to catch a predator type stings.Just more police state marching on in

a reply to: switchqm8
So what does this mean exactly?
I can set up an anonymous account and spam hundreds of people with CP And have them all arrested?

a reply to: dashen

Hum good question. I am not sure where are the ats computer experts..

Dangerous stuff...

In some countrys sending a picture of your 5 year old playing naked in some water to grandmother... is no problem.

But should i now check before I Travel what is in my e-mail?

This is a very loud and clear way of saying that your email is not and never was yours to begin with. It belongs to Google and they will scan or read through it at their leisure.

I hope they get all the pedophiles in the world for the damage they do to liberty and freedom in the process. They should get something accomplished while they become the very evil their motto claims they will avoid becoming.

Who needs the NSA with all their pesky public regulation and Congressional busy bodies when Google can do more by contract and remain completely above such inconvenience as congressional hearings for it.

These images will be well known images so a pic of your kid in a bath won't hit the radar so to speak

I'd imagine the t&c's of googles mail allows them to scan everything in your account (they already do it for viruses and spam to filter them out) so all they've done is added an extra module that scan's .jpg's etc and if they hit then it'll send it off for review (false positives can happen) and then the local plod gets informed and as the 4chan expression goes v& and b& when the part truck arrives

a reply to: dashen

I can set up an anonymous account and spam hundreds of people with CP And have them all arrested?

I expect that it is the senders of the pictures that are being arrested, for that very reason. If you received child pornography in an email, it would have to be proven that you solicited it.

a reply to: dashen

Possibly interviewed at least... My guess would be that a check of the receiver in question would reveal if they have in fact engaged in child porn images etc.

There have been instances of computers being infected with viruses where the person's computer is used to send / receive child porn without the person even knowing its occurring. Its also one of the reasons we always see more media accounts where child porn rings are broken up than individuals. Usually the individual cases are where a person is dealing directly with a cyber crime task force member (whatever terms are used).

Google is a private company and as such can check the emails for illegal activity (always read the T and C). If they report it to law enforcement they are fine. If they are requested to act on behalf of an investigation its where you run into the warrant issues etc.

a reply to: switchqm8
While google plays big brother, and snoops around in your personal life, claiming it's "for the children", they don't really give a damn about. Our Elected and unelected "officials" enjoy a free ride, purchasing child porn with your tax dollars...

The Boston Globe's Bryan Bender reported Friday that federal investigators "have identified several dozen Pentagon officials and contractors with high-level security clearances who allegedly purchased and downloaded child pornography, including an undisclosed number who used their government computers to obtain the illegal material."

link

A 2006 Immigration and Customs Enforcement investigation into the purchase of child pornography online turned up more than 250 civilian and military employees of the Defense Department -- including some with the highest available security clearance -- who used credit cards or PayPal to purchase images of children in sexual situations. But the Pentagon investigated only a handful of the cases, Defense Department records show.

Link

Child pornography being linked to the American government has all the hallmarks of being one of the major scandals of the decade.When the Pentagon child pornography story surfaced in 2010, it was naturally one of those media reports that created a whirlwind of interest and astonishment. Yet almost as quickly as the scandal emerged, it disappeared, leaving the nation dumbfounded and none the wiser of its outcome.

link

So while google is invading your privacy, for only the best of reasons, right? Government "officials" and contractors are getting their indiscretions swept under the rug. Any time spent doing some well thought out google searches will turn up examples like this, and other stories that will curl your toes.

Anyone who is really interested in protecting the children of our world, need to start at the top, and work down. Not the other way around.

ETA: Forgot about this thread by our own Loam. 5200 Pentagon Employees PURCHASED Child Pornography!

a reply to: switchqm8

So here we go again: It all begins with "protecting the children". Since child abuse is a raw issue for most, we have never really opposed "any means" to catch the predators. It began right at the start of the Internet in the 90's already. We seem to have forgotten many cases where Photo-Labs reported parents for the "baby in the bathtub" pictures. And naturally this "excuse" to go after pedos was used to develop the snooping softwares.
Sure all will now applaud this move by Google, but what is next? My email discussing reform to the voting act? My email discussing civil disobedience? Just fill in the "BLANK" of what ever you correspond about and you see that "protecting the children" is just an excuse to sniff on us. Don't forget, one of the most efficient dictatorships of all times, the 3rd Reich, - used the "... but for the good of the children..." quite well.
So whats out what you are wishing for.

A new thought popped into my head, and it's one of those unforeseen consequences that people who stomp on the rights of others never stop to consider. If they do pause, its only long enough to make some remark about broken eggs to make omelettes or something similar.

Child Sex and Exploitation is big crime. It's also big business and becoming bigger all the time for the enforcement to stop it. Agencies nation wide are working harder than ever before with new units, new people and new detectives to hunt and eliminate this cancer to our society.

I sincerely hope all those people trust google with their very life. Google will expose every undercover or working agent as casually and with as little distinction as the worst offender they seek. Everyone with something connected to what they hunt will be tagged . Some of those people work for the good guys and require that anonymity to work at all.

To say it another way, if the nation is being Googled for this, the nation had better hope with all it's might that Google itself doesn't have a single guilty party among anyone remotely close to this effort. If they do, then they will have done more to destroy the best efforts happening than anything ever accomplished in the process.

Do Gooder thinking gets more people killed than anything because it often stops right at the "do good" part without thinking anything through.

"Save the child. Even if it kills everyone else trying to accomplish that same goal"

originally posted by: EartOccupant
Dangerous stuff...

In some countrys sending a picture of your 5 year old playing naked in some water to grandmother... is no problem.

But should i now check before I Travel what is in my e-mail?

I would, especially if traveling to countries whose Due Process laws are a lot less dainty than ours.

I know Japan just recently passed a law making possession of child porn illegal.


Japan Outlaws Possession of Child Pornography, but Comic Book Depictions Survive

TOKYO — Yielding to years of pressure to fall in line with the rest of the developed world, Japan’s Parliament outlawed the possession of child pornography on Wednesday. But the new law left untouched the nation’s popular and sometimes sexually explicit manga comics as well as other portrayals of young girls as objects of sexual desire.

By an overwhelming margin, lawmakers from the governing and opposition parties joined to pass the legislation to close a loophole in a 1999 law that had banned the production and distribution of child pornography. While the older law did remove much child pornography from public view, critics including prominent conservative politicians have lamented that Japan was the only member of groups of developed nations like the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, or O.E.C.D., that still allowed its possession.

Click link for remainder of article.

The other thing to consider is intent. Did the individual intend to knowingly possess and distribute child pornography.

The kiddy didlers keep getting more and more devious. For instance Facebook has shut down several group pages that presented themselves as something benign, like a latest fashion for the 1-10 year old group. They want people to post images of their children, however the parents are not realizing the dual intent. Hell I have seen that type of setup on computer gaming forums - The "Show us pictures of your kid playing this game or that game".

Since this crap cross state and international boundaries, its a complex mess. Personally this is one of those areas where I would support an international law with streamlined laws and process. As we have seen with the US Supreme Court, they are just now starting to rule on electronics, searches of those devices, how retrieval is done to conform with law etc etc. You also have the simulated child porn where the argument is art verses illegal crime etc.

This is one of those "how do you stop it" issues. Like the "war on drugs" do you go after the ones using or after the ones producing?

It's weird, on one had the PtB seem to be promoting all sorts of perversions as normal, the change of the DSMIV and soforth, yet now 'Google "don't be evil" Mail' is using that to invade privacy.

I'd like to see every Google admin's email scanned, their laptops, their hidden servers. Given the percentages of perversions, I've no doubt some of them should be in jail.

Good for the goose...?

originally posted by: switchqm8
But we all know where this is going to lead just more and more reasons to invade and take our right s away.

Just more police state marching on in

Yup, couldnt agree more.

Common pattern when rolling out the police state.

To keep us "safer" from "terrorism" or its "for the children".

If they suspect that someone is a scum bag, provide the evidence and get a warrant.

Of-course they'll shoot your dog and potentially kill you in the process of serving that warrant but its all good.

originally posted by: dashen
a reply to: switchqm8
So what does this mean exactly?
I can set up an anonymous account and spam hundreds of people with CP And have them all arrested?

You might not want to do that but some agency that wanted to "get" you for some other transgression certainly and easily could get that job done on you. Those cases seem to be rather "open and shut" once a person is charged.

It is essentially based off the pixel colors for the image search. They will also be searching the image file names. I know because a colleague wrote the software for the search about 8 years ago and has refined it to a very precise 100% hit rate for these pixelation colors. It can essentially tell the difference between a nipple and a lip or the tip of a penis, which for the most part in an image with no makeup on look very similar to the human eye. It also takes into account Eigenvalues and eigenvectors which allow it to find where on the body these pixel colors occur. These are not the only factors in the algorithm either. It also saves a database of each photo for the algorithm to learn from previous hits. It is a VERY complicated program and the code is insane but I have seen it work thousands of times. He wrote this a long time ago and when I worked with him it was for corporate emails making sure nobody was trading porn in the company for HR purposes.....very large corporate entity so there was a lot of concern. Google caught wind from a news report on him and the rest is history. I used to discuss it with him and asked if he would ever consider selling it to the porn industry as it could work in the opposite manner as well, finding as much porn and pulling it in as you can. I doubt he ever did as he seemed very ethical, but who knows what money can buy.

Imagine how many teenagers sending dirty selfies to each other will be busted

a reply to: Xcathdra

It's so disgusting to me I feel physically ill at times for what is happening out there today.

You will see a group like Facebook do what they can in a tsunami of smut but then, glancing at the TV for what is about to come on? Toddlers and Tiaras. Just in time to replace the need in the average pedo for whatever Facebook and the others took down in one effort.

I saw a long article about a child on that show where the mother had the gall to sue over the child being sexualized. Imagine that. They put their precious little children on a show to make them look like glamour girls in a cat house and then are shocked when it attracts the predators that thrive on it. One show had a small little girl made up in the outfit and perfect appearance of Julia Roberts in Pretty Woman! Talk about removing all question as to the overall intent for display.

So when the software flags a picture that my wife sent me because it thought it might be CP does some random Google employee get to see the pic to check and confirm it? And will it end up on the internet like so many airport scanner pics?

originally posted by: CraftBuilder
So when the software flags a picture that my wife sent me because it thought it might be CP does some random Google employee get to see the pic to check and confirm it? And will it end up on the internet like so many airport scanner pics?

No...these images are not scanned by Google employees....that would take millions of man hours. They are scanned and checked against a database of files on a high volume high speed super computer with a LOT of attached storage. If they flag child porn through the image search then it will be reviewed. I have never seen his algorithm get a hit wrong except for when the database was being built though I have seen it miss some. That is most likely corrected at this point.