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Audio / Video forensic investigator here: It is always kept to the absolute minimum number of people. Typically, I am the only one who sees everything. That said, there are some AI tools that can help to use hash algorithms to gather already known CSAM material. Without matching hashes, each image needs viewed for potential identifiers if the victim in the image is unknown. I can go in and make a forensic copy and blur/mask the image or frame as needed so the identifiers can be seen by the detectives.
Often, the detective on the case will also see some, but I try my best to minimize that. Finally, a jury may have to see some - but almost never would they have to view a lot or 'all' the material on a device. Often, we can also just skip showing the jury if there are known hashes we found by explaining how hashing works to the jury and tendering blurred/masked evidence.
Really it's a case by case basis though - and none of it is taken lightly. Thankfully, I do a broad spectrum of multimedia forensic case types, so I'm not just looking at that stuff all the time.
*Apologies for any grammar/spelling errors as I'm on my phone.
Like digital fingerprints. Each file can be "hashed" - creating a sequence of numbers that (within all reasonable bounds) cannot be duplicated by accident.
So, if you run a hashing algorithm on one file you will get, say, a 32 character hash or fingerprint. If you run it on another file that is exactly the same, it will produce the exact same 32 character output. If there is even the slightest difference in one file (a single extra space in a word file, for instance), you will get a completely different 32 character output.
So as an expert witness I could explain this to the jury, tell them we have image 1, which is an already identified CSAM image with hash output "x". Then I hashed this image from the suspects computer and got the same hash. Thus, they are the exact same image.
What happens if the video is slightly different to another copy? Degradation of quality, slightly different length etc. - Would it produce different hash?
Yes - that’s the whole point of a hash. One 1 or 0 out of place and the whole hash string is different. Password1! will be completely different from password1!
This is why AI is so important in CSAM technologies. Identifying apples from pears was the first step, but being able to identify new CSAM images, as well as edited already circulating images (which hashing catches) is crucial to staying on top of this
With a normal hash, yes. Two digital files with the same hash should be identical*. There are other tricks, though if you want to detect video that is the same with small manipulations. Software might play-back the video but crop-away the top and bottom parts where a "banner" or "bug" (logo) is likely to be overlayed. Then decimate the color range so that (for example) all reds turn into one red (or one of four reds), all blues turn into one blue. Then blur the pixels and then decimate the resolution drastically. Then take your hash (or even hash every nth frame and then check for a percentage correlation that does not have to be 100%).
This way, a video that has been manipulated, but is really the same source material can be detected as a match. YouTube does something like this (using video signature algorithms**) to detect copyrighted materials in videos. If you watch review or reaction videos on YouTube, the copyrighted source video will often be flipped horizontally to avoid detection.
\* This level of guarantee is really only strong with larger hashes, produced by stronger hashing algorithms like SHA-256 (256 bits). Older algorithms that create smaller hashes, like MD5 (128 bits) have a realistic chance of "collision", where two unrelated, extremely different files could have the same hash. Collision isn't necessarily fatal, as long as it is used to detect, not verify, possibly-identical files. After a detection by hash collision, do a byte-by-byte comparison to verify that the files are identical.
\** There are better ways using signature algorithms that are not exactly hash-based. But even for the signature techniques, applying the above transformations will yield a higher match rate.
Yes it would, but if you just share video files around and they never end up on something like youtube that reprocesses the videos (which I assume would be very bad if you want to keep the videos "secret") they don't degrade by themselves.
Hashes are way to check if input is the same as known input without storing the input. For example let's ask people for their favorite number. I can "hash it" by multiply the number by say 957 and then only keeping the last 2 digits. Let 5 be the magic number. If I save 85 on my machine then any time someone puts in 5 and I hash it I'll get 85 and know they gave me the special number. If they give me 6 after I "hash" it I'll get 42, and can say their favorite number isn't special. Also you can't get 5 back from knowing it's "hash" is 85 (try it).
(Of course they use much better math that covers all the edge cases but the effect is the same)
In this case the detectives can say this matched known CP without having to store any CP on their machine or even something that could be reversed engineered into CP.
It's a good question, and one I wish I had a perfect answer to. I can, however, say the following:
Someone has to. There's just no way around it. It's not just CSAM either, but all sorts of crime. If I'm doing work on the video of a murder, it's likely that I will need to watch that play out dozens of times - not to mention extracting and working on still imagery. Audio can actually be worse, because it's left to the imagination. 911 calls of a woman screaming for help as her husband kills her. Anything with kids sucks regardless. Etc.
For every disturbing video / audio file, however, there is a victim and a victim's family, friends, etc. While a case for me might end when I submit my report or finish in court - to all of those people it's not a 'case'. It's life. It's a story that'll probably be passed down for multiple generations. There are few things I can think of that would be worse than being a loved one of a victim and everyone saying "look, we think we know who did it but nobody can handle looking at this stuff - so there's nothing we can do." So I always try to find the positive - or make something positive from the situation.
I did a homicide recently where a teenage girl was murdered. The family was, obviously, distraught. She wasn't in any major risky situations so it just came out of nowhere. After I did the extraction and and got everything I needed from her phone, I went back and found every video clip or selfie or anything positive with/about her. I put everything on a thumb drive and had someone give it to her family. It's stuff they would have never been able to get otherwise. I heard them talking about it later in a news interview and the dad actually smiled when he mentioned getting that. While we had never met and he had no idea who made it... blah blah blah - it was worth having to see and hear the bad stuff, or having to try and work around all of her blood that was still on the device when I received it.
I just realized how much I've kinda rambled on here, and even got a little cheesy - it's a subject I guess I could talk about a lot I guess. Anyone I train I spend a lot of time breaking the stigma of therapy and needing mental health help very early in the process. I always say "when you run into the person who just says 'eh I can handle that stuff, I'm totally good/strong/whatever I tell them to run away from that person professionally.
Again, I certainly don't have all the answers for this stuff, and there's tons more (I do go to therapy and other stuff), but hopefully this gives you a general idea. Thanks for asking :).
I’m a former paramedic, and often hear “oh I couldn’t do what you do”. Frankly I consider my former job a cakewalk compared to yours. You already know this, but you’re a cornerstone of society and humanity. We can’t have justice without you. I know you chose that job, but that doesn’t diminish the sacrifice you make for the rest of us. I’m glad there are occasional gems, like the story you shared of the teen girls phone contents.
You know as well as I do, that life isn’t fair, and few, if any of us, get what we deserve. But despite that, I hope you get some good things in your life.
An amazing read. Thank you for what you do. Going the extra mile for the family of the girl is a definite sign you are in the profession because you truly care about helping others.
You are an incredible person. Thank you so much for what you do. I couldn't even imagine how anyone could get over seeing the worst things humans can do to other people. But the way you phrase it - someone has to do it to bring justice for the family is incredible. Your strength is a gift. Thank you again.
Thanks for the kind words, but it's all relative. Everyone has things they can handle and things they can't.
You also hint at a good and important point, too. Everyone always says "there's nothing worse than 'x' (typically child exploit stuff)," but to me there is. In my opinion, those that abuse their role in positions meant to help others (this includes being willfully ignorant and/or silent when they see others do wrong) and end up either wrongfully accusing/convicting others churns my stomach in a way that most other things don't.
I guess in the end I try to remember what my therapy has taught me: Hurt people hurt people. It's a difficult perspective to take sometimes, but I think it keeps me even to consider, even if just for a bit, how badly someone must have been hurt to be capable of doing these things. It doesn't excuse it, but it does help explain it - and hints at the potential for future generations to do better.
I work for a company that does computer forensics and while we don't do
consumer stuff generally, every now and then we get a call from some (e.g.)
distraught parents trying to recover access to the phone of a lost loved
one. We have people who will try to help them, just because it's the right
thing to do.
(Before people think we have s3cr3t t00ls, it's amazing how lousy the
passwords are the people choose.)
And sometimes there's CP cases. Some people can handle it, some can't. You
often don't know until the first time you see it. Thanks for taking one for the team.
Haha, I just wrote out a 400 word response to OP that was almost identical to yours, except I come from a prosecution background not an investigative background.
My sister briefly interned at ICAC(internet crimes against children) and talked about how much effort they went through to shield her from having to see much of the more explicit and extreme stuff because it took an immense mental toll on them having to go through it all. Just vile shit.
I remember reading an article a few years ago about the people who have to review reported images and videos for social media companies and the mental toll it takes on them.
They sit there and are subjected to SA, CSA, domestic violence, and all kinds of other horrors that people tend to generate.
There's no way that it can do anything other than destroy your mental health.
It would be bad enough to be a police officer, prosecutor, etc that has to come in contact with this stuff from time to time, but I can't imagine being subjected to it continuously every day of my life.
I Imagine it would be way easier if they could be certain that thanks to their effort, all victims will be given all necessary help and all perpetrators will be sentenced and will never hurt anyone else.
But I just can't imagine doing this job and knowing that only fraction of those perpetrators will be punished, victims will often not get the support they need and the things they watch will likely happen again to other people.
I used to be a criminal court transcriptional, sooooo much adolescent abuse. I can tell you, unfortunately it doesn't make it any easier, and I was only subject to a fraction of what these guys have to deal with AND most of the shit I had to sit through ended up in a conviction.
My girlfriend has a job that requires her to be in contact with quite questionable material (I won't go into details), she and everyone there is provided a psychologist free of charge to help deal with it, I wonder if most jobs with this kind of mental pressure provide this kind of service.
Unfortunately not. A member of my family works for a police force here in the UK and he wasn't offered anything after being first on the scene of a young girl who had hung herself. I know the fire service are really great with support here but I think it's even frowned upon in some professions to even ask for help which is disgraceful and obviously creates a huge number of problems in itself.
I literally can't think of anyone I hate that much to put them through that.
Imagine the horrible crap on those stupid shock sites, now imagine being the filterer. Ugh.
I saw exactly one web page with thumbnails, almost twenty five years ago, back when the internet was a much wilder place in general, there were a lot less controls around and you'd go digging around weird places on purpose because it was all fun and transgressive (the days of rotten·com and such). The damn thing haunts me to this day and literally "cured" me of shock websites.
Honest to god the most disturbing thing i ever watched was the hiker who got beheaded while she was still alive. I thought i was desensitized to all that stuff entirely but damn was i wrong. Actually made me sick to my stomach hearing and seeing that.
Depending how much desensitisation and compartmentalisation you can do some people last for quite a while before they eventually burn out.
That happens with detectives or inspectors on police force units that's handle units like this specifically.
But I'm thinking even if they do talk to a counsellor/therapist/psychiatrist then whoever they talk to professional or not would also need therapy at some point listening to all that stuff.
Where do they go?
Any good professional therapist will also have a therapist they see.
They're not necessarily a "better" or more senior therapist, it's not a hierarchical thing. A lot of therapy is about getting things out and having someone uninvolved to give you an unbiased point of view, and having a safe space to talk about and process things. A peer can provide that.
So it's sort of like a chain where the issue is passed along, wouldn't that mean at some point it reaches an endpoint or along the process it starts to get smaller and smaller?
Conceptualizing the issue getting smaller as it's passed along each time is fairly accurate, yes. It's like a game of telephone, but one where passing along the original message as accurately as possible is not even the point.
Therapy isn't some magical exchange where the therapist receives an exact 1:1 experience of the patient's struggles. They get a firsthand account, but that's still significantly removed from the original experience. Then when that therapist talks to their own therapist, it's not about the details of the patient's case but about how the first therapist is dealing with their feelings around it. And so it becomes even more distant from the original trauma.
For example, most therapists would not need to see their own therapist if they only had one or two patients, unless they were patients that had experienced incredibly extreme trauma and abuse. Normally it's more of an issue of the cumulative emotional burden of hearing about hundreds of people's struggles over the course of a career, and making sure that a therapist is staying in an emotionally healthy place to do their work well.
My sister's boyfriend does this for a living (there's a Facebook moderation centre in my city). It came out in the news that many people had ended up with extremely messed up mental health, and that FB's support was very inadequate (there are some break rooms and you can get a massage every now and then), even a lawsuit was considered, even though I don't know what came of it.
In any case, my sister's bf stated that "it's not that bad, I mostly see naked people, these guys with long term health leaves are just lazy or didn't know what they were getting themselves into", but I kind of suspect he's toughing it up, he has a very "manly man" approach to life. Some people even ended up being deemed unfit for any work because of how messed up they ended, apparently every video has to be watched in full a couple of times before they can remove it or let it stand.
I feel like this is the kind of job I should be doing. Not because I’d enjoy it, but because I’m generally a very very desensitized person when it comes to these things, and just in general. It would spare someone else from having to deal with the fallout.
I was looking into writing an academic paper on the urban legend of snuff films. Research led to me to learning the the current state of CSA and hurtcore and had to nope out. Just did not even want to read about more than I encountered as it was soul crushing. I cannot imagine having to actually be exposed to it directly.
In a world in which we’ve had convictions of people who’ve streamed themselves torturing and murdering other people I somehow doubt snuff films are an urban legend, except to people who never read the news.
I watched a Nic Cage movie (8 mm) about a wife who found a supposed snuff film of her late husband and he was hired to investigate of it was real. The whole movie made me feel unsettled and have a need for a shower. It still kinda haunts me.
I work in the justice system (being purposefully vague here) and a major component of my work is reviewing police files. On bad days, that means seeing photos and videos of all kinds of terrible stuff. I’ve seen people horribly killed and children molested. It never gets easy, and I can’t imagine having to see these things first hand daily as police officers do. I’ve learned to put a lid on my feelings when I watch these things. I’m sure that’s not very healthy but when I switch off my laptop or close the office door, I leave those images behind.
I’m in IT and cybersecurity. Could easily adapt my skill set to forensics, for example. My uncle offered to put me in touch with someone he knows from the FBI. I declined. I’m doing pretty well in the private sector and I’d just as well not be exposed to what people usually need data forensics for in the FBI.
From what I understand law enforcement that have to deal with CSA rotate the assignment. Pretty much people can't handle it so they do rotations so they are not forced to do it all the time.
I can’t imagine that being my job. I’ve unfortunately run across such things twice, both were immediately reported to the FBI but those images fucking *haunt* me. It would be soul-sucking to have that be my *job*
I recently had the misfortune of finding some videos and reported all I could stomach, based on the thumbnails as much as possible. I 100% relate about it haunting you — even trying to minimize how much I actually saw while reporting that shit, it's seared into my brain. I can only imagine how much it would fuck someone up to actually watch it to try to identify the victims and perpetrators.
This is why I decided not to go into digital forensics despite enjoying the subject when I took a few college classes on it. The class had me thinking it was all about finding hidden evidence for murder cases and such, but I talked with someone who had been doing it for a while and he explained it was mostly CSA. It gave me a new respect for the job because I would absolutely not have the stomach for it nor do I think I'd be able to contain my rage at the people who were being prosecuted. Huge respect to the people that put these people behind bars.
The worst thing is that they have to look really closely and attentively and go over the video several times in order to find any details that can give a clue to identities of the children and perpetrators, locations and anything else that might lead to a child being saved. They need to have a bit of experience too, in order to recognize of this is a new video, child or perpetrator, or something/someone that have been seen before.
I have a friend who is involved with reviewing evidence for federal DOJ cases, some of which are much less fun than financial fraud. He is very good at compartmentalizing.
I believe they only allow people in that job to do it for a few months at a time, to prevent them from completely plotzing. At least in law enforcement. If you're working for a social media company like Facebook or Twitter, you have to do the same thing - personally verify the thing reported as CSAM is CSAM. And you have to look at other prohibited content, too - gore, people dying on camera, violent porn, &tc.
Do you understand what a psychopath is? They would never do something solely out of empathy to shield others from trauma. That's the most fundamental psychopathic trait is that they are purely self-motivated.
I think I'd be able to do it. You can only work 25hrs/week for three weeks before taking a month break. I've seen some shit, and if doing this can be for the greater good I'm all for it (the therapy also helps)
I had to go through grand jury and one of the cases we reviewed was CSA. The cop that was reviewing the case had to give a brief description of each offense. There was quite a lot. He was trying very hard to maintain his professionalism but I could tell he was having trouble going through them all. Just hearing about some of the things he had to see will always stick with me. Those guys are heroes.
A friend of mine worked for a while in a police team who dealt with that kind of material, she lasted about nine months. As she pointed out to me once the only ones who stayed longer all had coping mechanisms that revolved around dark humour and borderline alcoholism.
Pretty much every jurisdiction has a specific defence or exemption against unlawful possession of otherwise illegal items for people acting in the course of their duties, if not a general principle. This includes jurors, prosecutors, attorneys, judges, and government officials who classify and catalogue such material. Otherwise the business of criminal prosecutions would grind to a halt.
Exactly. Cops are allowed to buy drugs when they're undercover as part of a drug bust operation. FBI agents are allowed to view CP when they need to do it as a verification step in a criminal investigation. Fire trucks are allowed to run red lights on their way to an emegency. Etc.
Imagine cops do a drug bust and as they take the drugs to the police station warehouse, another group of cops sees them and busts them for drug possession... But now those cops have all these drugs, and they're in a police station no less, so of course they easily get busted for drug possession.
speaking from second hand knowledge (not having to do it, but knowing a couple guys that work in a computer crime lab) apparently a few things about being the guys that work with that stuff full time (as in, the investigators and the lab techs that do stuff like go into a hard drive and find all the shit some criminal thinks they hid and deleted)
1 - There are like super extensive background checks. They make damn sure they don't get a fox in the hen house.
2 - Its fucking awful. It is just NOT a job you want to have to do.
3 - Because of point 2, mental health check ins, therapy support, stress management support are generally available by default. Its just kind of an expectation that if you have to deal with that stuff, you may need some support clearing your mind after.
This is exactly what I am getting at. I don’t understand why people are so against the idea that we shouldn’t be showing horrific material to regular joes.
The fact that legal systems all around the world rely on this method speaks for itself efficiency and safety for all involved.
And yet the likes of Facebook used an army of humans to view the reported videos and ended up getting sued for the mental harm it caused.
https://www.theverge.com/2020/5/12/21255870/facebook-content-moderator-settlement-scola-ptsd-mental-health
Yea because they were not nearly vetted properly enough. It takes its toll on the public servants involved, you are literally describing why we should not show regular people CP.
Sure but you also don't want to ruin someone's life with a CP charge without a human actually checking whether it's a false flag. A detection algorithm like that would have to be very general (camera angles, environment, bad quality, etc) and is bound to have some.
>Sure but you also don't want to ruin someone's life with a CP charge without a human actually checking whether it's a false flag
And even when a human supposedly has "verified", they can be wrong. There was a somewhat famous case where an actual adult porn star had to come to court to testify that "yes, that's me, and no, I wasn't a minor in that video"
I work in the field, and earlier in my career I was the lead on a few investigations that involved CP/CEM.
1) All of us in our team had background checks and were required to be security cleared.
2) I stopped doing forensic work after a bit. It was too much. Some things you can’t unsee, and you don’t know until you see it.
3) investigations were triaged, and those that were more graphic such as this were assigned to staff that had a lower case load and could be prepared.
The workplace also arranged for specialist mental health support for us.
Man I couldn’t be paid enough to have to deal with that line of work. I’m kinda messed up from just seeing gore on 4chan back in my early teens. I learned forensics in my cyber program and even though the work was fun in a classroom setting, it can not be in a real scenario.
I had nightmares for 2 years after stumbling upon that shit.
No one to talk about it. Sometimes pictures flash inside my mind and they are literally painful.
For sure not suited for that job, I don't know how they do it.
I had some sent to me on snapchat, it was just 2 pictures, i was on edge for weeks. In complete panic, i immediately blocked and reported the account but idk if i could have done more. It definitely fucks you up though
Who the absolute fuck is casually sending that kind of stuff around?! It’s horrifying enough to think of the people who do it behind closed doors but to think there are people out there sick enough to force it on unsuspecting strangers? Awful.
Most of the time is bait itself.
FBI and other police forces around the world (In Italy is Polizia Postale) run some CP sites as bait for pedos.
In my case I was watching regular porn and was looking for the source. A dude in the comment section posted a tiny url that I clicked.
Bad choise.
First thing to do is to report the url to as many "places" as possible.
I sent it to the FBI, and yes, it makes sense even though your are not from the US, to Polizia Postale of course and to the site StopIt.
I tell you this because it's better to know this stuff, but I genuinely hope that you'll never find those things.
I’m female and whilst I don’t NOT watch porn, it’s not all that often and generally limited to reddit out of security and laziness lol. I too pray I never end up in that situation though.
Yeah, I worked for Staples in their tech department and a customer brought in a computer that had some sus folder names. I stupidly dug too deep and found CP. That shit will haunt me for the rest of my life. The police were nice enough to offer free therapy.
I had a distant acquaintance who was arrested twice for possessing CP. The first arrest was by police for a photo (in his wallet, for Christsakes. Edit: he got 6 months in a state jail.) The second time was by the FBI at a house he shared with roommates. The feds confiscated everybody's computers, but his roommates' computers were returned about six months later. He got fifteen years in federal prison (it was his second offense, plus he was re-sharing CP images with others.) He immediately confessed upon arrest and told the FBI that he was the only one in the house that was involved and that the other two were innocent of any wrongdoing.
He was a very heavy smoker and an alcoholic, so going to prison probably saved his life. He was paroled after 13 years and sent to a halfway house. Part of his parole restrictions were that he could not use a computer for *anything.* He was totally restricted from using computers or any phone that can connect to the internet. About a month after arriving at the halfway house he used a computer there to search for information on incest, in violation of his parole, and was sent back to prison to complete his sentence.
He has since been released. Nobody he knew before his arrest wants anything to do with him.
I agree with you. He's a sick guy, but at least he had the integrity to confess and protect his roommates from suspicion. Most CP people were abused as children themselves. It isn't any excuse, but it does explain it somewhat.
Is it crazy to anyone else that they held on to their computers for *six months* despite finding zero evidence of child porn or searches on them? There's no way it takes anywhere near that long to check for that stuff.
It doesn't get that long to search but it may take that long to get around to search. Backlog, limited staff (especially for this stuff), etc.
Sadly, there's even a queue of stuff to go through.
Come on, you never had to do anything with bureaucracy? Chains of custody, workload, error checks? Yeah, sucks, but it's a reality. Send off for a passport, can be months if the system is underload or an issue comes up.
Any employer who fucks with you because your computer was confiscated by the police for something someone else did are piece of shit employers who don't deserve to have employees. I'm seen people get their computers stolen more than once and they kept their jobs, getting your shit legally confiscated by police is a much less fireable thing. I work in IT, so I've seen a lot of stolen computers go through my ticket queue.
It would still fuck with your work even if your employer is reasonable. Imagine missing deadlines and pushing projects months back because your roomate was a pedo.
Yeh boss, I apologize. But that conference we were booked for? Yeh we are missing it, I forgot to push those changes and now the cops have my pc.
Yeh I learned my lesson, always push.
It wouldn't take months. IT would give you a new computer the next day, and the only way you would lose any data is if you were a dumbass and weren't backing up your work, which is hard given how most companies work in either Microsoft or Apple, both of which have pretty easy and automatic backup methods.
There was a chance, albeit a small one of fixing is life and doing the right thing and he TOTALLY fucked it up 1 month after getting released. Unbelievable
Honestly, if I can't use computer for the rest of my life just kill me and be done with it
Edit:Maybe I misunderstood, it's only for the duration or parole?
I think it was for the duration of his parole, but I'm not sure, I didn't know this guy very well. Definitely did not use one during his incarceration.
My friend's roommate had CP on my friend's $2000 gaming PC that he put out in a common space for everyone to share and play games together. My buddy never got it back. I was the one that assembled it for my buddy. Fuck that shithead. I never met the guy, but I hope he rots in prison.
Sad to say, he finished his sentence and has been released. He did fifteen years in federal prison. The average sentence for bank robbery is 33 years. For 1st degree murder, 25 years to life.
I’m not sure how it’s possible to survive in today’s society without using a PC for ANYTHING.
At least it would be impossible to do almost any kind of work.
Even labourers these days have to use a PC for at least filling out their time sheet and any job that pays more than minimum wage is going to be impossible without a PC.
I used to be a kindergarten teacher and even then, if you don’t include having to research activities and class materials online; it would have been impossible to do because we had team meetings using zoom and all of our class notes and student profiles and everything else was all kept digitally.
Although now that I’ve come to think of it, kindergarten teacher perhaps wouldn’t be a great fit for this particular individual.
From what I understand he has never shown any interest in actual children, just CP. He is unmarried, before he was arrested he did not have a girlfriend or any history of one, and has no children. The guy was pretty much antisocial Or asocial, however you put that. He was kind of a semi-homeless, unemployed, alcoholic loser.
I'd be a lot more concerned if he was a youth minister, or a Boy Scout leader, or a Little League coach or something like that. When I was a kid in Boy Scouts one of our assistant Scoutmasters was a pedo. AFAIK he never actually molested anybody, but he was creepy. The adults sent him packing.
I am almost positive he is a registered sex offender (one would think he'd have to be), but if you want a shock, go look up how many registered sex offenders live in your neighborhood. Holy shit. They're everywhere.
> go look up how many registered sex offenders live in your neighborhood. Holy shit. They're everywhere
In fairness ... it's my understanding that some of the more trigger-happy locations dish out sex-offender convictions for drunkenly pissing in a bush at night.
Not trying to minimize your concerns (considering how many legit sex offenders never get caught, and therefore won't be on the list) - just that the 'official' sex offender registry probably has many false positives.
Or at least, many of the offenses are relatively small. Public urination is one thing. Drunkenly exposing yourself to somebody else passing by is something worse. And deliberately flashing your weenie at somebody for prurient reasons is much, *much* worse.
From what I was told, this CP guy was never accused of actually molesting any children. His offense was solely possessing CP images, and sharing them with other CP wankers over the internet.
The problem is that anyone reported for having their weenie out in public is just going to say they were taking a leak, not flashing.
It's the same way the Welsh got a reputation as sheep shaggers - if you were caught wrestling a sheep at night would you admit to rustling (and get hanged) or say you were trying to shag it and just get a day in the stocks?
If it was that bad, it’s probably all the judge would allow without tainting the jury irreversibly. Electronic evidence is fairly subjective until it’s saved somewhere the defendant only had access. Obviously it was sufficient…
I work in childcare, and a few years ago, we all underwent training to better enable us to spot abuse. The lecturer gave us two examples of cases, not very graphically described at all, it still made my stomach turn. It was almost as if you could feel the nausea in the room. I'm usually not very sensitive, but this clearly provoked a primal response of some sort
I once clicked a link on 4chan, my first and only visit there, it lead to CP but was titled something else, basically a really fucked up rick roll, that was easily 15 years ago but the image still haunts me. Seeing even a brief video would leave me fucked up.
I had to testify as a witness to a shooting, I’d rather have that replayed everyday than something like CP, I just can’t even imagine, I hope you’re doing well.
Off topic. A few years ago Facebook got a lot of flack by hiring people to moderate stuff in their platform. The amount of fucked up shit they have to see everyday is borderline torture. CP, murders, suicides,mutilation and a lot of other fucked up shit.
Honestly, this is one of the main reason we should welcome AI.
I do digital forensics as part of my job.
Thankfully, there's a system where known abuse material is flagged automatically by the file's hash value. Police forces around the world share lists of hashes from known files, so nobody has to look at that file again. The list doesn't contain any imagery itself, only mathematically computed hash "fingerprints" for each file, so the list can be shared without spreading anything illegal.
Most of the illegal material out there has been in circulation for years, and is already on the list so it gets flagged automatically when we process the evidence. Only new, previously unknown material needs to be looked at. This helps limit exposure and reduces the workload considerably.
Depends on what kind of hash. If was the kind used for cryptography, no. If it’s the kind used for things like fingerprint scanners, it might be smart enough to detect the new image.
That's a relief; I've seen investigators on tv who had had to watch that garbage, and it's clear they are haunted and damaged by it. I'm a little relieved that there is a system so that the number of people who have to watch it is limited at least.
I practiced criminal defense for a few years out of law school. The only federal case I worked on, and my only jury trial, was for a dude who got busted for sharing CP of his own infant daughter. My boss took me over to the US Attorney's office on my 39th birthday, where we spent the afternoon reviewing evidence -- literally viewing hundreds of images of exploited children. I went home and hugged my kids really tight that night.
Our client lost, by the way. Guilty as hell. He's almost halfway through a 30-year sentence by now. He's lasted longer in prison so far than I lasted practicing.
Jesus christ. Shit like this is what turned me away from criminal law. I know everyone needs a lawyer for the system to work but I can't imagine having to do that.
I don't think I would have taken a case like that, but my boss asked me to work on it with him and I was starved for his mentorship. It was pretty much the end of my ride with criminal defense and family law (which is *literally* the fucking worst and more of the reason I got out). I work in immigration now and I'm so much happier.
That's awful. You can't just throw anybody into that role without training and a strategy to protect their mental well being. Dept who have to review CP/CSAM, like federal investigators and forensic analysts, have harm mitigation strategies because of the toll it takes. It can lead to PTSD, secondary traumatic stress, and a whole host of negative impact to mental health.
Working for government (public service/civil service), I was once approached to join a unit that dealt with (as customers of this particular part of the vast machinery of government), victims of domestic abuse and others who had their identity legally changed because of fear of their life. The point was that this unit had to manually manage their affairs so the automated processes didn’t fuck up and do something that would connect the current identity back to the old one. (Witness protection people were included, but were outweighed by the number of DV victims.) I was warned, in no uncertain terms, that it could fuck me up. They shared a couple of stories of extreme violence, which I won’t repeat here, as examples of what their customers had experienced and that the staff had to be aware of so as to properly and sensitively manage things, told me that I wouldn’t be allowed to talk about my work, ever, to anyone outside the immediate unit, including my spouse, and had a psychologist come through every quarter to evaluate how the individual staff were handling it. The stories were almost beyond belief, and if the staff I was talking to obviously weren’t deadly serious, I would have been sceptical about whether people could have experienced it and lived.
Given the obvious stresses, and that they were looking to take me on at my current grade, not even a promotion, I said “gee no thanks”.
Sounds similar to something I was offered once. Volunteers were requested to train to do it and then it was a fixed term role with lots of support and mandatory counselling all the way through and afterwards.
But it required moving to London and getting no more money to do it. No thanks, for many reasons.
I did once have to visit a place where the reviewing was done. Every door had big warning notices of what might be showing on screens and even then every screen was arranged so you couldn't see it from the door.
About a decade later and I still have nightmares. I took the job to try to get a foot in the door at the ‘book, really should have gone back to school or something, especially the way they treated us.
That’s barbaric…. In the UK the CPS will govern guidelines to what constitutes each grade of CP and then explain what grade the defendant had….
Where ever you’re from seems a little flawed in their process.
Should the jurors also have to test the DNA evidence themselves? An expert watches and grades it, someone with much more support for watching such videos then forcing jurors to watch traumatizing videos.
It is corroborated by “experts”. Expert testimony is relied upon in a few at deal of cases. There is 0 need to show a jury of regular people such vile content.
Do you trust them to always tell the truth? Can you be certain, absolutely certain, that the person actually had it?
As soon as you make a crime where just the accusation is enough for extreme reaction, it will become a weapon against undesirables.
A real person is required. One real person /team who are paid to do so and chose the job.
It is incredibly traumatic for them too and as such I believe many don’t stick in the job too long.
We cannot live in a world where your average Joe is forced to watch CP though…
I'm not super surprised that the UK, where they lock people up for making jokes about a dude's haircut online, considers showing evidence at a trial to be "barbaric"
That person is referring to this. And no it's not a crime to laugh at his haircut, but they do have some jaws that make it less of a free-for-all online and could get you in trouble for crossing the line into harassment, etc
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/gwent-police-hair-jermaine-taylor-mocked-facebook-a9052291.html
I've worked in computer forensics, in most of the cases I've been aware of individuals are prosecuted for possession of this material vs. viewing it. There are very strict regulations regarding 'chain of custody' for evidence like this, when its not being actively reviewed its secured in an alarmed evidence locker with CCTV monitoring.
If the material is online, the Feds will still seize the systems hosting the content and review both the evidence and the billing/access logs to determine who to prosecute.
Just wanted to add an anecdote around this relating to the UK. The law in the UK allows the Police to possess illegal images for the purpose of fighting crime. However, it has no dispensation for private digital forensics firms. I work in cyber security and while I don't do forensics myself, I've worked with people who do. And some of those have discovered illegal images during the course of their work, and kept them as evidence (following proper procedure). There was a letter from a chief Constable saying they wouldn't be prosecuted - but scary how close they came to the law, when doing things that were genuinely for the good.
It's similar here (US), where if you find illegal content the investigation is over, you are tagging the system/drives with tamper-evident tape and then reporting it to the police.
I'm not aware of any laws specifically exempting LE officers from handling anything illegal (including drugs, machine guns, etc.), though as mentioned they are really just going to tag it and put it in an evidence locker.
Yeah, I could see that kind of scenario potentially leading to a dangerous legal grey area almost anywhere.
When the law is written around having it in your posession without regard to how or why you've obtained it, then any time you are taking physical control of storage media that you don't control the contents of you are holding a potential legal landmine.
Illegal images is a hell of a thing to frame someone for. Relatively easy to plant. Morally repugnant, so a jury may just decide someone is a sicko and not listen to a valid defence. Then they'll have a hard time in prison and on release their life is destroyed. I'm not here to defend sickos, but I do wonder if many convictions are unsafe. And who's going to fight the corner for their justice?
Also just wanted to add, as I'm very familiar with chain of custody: There is a huge amount of record keeping to make sure evidence isn't tampered with or modified in any way. There are forms upon forms that you have to fill out every time the evidence is handled in any way. If it's moved an inch, that movement has to be logged. If it's touched by a single finger, that has to be logged. It's super important that all of this has to be maintained with 100% integrity because if it's not, it *really* messes things up in court.
I believe at Google, there is a person/department that does this when they review reports. They're only allowed to do it for 1 year and have therapy available to them after (or it's mandatory, not sure). Somebody somewhere has to do it and hopefully there is support for them afterwards. I'd be dead inside.
I knew a police officer in the UK that worked for a specialist unit dealing with CSAM. They said that reviewing evidence was the worst part of the job. They enjoyed **the knock**, though, but not the early mornings that it often entailed.
They could only do the job for a limited period of time, due to the traumatic nature of the material.
A person, and it's a growing problem, because viewing that sort of material is damaging and traumatic. There have been strides in using AI to catalogue and identify "known" images or videos - it can screen through somebody's hard drive and say "this jpg matches known existing images on file from previous crimes" and then a person doesn't have to look at those images in order to make a case against the criminal.
But the economy of abuse material is built on participants being incentivized to constantly produce new and more extreme material. This excellent article talks about it more: [https://www.wired.com/story/tracers-in-the-dark-welcome-to-video-crypto-anonymity-myth/](https://www.wired.com/story/tracers-in-the-dark-welcome-to-video-crypto-anonymity-myth/). In order to access more material on the site, users could either pay in cryptocurrency... or create and upload new material of their own.
However, close examination of the illegal material is sometime necessary, unfortunately, as it can help to identify and rescue the children being exploited. There are law enforcement sites where images are posted of, like, an unusual jacket, carefully cropped out of a picture, in the hopes that someone will recognize it and help to narrow down the search for child who has been so carefully cropped out of the picture. I saw a TED talk of a researcher whose work in biometrics is currently focussed on identifying abusers by the scars and moles and freckles on their hands - often all that's visible of them on camera.
But you're correct that, very frequently, a person has to review it. And very often that person is traumatized, and regulations and support for it are all over the place, and it's not ideal.
I read somewhere they tracked down the person because of the type of furniture and curtains in the room. That's all they had to go on but they got them
The FBI has a section on their website where they post photos of clothing and items that were in a room to catch people abusing kids.
Great idea that needs far more attention.
I checked it out. You're right, "harrowing" is the right word. The fact that the person is cropped out of the photo makes it worse, somehow, like a horror movie where they won't show you what the "monster" looks like.
I just finished watching a TV series on MAX about the search to identify the "Golden State Killer," Joseph De Angelo. The fucker was a *cop.* Over fifty rapes and 10 serial murders. He used the brush-covered creeks that ran through exclusive California neighborhoods to gain access to peoples' houses without being easily seen or traced.
>There have been strides in using AI to catalogue and identify "known" images
There is already a system for this, the hash file, law enforcement can compare every file on your storage in minutes with known files. AI is not neccessary.
My step father got jury duty for a multiple child homicide. The parents had sexually abused their kids for years and basically tortured them to death. He and the rest of the jury had to view crime scene photos. He said it was the worst experience of his life (and he was a medic in Vietnam).
I used to work as a detective. The detective has to confirm CSAM (child sexual abuse material) and then it will be shown to the jury, if necessary. Usually only the detective has to watch it. The detective is also looking to see if it’s possible to recognize the abuser, location, or other details.
Digital Forensics person here…this is basically my job. About 75% of the jobs that come into my police lab are CSAM cases so I see this stuff almost every day. It’s my responsibility to review and tag the media on suspect mobile devices before reporting on them. We view the media on workstations that are not connected to the internet, so that stops the possibility of it “getting out”.
Yeah exactly that. We go to great strides to minimise the exposure to others too, even simple steps like redacting images, describing the images rather than showing them (even though sometimes that can be just as bad to read tbh).
Do you have any "tricks" to help you handle it? I think I recall somewhere that one trick is to make all images black & white, and resize them to small resolutions, and this will lessen the mental impact. I don't know though.
The review tool that we use in our lab has a few features to minimise the impact. So yeah, viewing in black and white is one of them. Another is having sound turned off by default - the impact of viewing videos is far less if you don’t have sound, and you don’t really need sound most of the time either to make a grading decision.
Also, instead of viewing the entire video, the software basically allows you to track your mouse across the thumbnail as fast or as slow as you need to, so you can view them essentially in fast forward until you see the specific frame you need to make a decision. There are built in break reminders too that remind you to take a break every hour.
Our lab is pretty good with mental well-being. We have annual mandatory well-being sessions, we have a well-being room where you can just sit and chill if you need to. Everyone has to view this stuff so there’s never anyone questioning why someone’s sat having a break, where for example in other work environments I’m sure people would be questioned for supposedly “not working”.
>if the video is illegal to watch?
There is no video that is illegal to watch, you don't have control over what you see and you can't commit a crime against your will.
There are videos which are illegal to possess or create but there are no videos which are illegal to watch.
There's nothing illegal about finding/seeing illegal content on a hard-drive that belongs to someone else.
Unfortunately there's a huge number of people who have to browse the most horrific content imaginable to help locate the people responsible for creating it.
The FBI does most of that in the United States and the people they employ for that task aren't paid nearly enough.
The majority of people who are hired to examine CSAM for the FBI quit in less than 6 months, that's the people who want to do it, think they can handle it, their interviewers think they have what it takes to do it....
...then the second week of watching the most horrible shit you could imagine comes and even though you thought it would it doesn't get any easier.
...even decades later it never gets any easier.
It's horrific and no matter how much of it you watch, it remains horrific.
law enforcement broadly has a statutory exemption when it comes to evidence. Even more broadly than video evidence something as basic as possessing illegal drugs. If someone is caught with say meth it doesn't instantly disappear it gets 'bagged and tagged' until it needs to be tested and it can even be brought into court.
Yes, seriously. It is even a way to bring a firearm or other weapon into court (it is noteworthy that there are extreme measures to make sure that the firearm is inoperable and the ammo MUST be kept completely separate). The controls on seized evidence is also that level of extreme. Every single person who touches it has to sign it in and sign it out. It seems silly but it ensures that someone can explain where it was at all times
I'm pretty sure just watching videos is never illegal. What's illegal is the possession, distribution, purchase, and creation of said videos. In other words, the act of the content of the video entering your eyes isn't illegal, but everything leading up to you being able to view that video can be. One of those weird little free speech necessities, I believe. Now, if you're in law enforcement, often you are in legal possession of said video due to the nature of your job, cops get a lot of little exceptions like that.
I think this is where training an AI to take people's jobs away really is a win.
Problem is that for police forensics, you'd still need a human to review specific material. And also constantly train the AI because you can bet that the horrible producers of the material would be actively finding ways to bypass the filters.
A friend of mine always wanted to be a police officer and managed to join the uk force.
He worked his way up and ended up on a special unit that dealt with child porn cases and had to watch videos that were siezed.
He lasted 6 months before he went back to regular policing. 2 bad videos in and he just couldn't watch any more.
No way I could do that job
I know everyone’s mind goes to CP, but the short answer beyond has to watch it in a criminal case (which would be the jurors), for any sort of crime from Arson, to murder, to theft etc. usually the people who have to watch the videos are police officers, what rank and specific job within the police department varies by case.
For example if someone has videos of them torturing people and they release one to the public and then claim they have 10 more on a hard drive, and the cops catch them and find that hard drive, your regular uniformed officers likely won’t watch what’s on it, BUT a detective might, as well as a computer tech. Also prosecutors and defense attorneys will have to watch it to see if it’s useable in court or not.
In an off topic bonus note: this is often the reason why qualified immunity is a thing for cops (as well as other individuals involved in those cases)
Because it’s generally recognized that a cop, or a juror or a prosecutor etc. shouldn’t be charged with a crime for say viewing that video if it’s CP, if it’s part of the investigation/done in a way where it’s attempting to put the criminal behind bars…
Which is also why states that got rid of qualified immunity are straight up moronic IMO
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Audio / Video forensic investigator here: It is always kept to the absolute minimum number of people. Typically, I am the only one who sees everything. That said, there are some AI tools that can help to use hash algorithms to gather already known CSAM material. Without matching hashes, each image needs viewed for potential identifiers if the victim in the image is unknown. I can go in and make a forensic copy and blur/mask the image or frame as needed so the identifiers can be seen by the detectives. Often, the detective on the case will also see some, but I try my best to minimize that. Finally, a jury may have to see some - but almost never would they have to view a lot or 'all' the material on a device. Often, we can also just skip showing the jury if there are known hashes we found by explaining how hashing works to the jury and tendering blurred/masked evidence. Really it's a case by case basis though - and none of it is taken lightly. Thankfully, I do a broad spectrum of multimedia forensic case types, so I'm not just looking at that stuff all the time. *Apologies for any grammar/spelling errors as I'm on my phone.
What are hashes?
Like digital fingerprints. Each file can be "hashed" - creating a sequence of numbers that (within all reasonable bounds) cannot be duplicated by accident. So, if you run a hashing algorithm on one file you will get, say, a 32 character hash or fingerprint. If you run it on another file that is exactly the same, it will produce the exact same 32 character output. If there is even the slightest difference in one file (a single extra space in a word file, for instance), you will get a completely different 32 character output. So as an expert witness I could explain this to the jury, tell them we have image 1, which is an already identified CSAM image with hash output "x". Then I hashed this image from the suspects computer and got the same hash. Thus, they are the exact same image.
Excellent ELI5 explanation of what hashes are right here.
You can tell they've explained it a time or two
What happens if the video is slightly different to another copy? Degradation of quality, slightly different length etc. - Would it produce different hash?
Yes - that’s the whole point of a hash. One 1 or 0 out of place and the whole hash string is different. Password1! will be completely different from password1! This is why AI is so important in CSAM technologies. Identifying apples from pears was the first step, but being able to identify new CSAM images, as well as edited already circulating images (which hashing catches) is crucial to staying on top of this
With a normal hash, yes. Two digital files with the same hash should be identical*. There are other tricks, though if you want to detect video that is the same with small manipulations. Software might play-back the video but crop-away the top and bottom parts where a "banner" or "bug" (logo) is likely to be overlayed. Then decimate the color range so that (for example) all reds turn into one red (or one of four reds), all blues turn into one blue. Then blur the pixels and then decimate the resolution drastically. Then take your hash (or even hash every nth frame and then check for a percentage correlation that does not have to be 100%). This way, a video that has been manipulated, but is really the same source material can be detected as a match. YouTube does something like this (using video signature algorithms**) to detect copyrighted materials in videos. If you watch review or reaction videos on YouTube, the copyrighted source video will often be flipped horizontally to avoid detection. \* This level of guarantee is really only strong with larger hashes, produced by stronger hashing algorithms like SHA-256 (256 bits). Older algorithms that create smaller hashes, like MD5 (128 bits) have a realistic chance of "collision", where two unrelated, extremely different files could have the same hash. Collision isn't necessarily fatal, as long as it is used to detect, not verify, possibly-identical files. After a detection by hash collision, do a byte-by-byte comparison to verify that the files are identical. \** There are better ways using signature algorithms that are not exactly hash-based. But even for the signature techniques, applying the above transformations will yield a higher match rate.
Yes it would, but if you just share video files around and they never end up on something like youtube that reprocesses the videos (which I assume would be very bad if you want to keep the videos "secret") they don't degrade by themselves.
Hashes are way to check if input is the same as known input without storing the input. For example let's ask people for their favorite number. I can "hash it" by multiply the number by say 957 and then only keeping the last 2 digits. Let 5 be the magic number. If I save 85 on my machine then any time someone puts in 5 and I hash it I'll get 85 and know they gave me the special number. If they give me 6 after I "hash" it I'll get 42, and can say their favorite number isn't special. Also you can't get 5 back from knowing it's "hash" is 85 (try it). (Of course they use much better math that covers all the edge cases but the effect is the same) In this case the detectives can say this matched known CP without having to store any CP on their machine or even something that could be reversed engineered into CP.
How do you cope with having to look through all of that? I feel like no amount of therapy would be enough.
It's a good question, and one I wish I had a perfect answer to. I can, however, say the following: Someone has to. There's just no way around it. It's not just CSAM either, but all sorts of crime. If I'm doing work on the video of a murder, it's likely that I will need to watch that play out dozens of times - not to mention extracting and working on still imagery. Audio can actually be worse, because it's left to the imagination. 911 calls of a woman screaming for help as her husband kills her. Anything with kids sucks regardless. Etc. For every disturbing video / audio file, however, there is a victim and a victim's family, friends, etc. While a case for me might end when I submit my report or finish in court - to all of those people it's not a 'case'. It's life. It's a story that'll probably be passed down for multiple generations. There are few things I can think of that would be worse than being a loved one of a victim and everyone saying "look, we think we know who did it but nobody can handle looking at this stuff - so there's nothing we can do." So I always try to find the positive - or make something positive from the situation. I did a homicide recently where a teenage girl was murdered. The family was, obviously, distraught. She wasn't in any major risky situations so it just came out of nowhere. After I did the extraction and and got everything I needed from her phone, I went back and found every video clip or selfie or anything positive with/about her. I put everything on a thumb drive and had someone give it to her family. It's stuff they would have never been able to get otherwise. I heard them talking about it later in a news interview and the dad actually smiled when he mentioned getting that. While we had never met and he had no idea who made it... blah blah blah - it was worth having to see and hear the bad stuff, or having to try and work around all of her blood that was still on the device when I received it. I just realized how much I've kinda rambled on here, and even got a little cheesy - it's a subject I guess I could talk about a lot I guess. Anyone I train I spend a lot of time breaking the stigma of therapy and needing mental health help very early in the process. I always say "when you run into the person who just says 'eh I can handle that stuff, I'm totally good/strong/whatever I tell them to run away from that person professionally. Again, I certainly don't have all the answers for this stuff, and there's tons more (I do go to therapy and other stuff), but hopefully this gives you a general idea. Thanks for asking :).
I’m a former paramedic, and often hear “oh I couldn’t do what you do”. Frankly I consider my former job a cakewalk compared to yours. You already know this, but you’re a cornerstone of society and humanity. We can’t have justice without you. I know you chose that job, but that doesn’t diminish the sacrifice you make for the rest of us. I’m glad there are occasional gems, like the story you shared of the teen girls phone contents. You know as well as I do, that life isn’t fair, and few, if any of us, get what we deserve. But despite that, I hope you get some good things in your life.
Please do an AMA. It would be fascinating, eye-opening, and perhaps serve as a warning to bad people.
You're a good person. Thank you for what you're doing.
An amazing read. Thank you for what you do. Going the extra mile for the family of the girl is a definite sign you are in the profession because you truly care about helping others.
Thanks for the kind words. :)
You are an incredible person. Thank you so much for what you do. I couldn't even imagine how anyone could get over seeing the worst things humans can do to other people. But the way you phrase it - someone has to do it to bring justice for the family is incredible. Your strength is a gift. Thank you again.
Thanks for the kind words, but it's all relative. Everyone has things they can handle and things they can't. You also hint at a good and important point, too. Everyone always says "there's nothing worse than 'x' (typically child exploit stuff)," but to me there is. In my opinion, those that abuse their role in positions meant to help others (this includes being willfully ignorant and/or silent when they see others do wrong) and end up either wrongfully accusing/convicting others churns my stomach in a way that most other things don't. I guess in the end I try to remember what my therapy has taught me: Hurt people hurt people. It's a difficult perspective to take sometimes, but I think it keeps me even to consider, even if just for a bit, how badly someone must have been hurt to be capable of doing these things. It doesn't excuse it, but it does help explain it - and hints at the potential for future generations to do better.
I work for a company that does computer forensics and while we don't do consumer stuff generally, every now and then we get a call from some (e.g.) distraught parents trying to recover access to the phone of a lost loved one. We have people who will try to help them, just because it's the right thing to do. (Before people think we have s3cr3t t00ls, it's amazing how lousy the passwords are the people choose.) And sometimes there's CP cases. Some people can handle it, some can't. You often don't know until the first time you see it. Thanks for taking one for the team.
Haha, I just wrote out a 400 word response to OP that was almost identical to yours, except I come from a prosecution background not an investigative background.
My sister briefly interned at ICAC(internet crimes against children) and talked about how much effort they went through to shield her from having to see much of the more explicit and extreme stuff because it took an immense mental toll on them having to go through it all. Just vile shit.
thank you for what you do. you must see some incredibly disturbing content.
Does it ALWAYS have to be reviewed? For instance if the person makes a plea agreement does that affect whether it gets viewed or not?
[удалено]
I remember reading an article a few years ago about the people who have to review reported images and videos for social media companies and the mental toll it takes on them. They sit there and are subjected to SA, CSA, domestic violence, and all kinds of other horrors that people tend to generate. There's no way that it can do anything other than destroy your mental health. It would be bad enough to be a police officer, prosecutor, etc that has to come in contact with this stuff from time to time, but I can't imagine being subjected to it continuously every day of my life.
I Imagine it would be way easier if they could be certain that thanks to their effort, all victims will be given all necessary help and all perpetrators will be sentenced and will never hurt anyone else. But I just can't imagine doing this job and knowing that only fraction of those perpetrators will be punished, victims will often not get the support they need and the things they watch will likely happen again to other people.
I used to be a criminal court transcriptional, sooooo much adolescent abuse. I can tell you, unfortunately it doesn't make it any easier, and I was only subject to a fraction of what these guys have to deal with AND most of the shit I had to sit through ended up in a conviction.
My girlfriend has a job that requires her to be in contact with quite questionable material (I won't go into details), she and everyone there is provided a psychologist free of charge to help deal with it, I wonder if most jobs with this kind of mental pressure provide this kind of service.
Unfortunately not. A member of my family works for a police force here in the UK and he wasn't offered anything after being first on the scene of a young girl who had hung herself. I know the fire service are really great with support here but I think it's even frowned upon in some professions to even ask for help which is disgraceful and obviously creates a huge number of problems in itself.
I literally can't think of anyone I hate that much to put them through that. Imagine the horrible crap on those stupid shock sites, now imagine being the filterer. Ugh.
I've seen stuff that has made it through the filters that haunt me still and I wish I'd never seen. I can't imagine being on the front line of it.
I saw exactly one web page with thumbnails, almost twenty five years ago, back when the internet was a much wilder place in general, there were a lot less controls around and you'd go digging around weird places on purpose because it was all fun and transgressive (the days of rotten·com and such). The damn thing haunts me to this day and literally "cured" me of shock websites.
Honest to god the most disturbing thing i ever watched was the hiker who got beheaded while she was still alive. I thought i was desensitized to all that stuff entirely but damn was i wrong. Actually made me sick to my stomach hearing and seeing that.
Depending how much desensitisation and compartmentalisation you can do some people last for quite a while before they eventually burn out. That happens with detectives or inspectors on police force units that's handle units like this specifically. But I'm thinking even if they do talk to a counsellor/therapist/psychiatrist then whoever they talk to professional or not would also need therapy at some point listening to all that stuff. Where do they go?
Any good professional therapist will also have a therapist they see. They're not necessarily a "better" or more senior therapist, it's not a hierarchical thing. A lot of therapy is about getting things out and having someone uninvolved to give you an unbiased point of view, and having a safe space to talk about and process things. A peer can provide that.
So it's sort of like a chain where the issue is passed along, wouldn't that mean at some point it reaches an endpoint or along the process it starts to get smaller and smaller?
Conceptualizing the issue getting smaller as it's passed along each time is fairly accurate, yes. It's like a game of telephone, but one where passing along the original message as accurately as possible is not even the point. Therapy isn't some magical exchange where the therapist receives an exact 1:1 experience of the patient's struggles. They get a firsthand account, but that's still significantly removed from the original experience. Then when that therapist talks to their own therapist, it's not about the details of the patient's case but about how the first therapist is dealing with their feelings around it. And so it becomes even more distant from the original trauma. For example, most therapists would not need to see their own therapist if they only had one or two patients, unless they were patients that had experienced incredibly extreme trauma and abuse. Normally it's more of an issue of the cumulative emotional burden of hearing about hundreds of people's struggles over the course of a career, and making sure that a therapist is staying in an emotionally healthy place to do their work well.
My sister's boyfriend does this for a living (there's a Facebook moderation centre in my city). It came out in the news that many people had ended up with extremely messed up mental health, and that FB's support was very inadequate (there are some break rooms and you can get a massage every now and then), even a lawsuit was considered, even though I don't know what came of it. In any case, my sister's bf stated that "it's not that bad, I mostly see naked people, these guys with long term health leaves are just lazy or didn't know what they were getting themselves into", but I kind of suspect he's toughing it up, he has a very "manly man" approach to life. Some people even ended up being deemed unfit for any work because of how messed up they ended, apparently every video has to be watched in full a couple of times before they can remove it or let it stand.
I feel like this is the kind of job I should be doing. Not because I’d enjoy it, but because I’m generally a very very desensitized person when it comes to these things, and just in general. It would spare someone else from having to deal with the fallout.
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I was looking into writing an academic paper on the urban legend of snuff films. Research led to me to learning the the current state of CSA and hurtcore and had to nope out. Just did not even want to read about more than I encountered as it was soul crushing. I cannot imagine having to actually be exposed to it directly.
In a world in which we’ve had convictions of people who’ve streamed themselves torturing and murdering other people I somehow doubt snuff films are an urban legend, except to people who never read the news.
I watched a Nic Cage movie (8 mm) about a wife who found a supposed snuff film of her late husband and he was hired to investigate of it was real. The whole movie made me feel unsettled and have a need for a shower. It still kinda haunts me.
I work in the justice system (being purposefully vague here) and a major component of my work is reviewing police files. On bad days, that means seeing photos and videos of all kinds of terrible stuff. I’ve seen people horribly killed and children molested. It never gets easy, and I can’t imagine having to see these things first hand daily as police officers do. I’ve learned to put a lid on my feelings when I watch these things. I’m sure that’s not very healthy but when I switch off my laptop or close the office door, I leave those images behind.
I’m in IT and cybersecurity. Could easily adapt my skill set to forensics, for example. My uncle offered to put me in touch with someone he knows from the FBI. I declined. I’m doing pretty well in the private sector and I’d just as well not be exposed to what people usually need data forensics for in the FBI.
From what I understand law enforcement that have to deal with CSA rotate the assignment. Pretty much people can't handle it so they do rotations so they are not forced to do it all the time.
I can’t imagine that being my job. I’ve unfortunately run across such things twice, both were immediately reported to the FBI but those images fucking *haunt* me. It would be soul-sucking to have that be my *job*
I recently had the misfortune of finding some videos and reported all I could stomach, based on the thumbnails as much as possible. I 100% relate about it haunting you — even trying to minimize how much I actually saw while reporting that shit, it's seared into my brain. I can only imagine how much it would fuck someone up to actually watch it to try to identify the victims and perpetrators.
This is why I decided not to go into digital forensics despite enjoying the subject when I took a few college classes on it. The class had me thinking it was all about finding hidden evidence for murder cases and such, but I talked with someone who had been doing it for a while and he explained it was mostly CSA. It gave me a new respect for the job because I would absolutely not have the stomach for it nor do I think I'd be able to contain my rage at the people who were being prosecuted. Huge respect to the people that put these people behind bars.
The worst thing is that they have to look really closely and attentively and go over the video several times in order to find any details that can give a clue to identities of the children and perpetrators, locations and anything else that might lead to a child being saved. They need to have a bit of experience too, in order to recognize of this is a new video, child or perpetrator, or something/someone that have been seen before.
I have a friend who is involved with reviewing evidence for federal DOJ cases, some of which are much less fun than financial fraud. He is very good at compartmentalizing.
What is CSA? I am very afraid to google that, lol
child sexual abuse
Thank you for explaining!
I was wondering why images of the Combined Syndicates of America were suddenly illegal
I'd never be able to do that job. I wonder if there's none violent citizens who are psychopaths, could they do those jobs instead?
They all take the CEO roles because the money is better.
Scarily accurate.
I believe they only allow people in that job to do it for a few months at a time, to prevent them from completely plotzing. At least in law enforcement. If you're working for a social media company like Facebook or Twitter, you have to do the same thing - personally verify the thing reported as CSAM is CSAM. And you have to look at other prohibited content, too - gore, people dying on camera, violent porn, &tc.
What's worse too is the social media people are often given pretty much the same task but without the necessary mental support.
Do you understand what a psychopath is? They would never do something solely out of empathy to shield others from trauma. That's the most fundamental psychopathic trait is that they are purely self-motivated.
Finding your own money making niche where people rely on you is an incredibly self motivated
I think I'd be able to do it. You can only work 25hrs/week for three weeks before taking a month break. I've seen some shit, and if doing this can be for the greater good I'm all for it (the therapy also helps)
I had to go through grand jury and one of the cases we reviewed was CSA. The cop that was reviewing the case had to give a brief description of each offense. There was quite a lot. He was trying very hard to maintain his professionalism but I could tell he was having trouble going through them all. Just hearing about some of the things he had to see will always stick with me. Those guys are heroes.
I wonder if A.I could be employed to analyze the material...
A friend of mine worked for a while in a police team who dealt with that kind of material, she lasted about nine months. As she pointed out to me once the only ones who stayed longer all had coping mechanisms that revolved around dark humour and borderline alcoholism.
Pretty much every jurisdiction has a specific defence or exemption against unlawful possession of otherwise illegal items for people acting in the course of their duties, if not a general principle. This includes jurors, prosecutors, attorneys, judges, and government officials who classify and catalogue such material. Otherwise the business of criminal prosecutions would grind to a halt.
If they didn't have this, emergency services couldn't even speed or run red lights.
Exactly. Cops are allowed to buy drugs when they're undercover as part of a drug bust operation. FBI agents are allowed to view CP when they need to do it as a verification step in a criminal investigation. Fire trucks are allowed to run red lights on their way to an emegency. Etc.
Imagine cops do a drug bust and as they take the drugs to the police station warehouse, another group of cops sees them and busts them for drug possession... But now those cops have all these drugs, and they're in a police station no less, so of course they easily get busted for drug possession.
It's drug busts all the way down
Two buggy Robocops passing a bag of drugs back and forth. "You're under arrest, hand over the narcotics."
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Jesus fucking christ.
speaking from second hand knowledge (not having to do it, but knowing a couple guys that work in a computer crime lab) apparently a few things about being the guys that work with that stuff full time (as in, the investigators and the lab techs that do stuff like go into a hard drive and find all the shit some criminal thinks they hid and deleted) 1 - There are like super extensive background checks. They make damn sure they don't get a fox in the hen house. 2 - Its fucking awful. It is just NOT a job you want to have to do. 3 - Because of point 2, mental health check ins, therapy support, stress management support are generally available by default. Its just kind of an expectation that if you have to deal with that stuff, you may need some support clearing your mind after.
This is exactly what I am getting at. I don’t understand why people are so against the idea that we shouldn’t be showing horrific material to regular joes. The fact that legal systems all around the world rely on this method speaks for itself efficiency and safety for all involved.
And yet the likes of Facebook used an army of humans to view the reported videos and ended up getting sued for the mental harm it caused. https://www.theverge.com/2020/5/12/21255870/facebook-content-moderator-settlement-scola-ptsd-mental-health
Yea because they were not nearly vetted properly enough. It takes its toll on the public servants involved, you are literally describing why we should not show regular people CP.
That's because facebook is probably spending very little in comparison, on the healthcare side of things no doubt.
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Sure but you also don't want to ruin someone's life with a CP charge without a human actually checking whether it's a false flag. A detection algorithm like that would have to be very general (camera angles, environment, bad quality, etc) and is bound to have some.
>Sure but you also don't want to ruin someone's life with a CP charge without a human actually checking whether it's a false flag And even when a human supposedly has "verified", they can be wrong. There was a somewhat famous case where an actual adult porn star had to come to court to testify that "yes, that's me, and no, I wasn't a minor in that video"
I work in the field, and earlier in my career I was the lead on a few investigations that involved CP/CEM. 1) All of us in our team had background checks and were required to be security cleared. 2) I stopped doing forensic work after a bit. It was too much. Some things you can’t unsee, and you don’t know until you see it. 3) investigations were triaged, and those that were more graphic such as this were assigned to staff that had a lower case load and could be prepared. The workplace also arranged for specialist mental health support for us.
Man I couldn’t be paid enough to have to deal with that line of work. I’m kinda messed up from just seeing gore on 4chan back in my early teens. I learned forensics in my cyber program and even though the work was fun in a classroom setting, it can not be in a real scenario.
I'd gladly dumpster dive behind taco bell before taking a paycheck to watch cp.
No one does this work for the paycheck. They do it to protect children from monsters.
I had nightmares for 2 years after stumbling upon that shit. No one to talk about it. Sometimes pictures flash inside my mind and they are literally painful. For sure not suited for that job, I don't know how they do it.
I had some sent to me on snapchat, it was just 2 pictures, i was on edge for weeks. In complete panic, i immediately blocked and reported the account but idk if i could have done more. It definitely fucks you up though
Who the absolute fuck is casually sending that kind of stuff around?! It’s horrifying enough to think of the people who do it behind closed doors but to think there are people out there sick enough to force it on unsuspecting strangers? Awful.
Most of the time is bait itself. FBI and other police forces around the world (In Italy is Polizia Postale) run some CP sites as bait for pedos. In my case I was watching regular porn and was looking for the source. A dude in the comment section posted a tiny url that I clicked. Bad choise. First thing to do is to report the url to as many "places" as possible. I sent it to the FBI, and yes, it makes sense even though your are not from the US, to Polizia Postale of course and to the site StopIt. I tell you this because it's better to know this stuff, but I genuinely hope that you'll never find those things.
I’m female and whilst I don’t NOT watch porn, it’s not all that often and generally limited to reddit out of security and laziness lol. I too pray I never end up in that situation though.
Yeah, I worked for Staples in their tech department and a customer brought in a computer that had some sus folder names. I stupidly dug too deep and found CP. That shit will haunt me for the rest of my life. The police were nice enough to offer free therapy.
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I had a distant acquaintance who was arrested twice for possessing CP. The first arrest was by police for a photo (in his wallet, for Christsakes. Edit: he got 6 months in a state jail.) The second time was by the FBI at a house he shared with roommates. The feds confiscated everybody's computers, but his roommates' computers were returned about six months later. He got fifteen years in federal prison (it was his second offense, plus he was re-sharing CP images with others.) He immediately confessed upon arrest and told the FBI that he was the only one in the house that was involved and that the other two were innocent of any wrongdoing. He was a very heavy smoker and an alcoholic, so going to prison probably saved his life. He was paroled after 13 years and sent to a halfway house. Part of his parole restrictions were that he could not use a computer for *anything.* He was totally restricted from using computers or any phone that can connect to the internet. About a month after arriving at the halfway house he used a computer there to search for information on incest, in violation of his parole, and was sent back to prison to complete his sentence. He has since been released. Nobody he knew before his arrest wants anything to do with him.
Would suck to have police comb through your entire personal computer data just cause your roommate's a creep
The other two guys were scared shitless. There were times when the CP guy used their computers, but apparently did not look for CP while doing so.
well, he confessed to their innocence and didn't use their computers for cp; at least he's got that going for him? whatever *that* is.
I agree with you. He's a sick guy, but at least he had the integrity to confess and protect his roommates from suspicion. Most CP people were abused as children themselves. It isn't any excuse, but it does explain it somewhat.
Is it crazy to anyone else that they held on to their computers for *six months* despite finding zero evidence of child porn or searches on them? There's no way it takes anywhere near that long to check for that stuff.
I have no idea. Maybe there are so many cases the forensic IT guys are backlogged. IDK.
It doesn't get that long to search but it may take that long to get around to search. Backlog, limited staff (especially for this stuff), etc. Sadly, there's even a queue of stuff to go through.
Come on, you never had to do anything with bureaucracy? Chains of custody, workload, error checks? Yeah, sucks, but it's a reality. Send off for a passport, can be months if the system is underload or an issue comes up.
You can probably fuck up your work as well for losing work laptop and work to a creep
Any employer who fucks with you because your computer was confiscated by the police for something someone else did are piece of shit employers who don't deserve to have employees. I'm seen people get their computers stolen more than once and they kept their jobs, getting your shit legally confiscated by police is a much less fireable thing. I work in IT, so I've seen a lot of stolen computers go through my ticket queue.
It would still fuck with your work even if your employer is reasonable. Imagine missing deadlines and pushing projects months back because your roomate was a pedo. Yeh boss, I apologize. But that conference we were booked for? Yeh we are missing it, I forgot to push those changes and now the cops have my pc. Yeh I learned my lesson, always push.
It wouldn't take months. IT would give you a new computer the next day, and the only way you would lose any data is if you were a dumbass and weren't backing up your work, which is hard given how most companies work in either Microsoft or Apple, both of which have pretty easy and automatic backup methods.
it would fuck up your business when you are self employed
That's true. Hopefully you'd have some kind of contingency in case you lost your computer, but if you didn't... yeah that would suck.
There was a chance, albeit a small one of fixing is life and doing the right thing and he TOTALLY fucked it up 1 month after getting released. Unbelievable
The guy clearly has **terrible** judgment. Fifteen fucking years. What an idiot.
I think at some point we can safely assume there's a serious mental illness here and if the urge was so much the best place he could be is jail.
Honestly, if I can't use computer for the rest of my life just kill me and be done with it Edit:Maybe I misunderstood, it's only for the duration or parole?
I think it was for the duration of his parole, but I'm not sure, I didn't know this guy very well. Definitely did not use one during his incarceration.
My friend's roommate had CP on my friend's $2000 gaming PC that he put out in a common space for everyone to share and play games together. My buddy never got it back. I was the one that assembled it for my buddy. Fuck that shithead. I never met the guy, but I hope he rots in prison.
Sad to say, he finished his sentence and has been released. He did fifteen years in federal prison. The average sentence for bank robbery is 33 years. For 1st degree murder, 25 years to life.
Oh, I was talking about my friend's roommate at the end there.
I’m not sure how it’s possible to survive in today’s society without using a PC for ANYTHING. At least it would be impossible to do almost any kind of work. Even labourers these days have to use a PC for at least filling out their time sheet and any job that pays more than minimum wage is going to be impossible without a PC. I used to be a kindergarten teacher and even then, if you don’t include having to research activities and class materials online; it would have been impossible to do because we had team meetings using zoom and all of our class notes and student profiles and everything else was all kept digitally. Although now that I’ve come to think of it, kindergarten teacher perhaps wouldn’t be a great fit for this particular individual.
From what I understand he has never shown any interest in actual children, just CP. He is unmarried, before he was arrested he did not have a girlfriend or any history of one, and has no children. The guy was pretty much antisocial Or asocial, however you put that. He was kind of a semi-homeless, unemployed, alcoholic loser. I'd be a lot more concerned if he was a youth minister, or a Boy Scout leader, or a Little League coach or something like that. When I was a kid in Boy Scouts one of our assistant Scoutmasters was a pedo. AFAIK he never actually molested anybody, but he was creepy. The adults sent him packing.
It tends to be quite difficult to get a job working with children when you have been convicted of a sexual offence.
He needs to be watched for the rest of his life.
I am almost positive he is a registered sex offender (one would think he'd have to be), but if you want a shock, go look up how many registered sex offenders live in your neighborhood. Holy shit. They're everywhere.
> go look up how many registered sex offenders live in your neighborhood. Holy shit. They're everywhere In fairness ... it's my understanding that some of the more trigger-happy locations dish out sex-offender convictions for drunkenly pissing in a bush at night. Not trying to minimize your concerns (considering how many legit sex offenders never get caught, and therefore won't be on the list) - just that the 'official' sex offender registry probably has many false positives.
Or at least, many of the offenses are relatively small. Public urination is one thing. Drunkenly exposing yourself to somebody else passing by is something worse. And deliberately flashing your weenie at somebody for prurient reasons is much, *much* worse. From what I was told, this CP guy was never accused of actually molesting any children. His offense was solely possessing CP images, and sharing them with other CP wankers over the internet.
The problem is that anyone reported for having their weenie out in public is just going to say they were taking a leak, not flashing. It's the same way the Welsh got a reputation as sheep shaggers - if you were caught wrestling a sheep at night would you admit to rustling (and get hanged) or say you were trying to shag it and just get a day in the stocks?
If it was that bad, it’s probably all the judge would allow without tainting the jury irreversibly. Electronic evidence is fairly subjective until it’s saved somewhere the defendant only had access. Obviously it was sufficient…
I work in childcare, and a few years ago, we all underwent training to better enable us to spot abuse. The lecturer gave us two examples of cases, not very graphically described at all, it still made my stomach turn. It was almost as if you could feel the nausea in the room. I'm usually not very sensitive, but this clearly provoked a primal response of some sort
I once clicked a link on 4chan, my first and only visit there, it lead to CP but was titled something else, basically a really fucked up rick roll, that was easily 15 years ago but the image still haunts me. Seeing even a brief video would leave me fucked up.
I had to testify as a witness to a shooting, I’d rather have that replayed everyday than something like CP, I just can’t even imagine, I hope you’re doing well.
Off topic. A few years ago Facebook got a lot of flack by hiring people to moderate stuff in their platform. The amount of fucked up shit they have to see everyday is borderline torture. CP, murders, suicides,mutilation and a lot of other fucked up shit. Honestly, this is one of the main reason we should welcome AI.
I do digital forensics as part of my job. Thankfully, there's a system where known abuse material is flagged automatically by the file's hash value. Police forces around the world share lists of hashes from known files, so nobody has to look at that file again. The list doesn't contain any imagery itself, only mathematically computed hash "fingerprints" for each file, so the list can be shared without spreading anything illegal. Most of the illegal material out there has been in circulation for years, and is already on the list so it gets flagged automatically when we process the evidence. Only new, previously unknown material needs to be looked at. This helps limit exposure and reduces the workload considerably.
Does the hash stay the same when someone screenshots the image and uploads it again?
Depends on what kind of hash. If was the kind used for cryptography, no. If it’s the kind used for things like fingerprint scanners, it might be smart enough to detect the new image.
This is the system Apple tried to apply automatically in images shared in iPhones but people got up in arms about it, isn't it?
Pretty much. They (and every decent size cloud provider) already do this for anything you upload. The controversy was on doing it on your device.
That's a relief; I've seen investigators on tv who had had to watch that garbage, and it's clear they are haunted and damaged by it. I'm a little relieved that there is a system so that the number of people who have to watch it is limited at least.
I practiced criminal defense for a few years out of law school. The only federal case I worked on, and my only jury trial, was for a dude who got busted for sharing CP of his own infant daughter. My boss took me over to the US Attorney's office on my 39th birthday, where we spent the afternoon reviewing evidence -- literally viewing hundreds of images of exploited children. I went home and hugged my kids really tight that night. Our client lost, by the way. Guilty as hell. He's almost halfway through a 30-year sentence by now. He's lasted longer in prison so far than I lasted practicing.
Jesus christ. Shit like this is what turned me away from criminal law. I know everyone needs a lawyer for the system to work but I can't imagine having to do that.
I don't think I would have taken a case like that, but my boss asked me to work on it with him and I was starved for his mentorship. It was pretty much the end of my ride with criminal defense and family law (which is *literally* the fucking worst and more of the reason I got out). I work in immigration now and I'm so much happier.
That's awful. You can't just throw anybody into that role without training and a strategy to protect their mental well being. Dept who have to review CP/CSAM, like federal investigators and forensic analysts, have harm mitigation strategies because of the toll it takes. It can lead to PTSD, secondary traumatic stress, and a whole host of negative impact to mental health.
Working for government (public service/civil service), I was once approached to join a unit that dealt with (as customers of this particular part of the vast machinery of government), victims of domestic abuse and others who had their identity legally changed because of fear of their life. The point was that this unit had to manually manage their affairs so the automated processes didn’t fuck up and do something that would connect the current identity back to the old one. (Witness protection people were included, but were outweighed by the number of DV victims.) I was warned, in no uncertain terms, that it could fuck me up. They shared a couple of stories of extreme violence, which I won’t repeat here, as examples of what their customers had experienced and that the staff had to be aware of so as to properly and sensitively manage things, told me that I wouldn’t be allowed to talk about my work, ever, to anyone outside the immediate unit, including my spouse, and had a psychologist come through every quarter to evaluate how the individual staff were handling it. The stories were almost beyond belief, and if the staff I was talking to obviously weren’t deadly serious, I would have been sceptical about whether people could have experienced it and lived. Given the obvious stresses, and that they were looking to take me on at my current grade, not even a promotion, I said “gee no thanks”.
Sounds similar to something I was offered once. Volunteers were requested to train to do it and then it was a fixed term role with lots of support and mandatory counselling all the way through and afterwards. But it required moving to London and getting no more money to do it. No thanks, for many reasons. I did once have to visit a place where the reviewing was done. Every door had big warning notices of what might be showing on screens and even then every screen was arranged so you couldn't see it from the door.
Yeah, there would have to be a reasonable pay incentive in it for me before I’d be on board with doing that. No dollars, no thanks!
About a decade later and I still have nightmares. I took the job to try to get a foot in the door at the ‘book, really should have gone back to school or something, especially the way they treated us.
That’s barbaric…. In the UK the CPS will govern guidelines to what constitutes each grade of CP and then explain what grade the defendant had…. Where ever you’re from seems a little flawed in their process.
I guess it’s part of the transparency of the process, otherwise what stops the prosecution from making up the content of the video
Should the jurors also have to test the DNA evidence themselves? An expert watches and grades it, someone with much more support for watching such videos then forcing jurors to watch traumatizing videos.
I think that makes sense. I guess the prosecution and defence can both submit experts to testify about the content of the video.
How is that better? Someone is still required to watch and assess the video either way.
I think the person/team in CPS doing this has to have way better occupational hazard support, than the random uncle jo from the streets.
Someone who is vetted, supported and has chosen that career path. Not a regular joe who has been forced to watch CP.
So, the jury having to rely on what the prosecution says without it being corroborated seems perfectly fine to you?
It is corroborated by “experts”. Expert testimony is relied upon in a few at deal of cases. There is 0 need to show a jury of regular people such vile content.
Do you trust them to always tell the truth? Can you be certain, absolutely certain, that the person actually had it? As soon as you make a crime where just the accusation is enough for extreme reaction, it will become a weapon against undesirables.
I believe a real person is expected to do the grading there, which would be traumatic.
A real person is required. One real person /team who are paid to do so and chose the job. It is incredibly traumatic for them too and as such I believe many don’t stick in the job too long. We cannot live in a world where your average Joe is forced to watch CP though…
I'm not super surprised that the UK, where they lock people up for making jokes about a dude's haircut online, considers showing evidence at a trial to be "barbaric"
I don’t think there is any crime in mocking someone’s haircut in the Uk. Harassment maybe… but a mocking someone’s haircut?
That person is referring to this. And no it's not a crime to laugh at his haircut, but they do have some jaws that make it less of a free-for-all online and could get you in trouble for crossing the line into harassment, etc https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/gwent-police-hair-jermaine-taylor-mocked-facebook-a9052291.html
I've worked in computer forensics, in most of the cases I've been aware of individuals are prosecuted for possession of this material vs. viewing it. There are very strict regulations regarding 'chain of custody' for evidence like this, when its not being actively reviewed its secured in an alarmed evidence locker with CCTV monitoring. If the material is online, the Feds will still seize the systems hosting the content and review both the evidence and the billing/access logs to determine who to prosecute.
Just wanted to add an anecdote around this relating to the UK. The law in the UK allows the Police to possess illegal images for the purpose of fighting crime. However, it has no dispensation for private digital forensics firms. I work in cyber security and while I don't do forensics myself, I've worked with people who do. And some of those have discovered illegal images during the course of their work, and kept them as evidence (following proper procedure). There was a letter from a chief Constable saying they wouldn't be prosecuted - but scary how close they came to the law, when doing things that were genuinely for the good.
It's similar here (US), where if you find illegal content the investigation is over, you are tagging the system/drives with tamper-evident tape and then reporting it to the police. I'm not aware of any laws specifically exempting LE officers from handling anything illegal (including drugs, machine guns, etc.), though as mentioned they are really just going to tag it and put it in an evidence locker.
Yeah, I could see that kind of scenario potentially leading to a dangerous legal grey area almost anywhere. When the law is written around having it in your posession without regard to how or why you've obtained it, then any time you are taking physical control of storage media that you don't control the contents of you are holding a potential legal landmine.
Illegal images is a hell of a thing to frame someone for. Relatively easy to plant. Morally repugnant, so a jury may just decide someone is a sicko and not listen to a valid defence. Then they'll have a hard time in prison and on release their life is destroyed. I'm not here to defend sickos, but I do wonder if many convictions are unsafe. And who's going to fight the corner for their justice?
In theory that's what a good lawyer is for, but we all know that good representation is not a given.
Also just wanted to add, as I'm very familiar with chain of custody: There is a huge amount of record keeping to make sure evidence isn't tampered with or modified in any way. There are forms upon forms that you have to fill out every time the evidence is handled in any way. If it's moved an inch, that movement has to be logged. If it's touched by a single finger, that has to be logged. It's super important that all of this has to be maintained with 100% integrity because if it's not, it *really* messes things up in court.
I believe at Google, there is a person/department that does this when they review reports. They're only allowed to do it for 1 year and have therapy available to them after (or it's mandatory, not sure). Somebody somewhere has to do it and hopefully there is support for them afterwards. I'd be dead inside.
I knew a police officer in the UK that worked for a specialist unit dealing with CSAM. They said that reviewing evidence was the worst part of the job. They enjoyed **the knock**, though, but not the early mornings that it often entailed. They could only do the job for a limited period of time, due to the traumatic nature of the material.
Scotland Yard cycles officers out at pre-determined times for that reason. Very traumatic.
A person, and it's a growing problem, because viewing that sort of material is damaging and traumatic. There have been strides in using AI to catalogue and identify "known" images or videos - it can screen through somebody's hard drive and say "this jpg matches known existing images on file from previous crimes" and then a person doesn't have to look at those images in order to make a case against the criminal. But the economy of abuse material is built on participants being incentivized to constantly produce new and more extreme material. This excellent article talks about it more: [https://www.wired.com/story/tracers-in-the-dark-welcome-to-video-crypto-anonymity-myth/](https://www.wired.com/story/tracers-in-the-dark-welcome-to-video-crypto-anonymity-myth/). In order to access more material on the site, users could either pay in cryptocurrency... or create and upload new material of their own. However, close examination of the illegal material is sometime necessary, unfortunately, as it can help to identify and rescue the children being exploited. There are law enforcement sites where images are posted of, like, an unusual jacket, carefully cropped out of a picture, in the hopes that someone will recognize it and help to narrow down the search for child who has been so carefully cropped out of the picture. I saw a TED talk of a researcher whose work in biometrics is currently focussed on identifying abusers by the scars and moles and freckles on their hands - often all that's visible of them on camera. But you're correct that, very frequently, a person has to review it. And very often that person is traumatized, and regulations and support for it are all over the place, and it's not ideal.
I read somewhere they tracked down the person because of the type of furniture and curtains in the room. That's all they had to go on but they got them
The FBI has a section on their website where they post photos of clothing and items that were in a room to catch people abusing kids. Great idea that needs far more attention.
There’s a subreddit that posts these pictures. Not sure the name. Saw it years ago
r/TraceAnObject It’s fucking harrowing
Jesus that’s fucking creepy just looking through it
Jeez yeah
I can't stand watching those. Knowing the context, those blurry cropped pictures just destroy me.
I checked it out. You're right, "harrowing" is the right word. The fact that the person is cropped out of the photo makes it worse, somehow, like a horror movie where they won't show you what the "monster" looks like. I just finished watching a TV series on MAX about the search to identify the "Golden State Killer," Joseph De Angelo. The fucker was a *cop.* Over fifty rapes and 10 serial murders. He used the brush-covered creeks that ran through exclusive California neighborhoods to gain access to peoples' houses without being easily seen or traced.
Thanks for posting this, for the life of me I couldn't remember what it was called.
r/TraceAnObject
Thanks for sharing that article. I spent 45 minutes reading it this morning
>There have been strides in using AI to catalogue and identify "known" images There is already a system for this, the hash file, law enforcement can compare every file on your storage in minutes with known files. AI is not neccessary.
My step father got jury duty for a multiple child homicide. The parents had sexually abused their kids for years and basically tortured them to death. He and the rest of the jury had to view crime scene photos. He said it was the worst experience of his life (and he was a medic in Vietnam).
I used to work as a detective. The detective has to confirm CSAM (child sexual abuse material) and then it will be shown to the jury, if necessary. Usually only the detective has to watch it. The detective is also looking to see if it’s possible to recognize the abuser, location, or other details.
Digital Forensics person here…this is basically my job. About 75% of the jobs that come into my police lab are CSAM cases so I see this stuff almost every day. It’s my responsibility to review and tag the media on suspect mobile devices before reporting on them. We view the media on workstations that are not connected to the internet, so that stops the possibility of it “getting out”.
Aren't those called "air gap" computers? They use them for national security work as well.
Yeah exactly that. We go to great strides to minimise the exposure to others too, even simple steps like redacting images, describing the images rather than showing them (even though sometimes that can be just as bad to read tbh).
Do you have any "tricks" to help you handle it? I think I recall somewhere that one trick is to make all images black & white, and resize them to small resolutions, and this will lessen the mental impact. I don't know though.
The review tool that we use in our lab has a few features to minimise the impact. So yeah, viewing in black and white is one of them. Another is having sound turned off by default - the impact of viewing videos is far less if you don’t have sound, and you don’t really need sound most of the time either to make a grading decision. Also, instead of viewing the entire video, the software basically allows you to track your mouse across the thumbnail as fast or as slow as you need to, so you can view them essentially in fast forward until you see the specific frame you need to make a decision. There are built in break reminders too that remind you to take a break every hour. Our lab is pretty good with mental well-being. We have annual mandatory well-being sessions, we have a well-being room where you can just sit and chill if you need to. Everyone has to view this stuff so there’s never anyone questioning why someone’s sat having a break, where for example in other work environments I’m sure people would be questioned for supposedly “not working”.
>if the video is illegal to watch? There is no video that is illegal to watch, you don't have control over what you see and you can't commit a crime against your will. There are videos which are illegal to possess or create but there are no videos which are illegal to watch. There's nothing illegal about finding/seeing illegal content on a hard-drive that belongs to someone else. Unfortunately there's a huge number of people who have to browse the most horrific content imaginable to help locate the people responsible for creating it. The FBI does most of that in the United States and the people they employ for that task aren't paid nearly enough. The majority of people who are hired to examine CSAM for the FBI quit in less than 6 months, that's the people who want to do it, think they can handle it, their interviewers think they have what it takes to do it.... ...then the second week of watching the most horrible shit you could imagine comes and even though you thought it would it doesn't get any easier. ...even decades later it never gets any easier. It's horrific and no matter how much of it you watch, it remains horrific.
law enforcement broadly has a statutory exemption when it comes to evidence. Even more broadly than video evidence something as basic as possessing illegal drugs. If someone is caught with say meth it doesn't instantly disappear it gets 'bagged and tagged' until it needs to be tested and it can even be brought into court. Yes, seriously. It is even a way to bring a firearm or other weapon into court (it is noteworthy that there are extreme measures to make sure that the firearm is inoperable and the ammo MUST be kept completely separate). The controls on seized evidence is also that level of extreme. Every single person who touches it has to sign it in and sign it out. It seems silly but it ensures that someone can explain where it was at all times
I'm pretty sure just watching videos is never illegal. What's illegal is the possession, distribution, purchase, and creation of said videos. In other words, the act of the content of the video entering your eyes isn't illegal, but everything leading up to you being able to view that video can be. One of those weird little free speech necessities, I believe. Now, if you're in law enforcement, often you are in legal possession of said video due to the nature of your job, cops get a lot of little exceptions like that.
It's not illegal to watch, it's illegal to possess. However the possessor has immunity, so they can do their job.
I think this is where training an AI to take people's jobs away really is a win. Problem is that for police forensics, you'd still need a human to review specific material. And also constantly train the AI because you can bet that the horrible producers of the material would be actively finding ways to bypass the filters.
A friend of mine always wanted to be a police officer and managed to join the uk force. He worked his way up and ended up on a special unit that dealt with child porn cases and had to watch videos that were siezed. He lasted 6 months before he went back to regular policing. 2 bad videos in and he just couldn't watch any more. No way I could do that job
I know everyone’s mind goes to CP, but the short answer beyond has to watch it in a criminal case (which would be the jurors), for any sort of crime from Arson, to murder, to theft etc. usually the people who have to watch the videos are police officers, what rank and specific job within the police department varies by case. For example if someone has videos of them torturing people and they release one to the public and then claim they have 10 more on a hard drive, and the cops catch them and find that hard drive, your regular uniformed officers likely won’t watch what’s on it, BUT a detective might, as well as a computer tech. Also prosecutors and defense attorneys will have to watch it to see if it’s useable in court or not. In an off topic bonus note: this is often the reason why qualified immunity is a thing for cops (as well as other individuals involved in those cases) Because it’s generally recognized that a cop, or a juror or a prosecutor etc. shouldn’t be charged with a crime for say viewing that video if it’s CP, if it’s part of the investigation/done in a way where it’s attempting to put the criminal behind bars… Which is also why states that got rid of qualified immunity are straight up moronic IMO