No ‘Magic Bullets’ in the Fight Against Online Abuse, but ‘Spiders’ Help

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/12/22/us/hotlines-child-sexual-abuse.html

Version 0 of 1.

Sexual predators have grown increasingly adept at using the internet to share and view child sexual abuse photos and videos. Some have computer-programming skills and have deployed sophisticated defenses against efforts to take them down.

But the predators don’t have free rein on the internet, thanks to nearly four dozen child protection hotlines around the world, which act as a first line of defense against the explosion of imagery.

[Read The New York Times’s investigation into the global fight against online child sexual abuse.]

The hotlines play a central role in getting tech companies, websites and others to address the content. When the hotlines become aware of an illegal image, they issue a notice to have it removed. They may also notify law enforcement officials, who can launch a criminal investigation and try to rescue the abused child.

But to keep up with the predators, the hotlines must constantly find ways to outsmart them. The problem is that no solution lasts very long, because the predators also use technology to find ways to hide.

“I’ve been doing this for 14 years, and I’ve heard so many times about the magic bullet,” said Denton Howard, the executive director of Inhope, an organization of 47 child sexual abuse hotlines around the world. “In reality, magic bullets don’t exist.”

In the case of three recently shuttered sites, the hotline in Canada, the Canadian Center for Child Protection, deployed a new software tool, which it named Arachnid after the class of invertebrates that includes spiders. With a modest annual budget of less than $5 million, the center realized it needed a speedier and more efficient way to take on bad actors.

The goal was to leverage technology to “help end the cycle of abuse,” according to Signy Arnason, the center’s associate executive director.

Others, including the British hotline, also created automated computer programs that crawl the web, contributing to a sea change in the fight to rid the internet of the imagery. The programs, called spiders, have led to an exponential increase in notices sent by the hotlines because they are no longer dependent on responding only to individual reports from tipsters.

Inhope has also used improved software to coordinate the rising number of reports among the hotlines. The organization runs a data center in the basement of Interpol in Lyon, France, where the material is downloaded, scanned against previously identified images and shared with law enforcement agencies.

In nearly all instances, the software can also identify the country where the material is being hosted, meaning imagery in the Netherlands, for example, can be flagged by a hotline in Canada and get routed by Inhope to the Dutch hotline for further action.

The technology advances have helped put some sexual predators on the run, but they have also overwhelmed some of the hotlines, which are too small or ill equipped to handle the increased work. The changes have created tensions between some of the organizations.

The hotline in the Netherlands has been particularly hard-hit because that country is a global hot spot for companies that host the illegal imagery. Last year, Europe eclipsed the United States as the top hosting location for child sexual abuse material on the open web, according to data collected by Inhope, and the Netherlands led Europe.

The Dutch hotline, Meldpunt Kinderporno, has struggled to keep up, said Arda Gerkens, the group’s executive director, who is also a member of the Dutch parliament.

“They clog us with every image that they find,” she said of the Inhope referrals. “We hardly have time to breathe.”

Meldpunt Kinderporno, with a small annual budget of less than 1 million euros, this month deployed long-awaited software that helps automate tasks that were done manually for each report of abuse imagery. Ms. Gerkens said she was hopeful that the software, in combination with other efforts — including legislation being written to push companies in the Netherlands to scan for illegal content themselves — will help the hotline return to steadier footing.

“Every day I feel more and more pressure to get this done yesterday,” Ms. Gerkens wrote in an email.

The hotline in the United States, the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, is in a category of its own because of the enormous role American tech companies play in identifying and reporting illegal imagery found on their platforms. Last year alone, the American center received reports of more than 45 million illegal images from tech companies.