Google Searches Mail For Child Porn.

[Necron99]

GOOGLE has defended its policy of electronically monitoring its users’ content for child sexual abuse after it tipped off police in Texas to a child pornography suspect.

Houston restaurant worker John Henry Skillern, 41, was arrested Thursday following a cyber-tip that Google had passed along via the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC), based outside Washington.
“He was trying to get around getting caught, he was trying to keep it inside his email,” said detective David Nettles of the Houston Metro internet Crimes Against Children Taskforce.
“I can’t see that information, I can’t see that photo — but Google can,” he told Houston television station KHOU, which first reported the story.
It’s common knowledge that the world’s leading internet service, like its rivals, tracks users’ online behaviour in order to finetune its advertising services.
But the Texas case prompted concerns about the degree to which Google might be giving information about its users’ conduct to law enforcement agencies.

The story seems like a simple one with a happy outcome — a bad man did a crime and got caught,” blogged John Hawes, chief of operations at Virus Bulletin, a cyber security consultancy.
“However, there will of course be some who see it as yet another sign of how the twin Big Brothers of state agencies and corporate behemoths have nothing better to do than delve into the private lives of all and sundry, looking for dirt,” he said.
In an email, a Google spokesman said: “Sadly, all internet companies have to deal with child sexual abuse.
“It’s why Google actively removes illegal imagery from our services — including search and Gmail — and immediately reports abuse to the NCMEC.” The NCMEC operates the CyberTipline, through which internet service providers can relay information about suspect online child sexual abuse on to police departments.
“Each child sexual abuse image is given a unique digital fingerprint, which enables our systems to identify those pictures, including in Gmail,” added the spokesman, who did not disclose technical details about the process.
“It is important to remember that we only use this technology to identify child sexual abuse imagery — not other email content that could be associated with criminal activity (for example using email to plot a burglary).”
In a separate email, the NCMEC said federal law requires internet service providers to report suspected child porn to the CyberTipline.
“NCMEC makes all CyberTipline reports available to appropriate law-enforcement agencies for review and possible investigation,” it said.

Google defends child porn tip-offs to police | News.com.au



Don't think anyone would complain about this, unless someones typo gets u on a mailing list, but what else will they decide they need to report?

[thaimeme]

GOOGLE.
The authority.

[harrybarracuda]

Storm in a teacup.

They aren't "looking for porn", they are scanning file signatures for known child pornography using a list provided by the Feds.

[thaimeme]

A ruse.
Has nothing whatever to do with their concern for children and child porn.

[baldrick]

they are scanning file signatures for known child pornography

I don't think it was from the "feds" - there is an org that maintains hashes of known images

A ruse. Has nothing whatever to do with their concern for children and child porn

correct - google will be scanning attachments and comparing them to hashes for the main reason of conserving space ( this bust is just incidental ) - no need to keep 20,000 copies of FW:FW:FW:cute cat.avi

[harrybarracuda]

they are scanning file signatures for known child pornography

I don't think it was from the "feds" - there is an org that maintains hashes of known images

Both Google and Microsoft work in this manner with various law enforcement agencies.

*Taps nose*

[harrybarracuda]

The Tech War On Child Porn Is Not Limited To Google Scanning Gmail

Google has suddenly become the poster boy for child porn searches after the search giant reported a child porn image in a Texas man’s Gmail, leading to his arrest. Many in the tech community, including my colleagues here at Forbes seem shocked, saying we should “be afraid of Google’s power” and that its pairing up with law enforcement like this is leading us into the Panopticon. I have news for you: Google is far from the only tech giant scanning your messages for child porn, and this is only one of the technological methods being used to try to eradicate the societal scourge that is kiddie porn.

Microsoft, Facebook, and Twitter all have technology that scans photos to see if they’re the type that should land someone in prison for up to 50 years — if they actually took the photo — and up to 20 years if they’re a non-sex offender who just likes looking at and passing around child porn.

Microsoft actually led the pack in 2009 by co-developing PhotoDNA — a technology that can match images to known child porn images, even if they’re resized or edited. Within a year, it had rolled it out on Bing, Hotmail and Outlook to spot and prevent the spread of pre-pubescent porn. Facebook licensed the technology for use on its platform in 2011. Facebook scans not just photos for child porn, but private messages looking for predatory behavior toward children.

As Ars Technica points out, tech companies are required by law to report child porn to the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children’s CyberTipline when they see it. I’m not surprised that Gmail scanning helped law enforcement arrest a kiddie porn type; I’m surprised we don’t hear about Facebook, Google, and Microsoft turning people over more often. The downside of their efforts is that their scanning works by matching child porn to existing images they know about, so it creates an incentive to produce original child porn that doesn’t match what’s in a database to avoid getting caught for passing the stuff around.

Many kiddie porn types are wise to this and have moved on to darker platforms. “Child pornography offenders vary widely in their technological sophistication,” wrote the U.S. Sentencing Commission in a report to Congress about child porn in 2012. “Many are relatively unsophisticated ‘entry-level’ offenders who use readily available technologies such as ‘open’ P2P file-sharing programs to receive and/or distribute child pornography in an indiscriminate manner.”

In other words, those are the dumb ones who are easy to catch, who might also use Gmail or Hotmail to send their child porn around.

“Other offenders, however, use their technological expertise to create private and secure trading ‘communities’ and to evade, and help others evade, detection by law enforcement,” the report continues.

The savvy kiddie porn lovers have turned to bulletin boards on the Dark Web to trade pics and stories about child abuse. They use privacy-enhancing technologies like Tor to mask their identities. But law enforcement has followed them there. As reported by Kevin Poulsen at Wired today, after finding a vulnerability in Tor-based child porn sites hosted by a Nebraska man, the FBI turned his servers into a malware-delivery system so that anyone who sent a private message on his sites or loaded an image would download FBI spyware. It sent that user’s IP address to FBI headquarters, negating the obfuscation of their identity provided by Tor. Because looking at child porn is a crime, it’s a fairly unobjectionable deployment of FBI spyware but the method — which the FBI calls the “network investigative technique” — raises questions about when else law enforcement might feel it has the right to drop spyware on your computer just for visiting a website. Will browsing an online drug bazaar get you reported to the cops even if you don’t buy?

“Twenty years ago, we thought the [child pornography] problem was virtually gone,” said Ernie Allen, former president of the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children in a Microsoft PhotoDNA promotional video. “The child pornography problem worldwide and particularly in the United States has absolutely exploded with the advent of the Internet.”

With so many companies patrolling for child porn and effective exploitation by law enforcement of dark sites hosting it, it seems like anyone dealing in child porn has to be an encryption and security ninja to avoid prosecution. And prosecutions are increasing.

In 1994 and 1995 combined, there were only 90 people sentenced for for federal possession, receipt, trafficking or distribution of child porn, according to the report. In 2011, there were 1,649 federal child porn offenders and in 2012, there were 1,922 people sentenced for kiddie porn offenses.

“Some of the growth can be attributed to increased resources dedicated to identifying and prosecuting child pornography offenders” says the 2012 report, but it thinks most of the growth comes from the fact that the Internet makes it easier to get and send kiddie porn images. Which is the pessimistic takeaway, but as it’s a report on child porn, a gloomy point of view is to be expected.

A Good Result That Raises Questions, Google Uncovers Child Porn in Gmail - Forbes

[thaimeme]

...it's all about the children.

Of course it is.

[harrybarracuda]

Are you just going to post vacuous one liners or do you actually have something to say on the subject?

[Mr Earl]

Are you just going to post vacuous one liners or do you actually have something to say on the subject?

I suppose you're about to stun us with some rare eloquence.

[thaimeme]

Are you just going to post vacuous one liners or do you actually have something to say on the subject?

I suppose you're about to stun us with some rare eloquence.

Probably not.
As the prescribed model will be to absorb and promote the same old thought process from the conventional establishment.

Independent critical thought need not apply.

[BaitongBoy]

Next they will catch you watching anal porn and you will be banned from TeakDoor and die the slow puncture in jail...