Verizon helped uncover that a Baltimore Catholic deacon was storing child porn on its “cloud” online storage system.
What fascinates me about this story is two-fold:
1) How did Verizon find the porn? I have some ideas, explained below.
2) Under what authority did Verizon call the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children before even calling the cops? Actually, I just found out, it’s the law. More on that in a moment.
I’m all for stopping child porn, but I am curious how Verizon was able to detect the man’s porn. Do Verizon employees peruse anything and everything we post in their cloud? That’s a bit creepy. Do they have software that does it – the more likely option – but even that’s a bit odd.
I did some googling and found that one method is simply tracking file-sharing, like the way they catch people who download music without paying for it.
Another way is using software that takes known child porn photos (or video I suppose) and creates a digital signature for that photo – in the same way, I think, that Shazam identifies music by simply listening to it via your phone. It turns that music, or photo, into its digital elements and then looks for other images (or music) that have the same digital signature. Verizon could simply be doing the same thing with child porn videos and images on its cloud. They’d get the software and have their software sift through everyone’s cloud looking for known contraband, in essence. Because it’s a machine doing it, and not a person, in principle the privacy violation is minimized as the machine would ignore any images or videos that do not match the contraband’s signature.
It’s an interesting way of doing it, and does lessen the privacy concerns.
Here’s another method the FBI has come up with:
The FBI has recently adopted a novel investigative technique: posting hyperlinks that purport to be illegal videos of minors having sex, and then raiding the homes of anyone willing to click on them.
Undercover FBI agents used this hyperlink-enticement technique, which directed Internet users to a clandestine government server, to stage armed raids of homes in Pennsylvania, New York, and Nevada last year. The supposed video files actually were gibberish and contained no illegal images.
My concern, as a journalist, is what if someone clicks on the file because they’re writing a story about child porn? I’ve never seen child porn, I have no idea what it is, or how bad it is, though I can imagine. I could imagine someone doing the due diligence and wanting to see what this industry is really like if they’re trying to explain to the reader just how bad it really is. Consider the fact that I was just searching for an image to put with this story, using a big image database service that we use, Shutterstock. I tried “jailed priest” and “criminal priest” but didn’t come up with much. I then thought maybe “child porn?”, but then suddenly stopped myself for fear of even typing in the search term, lest it signal something somewhere to someone. That’s perhaps not a big deal, but it still seems a bit odd to me in some ways.
As for why companies are contacting the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children instead of the police, apparently it’s the law:
Shehan explained that companies such as AOL, Google, Yahoo, Microsoft and Facebook have been legally obligated since 1998 to contact his organization [the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children] when they find child porn on their network. In the beginning, that meant companies simply alerted the center when one of their customers told them about child porn. Over the past several years, however, many of the companies started using software to actively scour their networks.
I’d be intrigued as to why have companies contact NCMEC rather than law enforcement directly. It just seems odd empowering a private organization with law enforcement powers, particularly when dealing with privacy concerns.
There are also, concerns, about false positives:
While law enforcement officials praise the technology as a valuable tool in the fight against child porn, privacy advocates worry about how often PhotoDNA wrongly flags an email as containing child porn.
Giving Microsoft’s “best estimates,” Doerr said the software returns false positives about once in every two billion images – maybe even less often. She added that some of those false alarms were still child porn; the software flagged a similar photo that was taken shortly before or after the one in the database.
With the volume of images currently posted on the Internet, however, that could mean multiple false alarms per week. More than 144 billion emails were sent each day in 2012, according to The Radicati Group, a technology research firm. Facebook says 300 million new images are uploaded to its site every day.
And while GOP crazies claim that there is no violation of privacy here, I’m not so sure.
The scans are legal because no governmental entity is asking the companies to look at their customers’ emails, said Brian J. Gottstein, a spokesman for Virginia Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli.
“These are private companies acting independently of law enforcement to ensure that their private servers are not used to store or traffic contraband,” he said. “It is analogous to FedEx or UPS reporting a package they suspect of containing narcotics to authorities.”
First clue that something’s wrong here? The source is Virginia’s far-right bigoted Republican attorney general. But put that aside for a moment, this isn’t like FedEx or UPS unless FedEx and UPS are searching every single package for contraband. Perhaps they are, but that’s what this is analogous to.
I forget which show I was watching recently – perhaps Continuum or perhaps Fringe – but they were talking about how technology in the future kept people honest by recording every single moment of their day, and thus people had an incentive to be honest, since they wouldn’t want to be caught doing bad things. Maybe.
While I get the need for these child-porn snooping technologies, and I do think that the software sounds minimally invasive if in fact you aren’t trafficking in child porn, it still smacks of a bit of a Little Brother, if not Big Brother. Because of the technological revolution brought on by the Internet, so much of our private lives, from banking, to medicine, to dating, to sex has moved online. Once upon a time you only had to worry about school transcripts, a criminal record, and your debt payments following you around for life. Now you have to worry about Verizon and AOL and Skype having God knows what stored in their computers about you, and for God knows how long?
Ask the average American if, and for how long, their cell phone provider keeps copies of their text messages, and under what circumstances they can be released to a third party, and they’d probably shrug. The technology has so gotten ahead of us, that most people have given up worrying about it. As a result, we’re telemarketed to death based on information we never even contemplated someone having collected about us, let alone aggregated in one place.
So catching child porn, good thing. Snooping through our entire lives in order to catch them, not so much.
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