Technology helping police stop child pornography

The advent of the Internet, file sharing technology, and social networking has allowed the market for child pornography to thrive, but now those very same technologies are helping police to crack down on individuals distributing child pornography.

Local police departments across the United States are using sophisticated software to track, identify, and convict individuals trading child porn.

In Shawano County, Wisconsin investigators recently received new tools that have led to the arrest of five people on child porn charges in the last six months.

Detective Gordon Kowaleski of the Shawano County Sheriff’s Department said, “If you look in the past, if people were collecting child pornography it had to be done in person or through the mail. Now they can try to remain anonymous by sitting in their home and doing it, and we’re able to use a technology to locate those persons.”

Police were careful not to discuss the technology or investigative techniques in too much detail for fear of tipping off potential offenders seeking to avoid police, but Kowaleski did say that he and two other officers have undergone special training to identify individuals using file-sharing websites to distribute child porn.

He explains that once he finds individuals sharing illicit materials, he is “able to download them, view them, verify that yes they are contraband, and then I go after the IP address (a unique number assigned to an Internet-connected device) that was known to be sharing or offering to share those files.”

“The technology that we received had just come out. We’re one of the first groups to get it,” he said.

Kowaleski and his team have also been trained in computer forensics so they can recover data from confiscated computers for use as evidence in trials.

Meanwhile in Scott County, Missouri, local police have also undergone similar training and the Sheriff’s department has established a cyber crime investigations unit.

Detective Scott Phelps, the investigations coordinator for the Southeast Missouri Cyber Crimes Task Force, said, “I devote 100 percent of my time to ‘ICAC’ — Internet crimes against children. We concentrate a large majority of our efforts to this.”

Phelps says that he is generally able to find someone attempting to exploit children after only twenty minutes of online investigation.

“It’s not hard to find these guys looking for underage girls online,” he said. “The Internet has made it get completely out of hand.”

“They trade with other collectors,” Phelps said. But, “That’s not to say we won’t on our next search warrant find someone who is actually producing child pornography.”

Scott County sheriff Rick Walter said, “I think a lot of people feel like they are behind this computer screen and nobody sees what they’re doing. I think they feel like they are relatively safe in their own bedroom watching this stuff when they don’t know we’re tracking them down.”

Currently the task force only has two full-time cyber crime investigators, but Phelps hopes that it will eventually grow.

“We’d like for it to expand so more departments have the ability to contribute. This task force has been in existence for about four and a half years. The problem is getting worse, it’s not getting better,” he said.

The efforts in both Wisconsin and Missouri were made possible with grant money that helped pay for training and equipment.

“We’ve been very fortunate in getting additional grants, funding, and equipment to where we’re now we’re not only doing computers but also cell phones,” Kowaleski said.

“Right now we’ve got some pretty decent equipment, and I would foresee for at least the immediate future we’ll be doing well with it.”