Child On-line Pornography Image Eradication System (COPIES)

The Problem
The Internet, despite all its positive advantages, has many negative applications, including becoming a market for the child exploitation trade and a sanctuary for criminals such as child pornographers and pedophiles. These criminals have taken advantage of the Internet's vastness, relative anonymity, and borderless distribution channels to openly market, trade, and sell their illegal products.

The law enforcement community has ongoing requirements in investigative efforts involving the Internet: locating, tracking, and ultimately apprehending criminals; finding and recovering missing and exploited children; and combating criminal activities, child predation, and many other illicit activities. The law enforcement community finds that combating crime on the Internet is an overwhelming challenge. Law enforcement methods to monitor the Internet are currently very people-intensive and cannot keep pace with the rapid expansion and use of the Internet. Unfortunately, most law enforcement organizations do not possess the manpower, time, expertise, or tools to fight these types of criminal activities, and even fewer have automated computer software tools.

The Solution: COPIES
ANSER, funded under National Institute of Justice Cooperative Agreement 98-LB-VX-K021, is developing a system of intelligent software agents integrated with digital signature utilities to autonomously find copies of known child pornographic images and report the results to law enforcement. These intelligent software agents can continuously search the Web for images or be pointed at a specific URL, searching it and all links. Once an image is found, its digital signature is computed and compared to a database of digital signatures of known child pornography. A match of digital signatures indicates that a copy of known child pornography has been located at a particular URL on the Internet. COPIES produces a report of the URL, the image identifiers, and the date and time when the copy was found. With this report, law enforcement officers focus their investigations on the site where known child pornography is being disseminated.

ANSER uses a standard secure hashing algorithm from the National Institute of Standards and Technology to generate a unique 160-bit digital signature from each image. The algorithm is a non-linear, one-way conversion technique applicable to both known and unknown individual images and to large holdings of known child pornographic images. Since there is little probability that a digital signature can be reconstructed into an image, digital signatures can be distributed and analyzed without further exploiting these children. ANSER and its U.S. Government customer have developed a pilot project in which databases of hundreds of thousands of digital signatures of certified child pornography will be created, analyzed, and matched.

Other Law Enforcement Applications
COPIES technologies can be used to locate any digital file, image, video, audio recording, or executable software disseminated via the Internet or in other data holdings. Thus organizations fighting piracy or copyrighted materials or the illegal exportation of protected software technologies could use this system. The system can be extended to these alternative uses by simply choosing a different database of digital signatures.