1) The crimes themselves are absolutely intolerable to society.
2) The lack of serious resourcing the seriousness of this crime should warrant.
Part of the presentation was specifically on identifying the location a sequence of photos was taken in the hopes that it would narrow down the search radius for the offender. The team that did the work were members of the ICE HERO program -- one of the coolest veteran-to-civilian programs I've ever seen [1][2]. The folks literally spent weeks "driving" around likely areas in Google maps trying to identify the location. Because the photo was taken from an angle that the car wouldn't have seen, they weren't able to use any automation at all and it literally took a human's intuitive understanding of 3-D spaces to eventually figure it out.
However, what was really tough was that the HERO program only exists because it offers an internship that costs very little to DHS -- they simply can't afford a large group of full-time staff.
I urge anybody who can to petition to better fund anti-child abuse programs.
I don't intend to spoil the enthusiasm here, but wouldn't supporting welfare hence be a more effective measure than investing in fancy tech? That latter only increases the deterrants which seem hard to increase any further to begin with.
Disclaimer: I am a parent, and have fostered neglected children.
The trade in the material is unfortunately large. The descriptions of how the systems worked reminded me very much of the kinds of upload/download ratio systems you might find on software and movie/music piracy boards.
I don't know if they accept volunteers for code contributions, but I hope they consider it if they already don't.
I'm a British citizen but looking at spending 2 or 3 months out in Cambodia working on coding projects an exploring a country I've never visited.
Unfortunately, I know Cambodia has had problems with child abuse and child sex tourism in the past. Working on something like you've just described seems like a fantastic way to explore a country and also track down nonces
Europol has a "trace this item" website: https://www.europol.europa.eu/stopchildabuse
I don't mean to view actual child abuse images but similar to the europol thing ie the actual victims deleted from the images.
Why victims are not complaining about these crimes?
This also presumes they're strong enough to speak up in the first place. If you're a victim of this kind of abuse you usually aren't.
That's an interesting design of swingset; not one I've seen before.
Unlike the bog-standard swingset in the US, which is typically all steel tube, that one looks like it has extruded (aluminum?) verticals and then a tubular horizontal weldment as the top piece. Further, the horizontal looks like it was hot-dip galvanized as a finished unit. The verticals were painted before assembly, not after, because of the bare-metal bolt heads. The fasteners are presumably stainless, since I don't see any rust marks below them. It's got an interesting bearing/bushing at the top of each chain, probably to make it not squeak; that strikes me as a fairly luxe feature.
I couldn't find any similar ones searching around online, although my Google searches don't turn up many European models at all (thanks, Google).
The photo doesn't go up enough to be sure, but it looks like the top bar is an unbroken one-piece section. That would make it pretty bulky and awkward to ship. (The vertical pieces look like they come apart into about 4 ft sections, which means they were likely palletized at one point. Maybe the extrusions are not done in the same place as the rest of the manufacturing..? That's certainly plausible.)
If someone recognized the design/model, I think that would probably be a significant clue towards the photo's location; at the very least, the manufacturer would probably have a fairly good idea of where they normally sell to.
I think I would if I could trust that it was only being used for something like this & not commercial advertising type projects.
e.g. https://www.reddit.com/r/whatisthisthing/ works great.
https://www.europol.europa.eu/sites/default/files/styles/eur...
over the green square, appears a whitish blur that could easily say Cicoarea in a stylised way (or maybe is just another picture)
https://www.europol.europa.eu/sites/default/files/styles/eur...
Robinia is a fully hardy and widespread species that can be found in almost all Europe and USA, USDA area 1a.
https://www.europol.europa.eu/sites/default/files/styles/eur...
The big trunk in the background is from the same Fabaceae also. Senna could show a similar bark and leaves. Senna siamea from Thailand for example looks similar. There is a sapling of something that looks like a Psidium also and maybe a Schefflera. All tentatively.
https://www.europol.europa.eu/sites/default/files/styles/eur...
If is Fraxinus excelsior (probably) Europe. If Fraxinus pensylvannica: Eastern half of USA or Argentina.
Like « this picture seems to be located in this area/country » and then people from the area could have a look.
I’m pretty sure people would like to help.
Once AI is brought into equation, project executives put all efforts into removing Humans from the chain because AI is cheaper
See YouTube AI based moderation and infractions, it's too difficult and no where to go if AI slaps you
Given that Google actually has the data as well as the skills and computing power to help out Europol, I'd have hoped they'd be jumping at the opportunity to do so. At the least it would make for great PR, but perhaps they're afraid of the possible privacy issues and discussions as well (I can already see the headlines: "Google knows the location of any yard appearing in a photo!").
In any case, it's telling how humans are so good at this stuff and picking up on clues and patterns. It'll still take a while before machines are as good.
None of these pictures have signs of immediate physical violence, but just looking at them and thinking of their possible backstories makes my stomach churn.
I don't know if that's the most effective strategy, but maybe there are other reasons why they can't just dump them all at once.
That card looks like a pokemon card with a Google Chrome logo. Frustratingly familiar.
[1] https://www.google.com/search?tbm=isch&q=yerba%20rosamonte&t...
The most interesting part are the palms, but they are damaged with the photoshop work. If they are what they seem, this particular kind of palms are picky and do not tolerate any frost. A city near the coast probably.
The blue trafic signal is also interesting.
(Could be this photo related with the coca-cola red seats?)
Then they drove to the location and took out the flag
Joe Rogan on it:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AoBK1_ixiro
Some random on it:
Here's a Twitter thread where BBC solved a murder in Cameroon: https://twitter.com/bbcafrica/status/1044186344153583616?lan...
From a single video of the crime, they were able to figure out where, who, and when (!) the crime was committed. (Using Google maps.)
And here's Jeffrey Lewis presenting how they figured out "Where does North Korea Build Its Missile Launchers?" (1h video): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E9QbI8Jf4hg
Using "only" North Korean propaganda videos and commercially available satellite images and published memoirs from NK defectors, they were able to located the building where NK is making their TELs.
Does anyone have any other examples?
they triangulated the location of the ISIS execution videos using nothing more than shadows and geographical mounds in the desert
http://igra23.ru/katalog/karuseli-kacheli-balansiry/kacheli-...
It has the swept-bend tubular corner reinforcements, the polyethylene (or some other kind of plastic) panels on the upper corners, etc. The only difference I can see between the product photo and the Europol one is that, in the Europol photo, the top bar seems galvanized rather than painted. But that's the sort of thing that could easily change as a product is marketed.
It appears the company is out of Krasnodar (Краснода́р), located in southern Russia.
[0] https://www.eibe.net/en/swing-kondor-51007201100.html?c=5010...
Law enforcement and related organizations already use machine learning quite a bit, particularly for image enhancement. Yes, Google does have a lot of images of various locations from a top-down perspective, but that isn’t helpful for accurately determining a location from the images that Europol collects.
Also, keep in mind that Europol is only posting images here when all other means of determining location and identity have been exhausted. The images are usually indoors and don’t contain enough information for ML to be of any significant use. You might be able to narrow it down to a probably country based colors and design patterns, but that’s hardly sufficient and not solid enough evidence to actually do anything.
What do you mean by that?
That is never what I claimed. First, note that I took a pretty (IMO) balanced view and indicated that this is still a hard setting. Second, note that I did indicate that sufficient training (i.e. labeled) data would be required.
This is what was possible in 2016: https://www.theverge.com/2016/2/25/11112594/google-new-deep-...: "The new deep-learning program churns through millions of photos to determine the best match."
Also see project of a fast.ai participant: "Which of the 110 countries a satellite image belongs to?" (point 13 here: https://forums.fast.ai/t/deep-learning-lesson-2-notes/28772)
> (There’s also no such thing as “deep learning”.)
- https://www.deeplearningbook.org/
- https://www.coursera.org/courses?query=deep%20learning
- https://eu.udacity.com/course/intro-to-tensorflow-for-deep-l...
- https://www.edx.org/professional-certificate/ibm-deep-learni...
> Yes, Google does have a lot of images of various locations from a top-down perspective, but that isn’t helpful for accurately determining a location from the images that Europol collects. You might be able to narrow it down to a probably country based colors and design patterns, but that’s hardly sufficient and not solid enough evidence to actually do anything.
Maybe not completely, but again: being able to narrow it down would already be an incredible help, especially for outdoor pictures (which were also shown in the article's video). I never claimed that a model would completely replace the human process.
Also, I find the downvotes (not saying you) on my initial comment to be in pretty bad form. I'm not Jeremy Howard or Andrew Ng, but don't think I was blowing smoke, and work in the area of data science and ML.
And don't forget, people are strongly died to locations. If Reddit decides that a particular photo is located at 287 FM 772, that's someone's house, and a name can easily be associated with it. Nobody wants to receive a Google alert that their name is suddenly popping up in /r/find-a-pedophile
Giving threats is a crime in itself.
Threatening victims does not guarantee victims' silence.
If that crime is widespread then there still should be plenty of victims who, actually, report that crime.
Unfortunately it's a global brand so not much help.
Police.
> If they did what risks and repercussions do they face?
Based on my experience as a victim of a crime, complaint to police very quickly reduced my risk of repercussions -- as soon as perpetrators faced police.
> this kind of abuse
What kind of abuse?
Sure.
Your anecdotal experience is of only minor consequence here.
I've known people that have been abused by the police and other authority figures.
Plus if you're a minor and you're being abused by your guardian and the police show up to ask questions you're going to face backlash and it isn't going to be good.
For some there's really nowhere to go for justice.
I've been abused by the police.
That did not prevent me from complaining to police when I got in trouble with criminals.
> For some there's really nowhere to go for justice.
Correct. But many victims still have ability to get justice. And it is very hard for potential perpetrator to predict if victim would complain or not.
So that uncertainty works as an effective deterrent, even if some of the victims are not going to complain.
Child sexual exploitation is a well researched bit of criminology. Jessica Eaton has a lot of research focusing on female victims which covers all of this stuff.
Everything I've written as a response comes off as patronizing at best and incredibly rude at worst so I've decided to just not respond at all. It's kept me up half the night to be honest because his perniciously ignorant responses are so rage inducing.
How do you even know from that story that there was sex or child involved?
You are eager to engage in a manhunt based on ... what exactly?
If you're not they may think it's just hilarious to torment you, to ridicule you, or worse.
In some places in America, for many people, the police are the enemy and cannot be engaged with in any capacity for any reason whatsoever.
"No communication" attitude does not really help with figuring out what other people think.
> obviously
"can't quite figure it out", but conclusions are "obvious" anyway?
> It's kept me up half ... so rage inducing
That hints that there is an unresolved conflict.
Trust. We can see often cases of americans executed by traffic police just because, and other abuses ("A Dallas police officer entered an apartment she thought was hers and killed the owner of the apartment" and so...) so the repeated message that encounters with US police should be navigated carefully if you don't want to be another victim looks justified. At least in some places and specially if you are black or latino.
I think that in Europe we have a different relationship with the police. It seems (from my non expert point of view, I could be wrong) that Police in USA can lie and "get away with murder" anytime they want. Europol lying about such serious theme as abused children would be a big no. Would nuke any trust and public collaboration and is just not expected. What happened to Ian Murdock, Aaron Swartz or Andrew Sadek [1] would be very difficult to justify from an european point of view
[1] https://www.thedailybeast.com/student-drug-informant-found-w...
Without any details about where these photos came from?
Without court decision?
I agree that is frustrating not having more details that could help us to link facts or notice subtle details that otherwise would be missed, but I can see how showing forever specific details about his/her sexual abuse in internet would do more harm than good to the victim.
> Without court decision?
You can't start a trial without having even the name of a suspect. It seems that is too early for that if they are compiling facts and trying to reach victims.
> where these photos came from?
[shrug] pedophilic archives in internet?
So somebody took a bunch of photos of children in public places. These children probably are not even aware about these photos and do not care either way. But activists from this post would like to turn these children into victims and drag them into dirty investigation. Then put the photographer into prison for 5-20 years and permanently label him "sex offender" for the rest of his life.
Do I understand the goals of this search correctly?
