Gates drives anti-porn software

TORONTO: A "really rotten day" at work in late January prompted a just-about-had-it Toronto police officer to e-mail a spontaneous plea to the world's richest man for help fighting child pornography.

"To be real honest, I didn't expect anything back. I didn't even save the e-mail," said Det. Sgt. Paul Gillespie, a 25-year veteran of the Toronto force.

But his effort paid off. Microsoft Corp. founder Bill Gates forwarded the e-mail to Microsoft Canada. "Three weeks later, I got a call. They said, 'We'd like to talk to you about your e-mail," Gillespie recalled.

Microsoft and the Toronto police, where Gillespie is in charge of the child exploitation section, are now developing software that will make it easier for police to investigate the dissemination of child pornography on the Internet. They hope to complete an initial version of the software in a month.

The software is designed to store copies of all the images police find, creating a searchable database that can help them uncover similarities between cases. It can also analyze pictures and classify those that are child pornography, largely automating a job that consumes a huge amount of police labor.

"I just wondered if there was a possibility of designing ... software to assist some of our investigators," Gillespie said. "At least so they don't have to always go look at these awful images ... and have nightmares every night."

Microsoft Canada has already invested C$600,000 ($450,000) in the software project, which got under way in February, and does not know what the final cost will be.

Gates, a college drop-out, is worth an estimated $41 billion and his philanthropic foundation, with an endowment of $24 billion, has made large donations to global health initiatives among other causes. Microsoft said it could not say why Gates chose to support the Toronto project but that the effort is part of the company's contribution to improving the Internet.

IDENTIFYING PREDATORS

Forty percent of people charged with child pornography also sexually abuse children, police say. But finding the predators and identifying the victims are daunting tasks.

The Toronto software, called the Child Exploitation Linkage Tracking System, will document every piece of information available on child pornography suspects and the victims.

"There is all sorts of new software out there that is specifically designed to defeat the forensic retrieval (by police) of evidence by using encryption and it just seems like ... the bad guys are winning," said Gillespie. "The wild, wild west is certainly an accurate description of these chat rooms and newsgroups."

The Microsoft Canada tool will be on an open standard so that it can be tied in with any software used by any agency, said Paula Knight, director of community affairs for Microsoft Canada. "By having this system in place, we'd be able to track the people who collect, trade and distribute these images on the 'Net," she said.

The explosion in technology and the Internet have made the task of handling the exponential increase in child pornography almost impossible, police say.

"Several years ago, you might see 15 pictures, 20, 100 or 150 and a few videotapes. Now, we're to the point, on a typical seizure, we could see up to 10,000, 100,000, 500,000 images," Gillespie said.

And, he says, the pictures are getting harder to look at.

"Three or four years ago, the majority (of victims) would be 10, 12, 14 (years old) -- not to say that's better child porn, it all just memorializes criminal acts of the most heinous nature - but in the last couple of years, we've just seen such young children on regular seizures - babies, 2- 3- 4-year-olds."

Gillespie aims to have other police forces in Canada join the system. Investigations in Britain and the United States are already coordinated with computer systems, he said.

"They're not operating in a vacuum, running parallel investigations to everybody else, which is sort of what we've been doing," he said. "In Canada ... we have a massive amount of information coming in and not making the most of it."

© Reuters