Transcript
Speaker: Welcome to the Finding Freedom podcast, a new podcast dedicated to empowering all stakeholders to learn about, discuss, and disrupt global human trafficking with your hosts, Sherry Calcadroni and Corey Marshall.
Speaker: Child sexual abuse material known legally as child pornography refers to any content that depicts sexually explicit behavior involving a child.
Speaker: These could be photos, videos, or computer-generated images that are so realistic that you can't tell they're fake.
Speaker: Thorn, a leader in technology and research to end online child sexual abuse and exploitation, sadly notes that reports of CSAM, child sexual abuse material, have increased over 15,000% in the last 15 years.
Speaker: In 2004, the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, NCMEC, reviewed 450,000 child sexual abuse files.
Speaker: In 2019, that number was 70 million.
Speaker: There is no doubt that technology exacerbates child sexual abuse, as is evident in live streaming, pay-to-watch abuse, and the rapidly rising challenges of self-generated abuse imagery.
Speaker: But technology is also a central armory in efforts to combat it.
Speaker: In today's episode of Finding Freedom, we will be discussing the online world of child exploitation with our distinguished guests, Matt Burns and Dave Ranner, from our partners and friends at Camera Forensics.
Speaker: Thank you both so much for joining us.
Speaker: Thank you.
Speaker: No problem at all.
Speaker: Can you share with us a little bit about Camera Forensics' mission and goals?
Speaker: Yeah, sure.
Speaker: So Camera Forensics, we're a small tech company in the UK.
Speaker: Fundamentally, our core mission is whatever it takes, whatever we can do to help law enforcement tackle the problem of online child sexual abuse.
Speaker: We try and make all our company decisions based on what we think the impact will be on our ability to safeguard children or to help the authorities safeguard children.
Speaker: And that's so like effectively our North Star as a business.
Speaker: And it actually makes decision making incredibly easy when you've got that clear metric of what you think success looks like.
Speaker: It's not just a kind of a marketing thing.
Speaker: We kind of pin numbers to the wall.
Speaker: And, you know, there are times when we have a decision.
Speaker: We go, oh, should we try this or that?
Speaker: And then we think, oh, well, which one is more likely to help the most kids?
Speaker: And then it becomes much easier to make decisions.
Speaker: Yes, we are a profit-making company, but it turns out that it's quite easy to run a business this way if you just do the right thing.
Speaker: So Matt, that's actually really refreshing to hear because there are a lot of companies that believe doing the right thing and making a profit have to be mutually exclusive.
Speaker: Can you talk a little bit about how you structured your business so that you could achieve both objectives at the same time?
Speaker: Yeah, well, so to go back right to the very start, when it was just me, I was very fortunate to... Well, there's a few things.
Speaker: So in the early few years, financially, I was lucky to have a bit of financial independence in order to do what I felt was right.
Speaker: And that was literally the inner motivation.
Speaker: It was like making money wasn't a personal goal of mine.
Speaker: It was like...
Speaker: As with anyone, people make money so that they can have fun.
Speaker: And this was just a shortcut to having fun.
Speaker: It's like kind of doing something rewarding, enjoying what you do every day, feeling that kind of adrenaline rush of actually having some kind of impact is addictive.
Speaker: It's purely selfish.
Speaker: I'm not any kind of hero or martyr or any of this nonsense.
Speaker: It's all selfish.
Speaker: And it's purely because I find it really enjoyable.
Speaker: And it's just kind of grown that way.
Speaker: I will certainly not begrudge you that type of selfishness.
Speaker: Dave, how do you see this playing out on your side of the business?
Speaker: I'm the guy who has to make sure that we meet payroll every month.
Speaker: We're fortunate that we've quite quickly built a really strong international network via institutions like Interpol and what have you.
Speaker: And we quickly met people in law enforcement who were very supportive of what we were doing.
Speaker: And it felt like, as a matter of fact, if we were out there doing the right thing, then revenue would follow.
Speaker: And these people out there, essentially law enforcement, liked what we were doing and made sure that we could make payroll every month.
Speaker: We also have some really good sort of opportunities and contracts within the UK and the US where we do research and development services in this particular area.
Speaker: And again, we feedback profit from
Speaker: which again help law enforcement identify victims and safeguard children.
Speaker: So in the early days, I think it's worth a bit of a shout out to Innovate UK, which is the UK's like quasi-autonomous non-government organisation that funds risky research.
Speaker: And we were very fortunate to get a grant from them in the early days that let us develop some of the technology.
Speaker: I remember when I was in your office this spring, seeing those numbers that you talked about, Matt, that you had posted on the board, and it was sort of a real ring the bell sort of moment when each of us in this space, because it actually can be difficult and emotionally taxing work, can't it?
Speaker: We're all motivated.
Speaker: I think we have to hone in on exactly that.
Speaker: Why are we here?
Speaker: what is the mission that's driving us to accomplish these ends?
Speaker: And I've always been a fan of your work and some of the really cool innovative things that you're doing over at Camera Forensics.
Speaker: Can you share a little bit more specifically about some of the tech that you have developed or what problems you're looking to solve with some of them?
Speaker: Yeah, sure.
Speaker: So the core product, the very first thing, which is the main camera forensics sort of search engine is a search engine.
Speaker: So in the same way that Google works,
Speaker: try to bring structure and order to the internet in terms of the text that's posted and they're searching and allowing you to find the answers to your questions.
Speaker: We're doing the same thing, but for media and so primarily imagery.
Speaker: So that when law enforcement are trying to identify or try to safeguard children that are in images of child abuse, we can help them kind of build a bigger picture and try to really understand the
Speaker: how images first appeared online, who's sharing them, these kinds of questions.
Speaker: So it's just a search engine that's very tailored to the specific use case.
Speaker: So that's the main thing that we do at CAM Forensics.
Speaker: What trends do you see currently in online child exploitation?
Speaker: How are you and other stakeholders addressing these challenges?
Speaker: I think it's firstly important to recognise that we as technology and tool providers, we're not at the coalface.
Speaker: We're not law enforcement.
Speaker: We're not seeing this on a day-to-day basis.
Speaker: So some of what I'm going to talk about is a little bit secondhand.
Speaker: We support the people doing the real work, essentially.
Speaker: I don't think it's sensationalising to say
Speaker: that any technology or platform will be exploited by people who have an interest in exploiting children.
Speaker: We've heard stories from people around platforms that you would not imagine would have this sort of thing going on, but they do.
Speaker: They all do to varying degrees.
Speaker: In terms of what we're hearing about, I think we're hearing more about coerced abuse.
Speaker: That would be children live streaming from their bedrooms, abusers,
Speaker: So like building their trust, getting the children to commit various acts on camera.
Speaker: I think if one's naive, it's very easy to say, oh, well, it's not contact abuse.
Speaker: It's not that bad.
Speaker: But I think that's it.
Speaker: immensely wrong.
Speaker: It is still abuse.
Speaker: It is emotionally and psychologically awful.
Speaker: The pictures that the abusers take will live on on the internet forever.
Speaker: And that's something the victim has to live with.
Speaker: So I guess coming back to your original question, yeah, more coerced abuse online.
Speaker: In terms of what interventions we're seeing around that, I mean, they range from a one-end education and
Speaker: I'm always in two minds about education in that you're sort of like putting the onus on the victim to make sure they don't become a victim.
Speaker: But I think education is nevertheless important.
Speaker: There's some good technology out there that some companies are developing that will watch a live feed and say to a child, you know, are you sure you want to be doing this?
Speaker: Are you sure you want to share this with someone?
Speaker: You know, here are the implications of what you're doing.
Speaker: And, you know, so like that's artificial intelligence or detect nudity or coercive behavior or what have you.
Speaker: And then you've got through to other interventions by the platforms themselves.
Speaker: And I think we could probably talk more about this later, but fundamentally these platforms are themselves making money out of the traffic on the website, sort of on the platforms.
Speaker: And so fundamentally these platforms are making money out of people using them for this purpose.
Speaker: And I think some platforms are doing a great job of trying to stop this.
Speaker: Some are doing a half-hearted job.
Speaker: Some aren't even trying at all.
Speaker: So I think there's more work to be done there.
Speaker: And then, of course, at the very sharp end, you have the police who are coming to the party late in this.
Speaker: It's after the offensive occurred and trying to find victims, safeguard victims, and obviously find offenders.
Speaker: So, Dave, you just touched on a number of really interesting dynamics that are having to be navigated in the child exploitation space.
Speaker: I mean, you touched on everything from privacy to regulatory restrictions.
Speaker: and other similar types of challenges.
Speaker: How have you guys been navigating some of those challenges given that, for example, some of the platform companies are hiding behind existing regulations, especially in the US?
Speaker: The Communications and Decency Act has provided a shield for some of those folks for a number of years.
Speaker: And at the same time, the privacy legislation that is trying to protect the identities and the personally identifiable information of those that are navigating on the web
Speaker: And then you also have the intersection with obviously children in this space.
Speaker: So can you tell me, can you tell us a little bit about how you're navigating those various cross currents with law enforcement, with policymakers, et cetera?
Speaker: I think one of the sort of like narratives that we see a lot is it's child protection versus privacy and that you can have one or the other.
Speaker: And I think,
Speaker: it's important to reframe that in that child protection is about children's privacy.
Speaker: So it's not one or the other.
Speaker: And I don't think we have to choose between the two.
Speaker: In terms of the legislative framework, I mean, I can talk more about the UK, I think, than anywhere else, because it's what we're more familiar with.
Speaker: We do have to be very careful as a business, because fundamentally, our tools are designed to de-anonymise perpetrators and to help victims.
Speaker: And there's a lot of
Speaker: legislation within the UK and Europe to try and stop that happening.
Speaker: And for very good reason.
Speaker: People deserve privacy.
Speaker: So we've been working a lot around the GDPR and data protection regulations to try and deal with that and to say, what is our legitimate interest in the data we're collecting?
Speaker: Our approach on that is to say the legitimate interest is based around protecting children.
Speaker: And therefore, that supersedes
Speaker: not people's privacy, but it allows us to collect that data for this very, very specific purpose.
Speaker: Absolutely.
Speaker: I mean, that seems like a compelling public interest to me.
Speaker: How is law enforcement and how are policymakers responding to that position?
Speaker: Law enforcement, I think they want the tools.
Speaker: They want to be able to fight and safeguard victims.
Speaker: We see internationally, the reactions are quite different.
Speaker: Some countries are more, give me this tool, I'm going to use it, we'll ask forgiveness later.
Speaker: Some are understandably cautious around privacy.
Speaker: But I don't think we've ever hit a situation where a law enforcement agency will not use our tools.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: And just to add to some of those points that Dave made.
Speaker: So the legitimate interest thing is really important.
Speaker: But basically making sure that we continually check and assess that it's proportionate and what things can be put in place to make sure things are proportionate and it's appropriate.
Speaker: And so like...
Speaker: Privacy is an example.
Speaker: Everyone has an entitlement to privacy, but it's the victims and the offenders in the sense that, or just general internet users, have certain levels of rights.
Speaker: And it's when one person's privacy infringes on another person's privacy.
Speaker: So, you know, it's where you draw the line between those two.
Speaker: For...
Speaker: Law enforcement, say for example in the UK, coming soon is the requirement they will have to supply justification for why they perform certain searches.
Speaker: So there's a kind of, you know, there's a trial to say, well, that's why they were able to do certain things.
Speaker: And also legislatively in the EU coming soon are the DMA and the DSA, which are the Digital Markets Act and the Digital Services Act.
Speaker: Digital Services Act is the more interesting one, I guess, because as a platform, as a kind of media provider like Facebook or Microsoft or whoever, rather than it being voluntary reporting and policing their networks and making sure that they're providing a safe environment for children, it becomes illegally enforced.
Speaker: It's not voluntary.
Speaker: It's saying, well, if you are going to create this online playground, it's up to you to make it safe, just like it would be in a real world playground.
Speaker: And so legislation is definitely catching up.
Speaker: I'm really positive people like to talk kind of
Speaker: doom and gloom on these trends, but things are go ing in the right direction.
Speaker: Again, pulling it back to trends a little bit.
Speaker: Yes, it can seem like the crime is increasing and the modus operandi, the way that offenders behave might be shifting in different things, but there's some great stuff in terms of lifting the rock and shining a light on these things that was never previously done.
Speaker: And so there's a huge amount of good work being done by tech companies that we should be applauding and celebrating and encouraging more of.
Speaker: There are good things to be done and there's certainly lots of room for collaboration.
Speaker: And obviously it's in everyone's best interest to keep technology companies and their efforts on side and working together to save every last victim.
Speaker: But at the same time, you have to shine a light at the failures.
Speaker: I know I've shared with some of you this really difficult conversation that I had with a parent somewhat recently whose daughter had been
Speaker: blackmailed in essentially the exact same way that Dave mentioned and was made to take pictures of herself.
Speaker: And she ended up trying to take her own life because the pictures keep resurfacing online.
Speaker: And this has been one of the challenges that I think that we have in this space, that there's the idea that once material like this goes online, it lives online forever.
Speaker: And each time somebody else opens those images or watches that video,
Speaker: It's like re-victimizing that child again.
Speaker: But at the same time, we also know that there's other technology that exists that allows for immediate removals of other content, particularly around copyright materials.
Speaker: So where do you think, Matt, the balance between those lie?
Speaker: Is it really true that once material goes online, it will live there forever?
Speaker: No, absolutely.
Speaker: is something I believe really strongly about actually is this is unacceptable that we kind of shrug our shoulders or lots of people kind of shrug their shoulders and say, Oh, once it's online, it's online, it's too late, there's nothing you can do.
Speaker: As you hinted with copyright material, you know, if this was pay per view boxing, or the next big Hollywood blockbuster, or even something very kind of grotesque, you know, there's there's lots of other material that seems to get pulled very quickly, and it's very hard to find online.
Speaker: So it's definitely possible
Speaker: But for some reason, the attention, the same amount of effort and energy isn't poured into child abuse material.
Speaker: For me, it's just a question of when.
Speaker: For how much longer are we going to tolerate that this stuff still proliferates?
Speaker: And when's it going to stop?
Speaker: Because it will stop.
Speaker: It's not going to carry on forever.
Speaker: And who's going to be the first person to make sure it stops?
Speaker: What about some other exciting developments that you know about?
Speaker: What gets you motivated right now to work on?
Speaker: What are those really gnarly and difficult problems that you're taking on?
Speaker: And don't be afraid to jump into the technical weeds.
Speaker: This is what we're really talking about.
Speaker: The fact that the technology exists, but it's just not yet being put to use broadly.
Speaker: Sure.
Speaker: So a lot of the problems that people working in this area kind of face is the volumes of data, the amount of material you have to go through and grade or look at and intercept, whatever.
Speaker: And it just becomes like this impossible avalanche of work to do that feels insurmountable.
Speaker: Obviously, lots of great minds have been working on ways to be more efficient with the human effort and human resource in terms of how you detect it, how you prevent the spread of it, and how you surface it from large collections.
Speaker: So there's lots of good stuff.
Speaker: Lots of different people are trying to perfect machine learning algorithms that are capable of analyzing images and video and determine if it's illegal, how serious it is, how contemporary it is, or how risky it is, these kinds of things.
Speaker: These, I think, show great promise in terms of how you can more effectively use law enforcement's time.
Speaker: I get very inspired by working with our users.
Speaker: And Sherry, you and I have been very lucky to work together on a project doing exactly that, where we've supplied a tool to victim identification officers in the UK to help identify victims.
Speaker: And it's probably worth taking a bit of a step back on that.
Speaker: Victim identification is what we call the discipline and process around
Speaker: actually finding and locating children in abuse images.
Speaker: So if an image comes up online and it's believed to be new, that this picture's not being seen before, we're pretty sure the child within it has not been safeguarded.
Speaker: It's what clues, what little bits of threads can we pull out to try and help law enforcement locate that child?
Speaker: And, you know, this crime type doesn't respect borders.
Speaker: It could be an undercover police officer in Australia working on tour
Speaker: has found this image and it might come from South America.
Speaker: There's absolutely no slight geographical correlation between who's working on these things and where the children might be.
Speaker: And so I really, really am inspired by creating tools that help law enforcement locate those children.
Speaker: Unfortunately, we can't talk too much about them because obviously talking about them in a public forum tips off offenders and they do share tradecraft.
Speaker: There are manuals online that offenders share to say how to avoid these sorts of detection techniques, which is why we can't talk about it too much.
Speaker: But for me, that's what gets me out of bed in the morning is making these tools, giving them to our users, our victim ID officers, and then hearing back a week later from one of them saying, I used your tool and I identified a child.
Speaker: We arrested someone and that child is now safe.
Speaker: Now, Dave, I think you just put your finger on something that's very, very interesting, and that's the division of priority and effort that's being placed on this issue from different sides of the equation.
Speaker: Those folks that are operating and sharing images and making money off of these are sharing information.
Speaker: They are coordinated in the way that they operate.
Speaker: They are very well organized.
Speaker: Can you talk a little bit about that dynamic and the different types of things that you're seeing versus the defensive posture that's being taken by some of the various, whether it's law enforcement agency, NGOs, or others, and how that affects how the issue is being addressed?
Speaker: In terms of how the offenders operate, it's very easy with these sorts of discussions to get too focused on the offenders at the pinnacle of their offending pathway and technological prowess.
Speaker: The ones who are operating out there on tour who have really, really, I hate to say the word good, but really strong tradecraft who know how to avoid detection.
Speaker: Because for every one of those, there are a hundred who are
Speaker: not that good and, you know, are doing things that will get them caught and spotted and, you know, tend to themselves the attention of law enforcement.
Speaker: But yeah, the ones at that pinnacle of sort of like offending...
Speaker: I've heard them described as a harder technological adversary than some of the terrorists that our security services have to deal with in terms of their capability and competence.
Speaker: The other side of the equation, the law enforcement, there is actually an amazing network of law enforcement officers around the world working on this stuff.
Speaker: We're talking both formal networks across the world run by the likes of Interpol and Europol, but also informal networks of people who have met at conferences, know each other very well, and they know who to call to get something actioned on it in a different geographic area.
Speaker: I hope they won't mind me repeating this phrase, but there's someone working in this area who always talks about it takes a network to defeat a network.
Speaker: very true and it's about that coordinated response that coordinated effort through both law enforcement but also platform providers, NGOs, academia, tech companies like us you know it is through that combined effort that we can we can beat this I think that you know collaboration is key.
Speaker: Another kind of slight kind of tangent here but another thing that
Speaker: I think is fascinating is how people often describe as an arms race between, you know, good goodies and baddies or whatever.
Speaker: And then sort of get simplified as technology evolves and tradecraft changes and these kinds of things.
Speaker: But in practice, it's more like every other crime.
Speaker: If you think of murders and things from the 70s or whatever that went unsolved for decades and are still being solved now because of advances in DNA or other kind of forensic techniques, it's exactly the same in this area.
Speaker: There is constantly new methods and techniques to catch these people.
Speaker: And they must know that.
Speaker: They must live in fear of the knock on the door.
Speaker: And it doesn't matter how good
Speaker: Like Dave was saying, the people at the top of the pyramid or whatever, it doesn't matter how good they are today or tomorrow.
Speaker: Any crimes they've committed could still be solved at any point in the future.
Speaker: and hopefully brought to justice.
Speaker: Just to press on this issue a little bit more, it's interesting the dynamics that you're describing here, because a little earlier in the conversation, you talked about how the technology is there to be able to combat this and some of the coordination may not be.
Speaker: How are the perverse economic incentives continuing to fuel the problem?
Speaker: Economically, for the people trading this online for financial gain, they may be making money from advertising or from membership or whatever, I'm not really sure.
Speaker: You know, people that are doing it with financial incentive, the trick then is to disrupt the behavior before they break even.
Speaker: So whenever they publish a website online or they initiate something, there's going to be some costs involved buying domains and servers, these kinds of things.
Speaker: So the faster you can take these things down...
Speaker: get things blocked, get things stopped, then ideally you can do it before they even break even.
Speaker: And then if they can't make money at all, then they won't even start the next time.
Speaker: In our space, we've developed something that we call the human trafficking kill chain, which is based on a military concept that was extended into the cyber domain by Lockheed Martin.
Speaker: That was something that they call the cyber kill chain.
Speaker: And what it really is, is breaking down an adversarial process and what it is that they
Speaker: both need from an asset perspective and what phases they go through in order to achieve the end.
Speaker: And obviously there's an overlap between online child sexual abuse and human trafficking and modern slavery.
Speaker: And it's amazing to me how much that kill chain actually holds true here from recruitment to transportation, brokering, exploitation in the online abuse space.
Speaker: Obviously recruitment looks a little bit like grooming.
Speaker: And that is an opportunity to stop them before they break even, as you said, Matt.
Speaker: Transportation, in this case, wouldn't really talk about physical transportation across the border or whatnot, especially since the Internet is borderless.
Speaker: There's a digital process that happens in this space.
Speaker: And that's really where the ESPs come into play.
Speaker: And it's, again, another opportunity to block exploitation.
Speaker: What you were talking about, Matt, I think as well in terms of those online financial incentives and where they meet consumer demand would be that brokering step.
Speaker: I was interested in that as well.
Speaker: Where do you find the majority of this data?
Speaker: Is it open source?
Speaker: Is it deep web?
Speaker: Are they really hanging out on Tor networks?
Speaker: Or is it maybe some combination of the above?
Speaker: Well, so actually for camera forensics, we don't fetch or knowingly kind of scrape or search the illegal material.
Speaker: We very much try to stay in the kind of open web domain and it's trying to connect the two, allowing law enforcement to connect the two.
Speaker: I suppose that makes sense from an obvious legal perspective about just the particular dangers of this sort of data.
Speaker: Yeah, we're very careful from both a legal perspective and a welfare perspective and all these kinds of things.
Speaker: It's just, for us, there's no need.
Speaker: Anecdotally, I mean, we've,
Speaker: It's very easy to think, oh, this only happens on the dark web, you know, with people who download the Tor browser and use that.
Speaker: But in reality, there is an awful lot on the clear web.
Speaker: And that's what the Canadian Centre for Child Protection are going after.
Speaker: Yeah, it's not all people using clever tech to share it and hide it.
Speaker: An awful lot is going on in plain sight, including on some very well-known social media platforms.
Speaker: There's a bit of a myth that the majority of the sort of content is only traded and displayed on these dark corners of the web.
Speaker: When in reality, it's the sort of websites where our own children are going to be groomed, where you and I could accidentally encounter these that, you know, people who know exactly what they're looking for very easily can find it as well.
Speaker: But majority is actually on the clear web.
Speaker: Exactly.
Speaker: I made that sensationalist statement earlier in our discussion that any platform out there will be exploited in some way or form for this purpose.
Speaker: Yeah, and there's also, for example, in the pattern of coercion, they may be completely benign websites that are targeted for children.
Speaker: They're very clear and public and transparent and all that.
Speaker: And then you'll have offenders attempting to off-platform them, basically trying to lure them to a different messenger app or whatever, something where they can take them out of that kind of
Speaker: somewhat safer environment and into something somewhere else and where they're more likely to go undetected.
Speaker: But of course, there is behavior there in the first place that could be detected.
Speaker: What are the responsibilities of those platforms that are providing some of those secure messaging or communications or chatting tools?
Speaker: And what are some of the options that they have available for doing the types of monitoring or scanning that
Speaker: camera forensics and other companies can do to help maintain the safety of their platform.
Speaker: From my perspective, I feel like the responsibility is to society and to humanity and to people as a whole.
Speaker: And so any kind of messenger platform, for example, that says, oh, it's very important to protect the privacy of our users by encrypting or compensation, for example, is absolutely entitled to say that as long as they are also including the privacy and safety and security of anyone whose abuse is being facilitated by their platform.
Speaker: They have to take that whole picture.
Speaker: And as long as they're balancing that up, then show me the working and then I can lay them, you know, I don't mind.
Speaker: But if they're only considering, if they're using sort of end-to-end encryption as a way of absolving themselves of any responsibility, then obviously not okay.
Speaker: I mean, there's been a lot of expectation, I think, on these platforms to self-regulate since their inception and for up to now.
Speaker: And I think there are lots of people arguing internationally that self-regulation hasn't worked.
Speaker: I'm not expert enough to offer a strong opinion either way, but there are certainly people I respect who are arguing that self-regulation isn't working and it needs to be legislative now.
Speaker: But that creates a whole extra problem, which is there is no international legislation.
Speaker: So if you make life hard for these platforms in one country, they'll just up sticks and go somewhere else.
Speaker: So that's also something that needs to be very, very carefully considered.
Speaker: I think it's also important to draw out that as we are bolstering and arming tech companies' efforts in this space as well, which is generating millions of reports to NCMEC every year, that going back to your point, Dave, what that means is that those NCMEC reports turn into referrals to law enforcement agencies.
Speaker: And if we have millions of those reports coming in the pipeline, you know how many are coming back out as well.
Speaker: And if we don't have the right tools that we're equipping law enforcement with from a data triage and workflow perspective, then continuing to stuff the fire hose doesn't really do anything.
Speaker: No, no, that is, of course, very true.
Speaker: And just a bit of an aside on that, I also think it's problematic when you get to certain elements of media saying, oh, look, X, Y and Z site has reported this many child abuse images this year.
Speaker: That's awful.
Speaker: They've got a problem.
Speaker: They've got far less of a problem than the next platform along that's not reporting anything because they're just not checking.
Speaker: Those sorts of reports and stories don't exactly do anything to motivate companies to do the right thing, do they?
Speaker: Okay, let's add something different, a little pointed here.
Speaker: What is something that you guys are excited about in terms of the technology or research entering this space?
Speaker: Where are the pockets of potential that we're not seeing yet?
Speaker: So for me, we joke about where we will be in 10 years and that kind of thing, and
Speaker: I'm a massive optimist and we can definitely solve this problem to the point where our business no longer needs to exist.
Speaker: I feel like the 10 years is eons in technology.
Speaker: And if the big kind of operating system levels, if the Androids, Apples and Microsofts of the world combined to prevent the decoding of illegal material, for example, on their platforms or display technology, there's lots of interception points where you don't have to
Speaker: You don't have to violate people's privacy to completely make it impossible to trade this kind of material online.
Speaker: I feel like this will look back from the future, this period in history, as a strange one where it was possible.
Speaker: So that's what I'm excited by.
Speaker: Yeah, and I think you've hit on something there, Matt, which is I'm not convinced when you come down to it that it's actually a technology problem.
Speaker: It's about willingness to solve it.
Speaker: I think people would like it to be a technology problem because then they don't have to worry about it themselves.
Speaker: But I think it isn't.
Speaker: Count me as one that agrees with you on that.
Speaker: I think the technology is there.
Speaker: The political and other will is not.
Speaker: Yet.
Speaker: Maybe it's not yet.
Speaker: The job that we all have in this space is to work ourselves out of that job.
Speaker: Well, thank you both very much, Matt and Dave from Camera Forensics, for joining us today on the podcast.
Speaker: I wish you luck in everything that you're trying to do.
Speaker: Always a pleasure.
Speaker: Thank you for having us.
Speaker: Really enjoyed it.
Speaker: Thanks for listening to Finding Freedom with Sherry Calpidroni and Corey Marshall.
Speaker: A special thanks to our guests, Matt Burns and Dave Ranner from Camera Forensics.
Speaker: Interested in learning more?
Speaker: Please check out our website at www.globalemancipation.ngo or navigate to www.cameraforensics.com for more information on their life-saving efforts to combat online child sexual exploitation and provide much-needed victim identification tools.