US actor Ashton Kutcher urges end to child sexual exploitation

[escapefromstress]

Actor and human rights campaigner Ashton Kutcher has urged US lawmakers to support efforts to help bring an end to child sexual exploitation.

At a senate hearing on Wednesday, a visibly emotional Mr Kutcher said it was time for "society and government" to defend the vulnerable.

He said that he had been exposed to things "no person should ever see".

Mr Kutcher was speaking as chairman of Thorn, an organisation that develops software to locate victims of abuse. "The right to pursue happiness for so many is stripped away, it's raped, it's abused, it's taken by force," Mr Kutcher, 39, said.

He told the US Senate Foreign Relations Committee in Washington that new technology was needed to prevent websites from carrying adverts promoting the sexual exploitation of minors. "Technology can be used to enable slavery, but it can also be used to disable slavery," Mr Kutcher said, adding: "Can we build the tools that are better than their tools to fight what is happening?"

He said that one of the tools his organisation had created, Spotlight, helped identify 6,000 victims in six months. It was developed after a 2012 survey found that 63% of underage victims were being bought or sold online.

Mr Kutcher, who is married to actress Mila Kunis and has two children, said that he aimed to help victims around the world with his work at Thorn after being affected by what he had seen. "I've seen video content of a child that's the same age as mine, being raped by an American man who was a sex tourist in Cambodia. This child was so conditioned by her environment that she thought she was engaging in play."

He told those present at the Ending Modern Slavery hearing that his organisation had been approached by authorities to help track online perpetrators with new technology. "We were the last line of defence - an actor and his foundation," he said, adding: "That's my day job, and I'm sticking to it."

http://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-38988637

Another article on same topic: https://perb.cc/vbulletin/showthrea...nd-Helplines&p=1756757&viewfull=1#post1756757

 

[Warl0ck]

The bulk of the online child exploitation is happening on the Dark Net. To put things into perspective, a member of the #Anonymous hacking collective took down 10,000 sites on the Dark net (20% of all sites) and a good portion where for child porn, trafficking, etc. It's a shady underworld that the vast majority of the general population has no idea exists. A trip down to a typical site and it can be pretty disturbing. The real problem is the lack of funding for police & governments to stop the problem. That type of digital forensics is extremely complex and it's international requiring a whole lot of coordination between governments & police forces.

Back in late 2011, a faction of Anonymous turned it's guns on "Lolita City" which was a massive collection of some vile child porn. They nuked the site & dumped the database & some screen shots of chat records into the wild. I've seen the stuff. One comment that forever sits in my mind is a guy claiming you "don't need Viagra when you're with a 9 year old". I attribute that hack to bringing awareness to the problem. A year later the FBI started investigating Freedom Hosting which controls much of the Dark Net websites. This was called "Operation Pacifier". My understanding is the Feds wrote a complex Javascript which identified the actual IP number of the user versus the Tor IP. The result was a whole bunch of people got an early morning visit by men in kevlar. And Freedom Hosting went #tangodown.

Good for Ashton.

 

[westwoody]

don't need Viagra...

Anyone who says something like that needs a bullet in the back of their head.

Their brains are just wired wrong, no therapy will help them, they need to be confined for the safety of everyone else.

We had one where I work and one day he said something really stupid...almost got beat to death right on the workfloor. And he did not understand the problem, he didn't see why other guys ---guys with children -- were so mad at him.

 

[Warl0ck]

Anyone who says something like that needs a bullet in the back of their head.

I think what is more disturbing is the slow move toward the acceptance of pedophilia (which directly ties in with child and human trafficking). Twitter is littered with accounts of people who profess their love for children but "promise" us they'll never act on it. And they seem dumbfounded when society hates them. Of course if they were living next door to an ISIS soldier his claim of "I just support them but I'd never act out" would be moot. You've seen the scandals at the BBC and whispers of what was happening in prominent political parties with underage girls.

On the plus side, LE has started paying real attention to the problem in the past few years. They've got more money, more firepower & better relationships with other police forces around the globe. Even local police forces now have ICE's (Integrated Child Exploitation) units. I think it was fictional FBI agent Aaron Hotchner (Criminal Minds) that said something like "monsters live among us". They do.

Microsoft staff suffer PTSD from having to sift through child porn videos. >> https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/jan/11/microsoft-employees-child-abuse-lawsuit-ptsd

 

[escapefromstress]

Another article on same topic: https://perb.cc/vbulletin/showthrea...nd-Helplines&p=1756757&viewfull=1#post1756757

Good for Ashton.

So how do we explain the discrepancy in stats, or is ENB talking about a different set of stats than the ones Kutcher uses?

 

[escapefromstress]

I thought it was interesting to see the two different perspectives on the issue.


Here's some more info on recent technological developments in fighting trafficking and abuse of children.

Bitcoins used in child sex abuse deals targeted

Bitcoins used to buy images of child sex abuse could soon be tracked and blocked as two companies share data on how the virtual currency is spent.

The Internet Watch Foundation (IWF), which tracks abuse sites, is passing data to start-up Elliptic, which helps Bitcoin exchanges monitor transactions. The data comes from transactions carried out on sites the IWF monitors.

The IWF said the "pseudo-anonymity" offered by bitcoins made them an increasingly popular form of payment. "We are seeing it being used on the more dedicated commercial abuse sites that we monitor on a regular basis," said Sarah Smith, IWF's technical researcher.

Ms Smith said the IWF had first noticed the virtual currency being used in 2014 alongside other payment systems, but its use on abuse sites was growing alongside other illicit use of the virtual cash. Bitcoins' "pseudo-anonymity" made it a very attractive payment system in criminal circles, she added.

The IWF's work to disrupt abuse sites had left it with a list of Bitcoin addresses associated with sites selling abuse content and their customers, said Ms Smith.

This list and any other addresses the IWF finds are being passed to tech company Elliptic to help in its work to curb criminal use of bitcoins.

"This is the first time anybody has started identifying these crimes in Bitcoin and flagging them up in a system like ours," said James Smith, head of Elliptic, adding that it was a "great step" towards eliminating illicit use of bitcoins.

Elliptic analyses the Bitcoin blockchain - the virtual currency's central ledger in which every deal done with the digital cash is recorded - to spot stolen coins, to trace transactions that seek to hide their criminal origins or to conceal the illegal uses to which they are put.

It passes information about the web of dodgy transactions to exchanges and other merchants to help them avoid doing business with "known bad actors" and to stop them being inadvertently enrolled in money-laundering schemes.

http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-36734658

 

[escapefromstress]

Microsoft launches tool to rid Internet of child porn

http://money.cnn.com/2015/07/15/technology/microsoft-photodna/

The biggest social media sites have been using Microsoft technology to combat child pornography. Now, Microsoft is giving that tool away-- for free.

Microsoft (MSFT, Tech30) on Wednesday launched a cloud version of PhotoDNA, software that prevents child porn from being uploaded to websites. It's currently used by more than 70 companies, including Facebook (FB, Tech30) and Twitter (TWTR, Tech30).

Now, online service providers and businesses hosting user-generated content can apply to use the service too.

With an exponential increase in social media sharing, weeding out child pornography from billions of uploads is challenging. About 720,000 of the 1.8 billion pictures uploaded across the Internet each day are illegal child sexual abuse photos, Microsoft wrote in a blog post.

"The tool has amazing accuracy, and it has enabled us to find problematic content faster than ever before," Facebook said in a blog post from 2011, when the company started using PhotoDNA. "And, because PhotoDNA has been so effective for us, we encourage other sites that allow photo uploads to use it as well."

But only social media mammoths could set up huge servers, hire technical assistance and dish out the big bucks for it.

Now, four years after Facebook started using it, even the smallest organizations can benefit from this filtering service -- with no servers to be set up, no expert guidance and not a single cent to be spent.

Companies like Flipboard. a popular social magazine where users share and curate content from the Web and social media, are eager to use the technology to protect users and young victims while helping make the Internet safer for everyone.

Flipboard has been using the service for a few months now. "We did manual investigation before but that sort of solution doesn't scale," David Creemer, Flipboard's head of Platform Engineering, told CNNMoney.

The software will identify images that have been previously been flagged.

"Initially, I personally verified images that were flagged by PhotoDNA and I never saw a false positive. If PhotoDNA says a photo is illegal, I believe it," Creemer said.

 

[escapefromstress]

I think what is more disturbing is the slow move toward the acceptance of pedophilia (which directly ties in with child and human trafficking). Twitter is littered with accounts of people who profess their love for children but "promise" us they'll never act on it. And they seem dumbfounded when society hates them. Of course if they were living next door to an ISIS soldier his claim of "I just support them but I'd never act out" would be moot. You've seen the scandals at the BBC and whispers of what was happening in prominent political parties with underage girls.

On the plus side, LE has started paying real attention to the problem in the past few years. They've got more money, more firepower & better relationships with other police forces around the globe. Even local police forces now have ICE's (Integrated Child Exploitation) units. I think it was fictional FBI agent Aaron Hotchner (Criminal Minds) that said something like "monsters live among us". They do.

Microsoft staff suffer PTSD from having to sift through child porn videos. >> https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/jan/11/microsoft-employees-child-abuse-lawsuit-ptsd

I found this article very disturbing.


St. John's child sex doll case

A child sex doll case in St. John's has caught the attention of an American journalist from New York.

Freelance writer Elizabeth Daley says she learned about the Kenneth Harrisson case after reading an article on the therapeutic uses of the dolls and then researching where child sex dolls might be illegal.

The Harrisson case turned up in a Google search.

"I'm interested because it brings up some issues on the limitation of freedom of expression — which is something we are very interested in — in the United States," said Daley. "We have a first amendment right to free speech and that includes freedom of expression which could be limited to representations that could be considered art," she said.

"So, there's a lot of questions since Mr. Harrisson didn't spend any time with this doll that I think are interesting legal questions from an international perspective."

It's alleged that back in February 2013, the doll arrived at Canada Post's international mail processing centre in Toronto addressed to Harrisson, 51, in St. John's.

In St. John's Monday, Canadian Border Services officer Benedict Hall told the court he was contacted by the Toronto centre and was told what was in the package for Harrisson. Hall said he asked the centre to send it to him, so he could take a look. He then contacted the Royal Newfoundland Constabulary to see if they wanted to do a "controlled delivery" of the doll to Harrisson.

The plan was put into operation and Harrisson was arrested on March 12, 2013.

He faces charges in relation to smuggling a child sex doll, using the mail system for an indecent purpose, and possession of child porn.

Daley says she doesn't think the matter would even have gone to trial in the U.S.

"I'm not an expert, but based on our laws, it would not. There has to be a real child that was harmed in the making of child pornography," she said. "We have protections for things that are not actual children or based on actual children."

Daley says that not only was she interested in the story, but a U.S. publication was interested enough to send her to St. John's for the trial. "It's especially interesting given that we all have access to the internet. We all have access to a global market place," said Daley. "Things that are illegal in one country can be easily procured, despite the fact that they are illegal in that country."

"We need to rethink the way we understand laws as an international community not just laws based on our particular country."

It's alleged that Harrisson ordered the doll from a company in Japan.

Daley says that is worth noting. "The laws of Japan are very different from the laws of Canada and very different from the laws of the United States. As we all are shopping online, this is an issue."

When the trial resumes on Tuesday, Daley will be in the court.

The first part of the morning will focus on a crown application to have the public — including media — banned from the court when the doll is removed from packaging and shown at trial.

http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/newfou...ohns-1.3938327

 

[Warl0ck]

Well consider this..and think forward.

We're close to household virtual reality and there is talk of AI (artificial intelligence robots as sex workers). How long until pedophilia becomes part of virtual reality or you can buy a child robot to serve your sexual needs. Legally it's a grey zone as you're not violating a child because it's not a child. Japan has a type of anime that often pushes those lines. Would it be legal to make a "Shrek" style film that incorporates child pornography? You can act out a violent rape or murder scene in a film because it's art. Technically I'd bet you can do the same thing with child porn.