35 research outputs found
Characterizing Pedophile Conversations on the Internet using Online Grooming
Cyber-crime targeting children such as online pedophile activity are a major
and a growing concern to society. A deep understanding of predatory chat
conversations on the Internet has implications in designing effective solutions
to automatically identify malicious conversations from regular conversations.
We believe that a deeper understanding of the pedophile conversation can result
in more sophisticated and robust surveillance systems than majority of the
current systems relying only on shallow processing such as simple word-counting
or key-word spotting.
In this paper, we study pedophile conversations from the perspective of
online grooming theory and perform a series of linguistic-based empirical
analysis on several pedophile chat conversations to gain useful insights and
patterns. We manually annotated 75 pedophile chat conversations with six stages
of online grooming and test several hypothesis on it. The results of our
experiments reveal that relationship forming is the most dominant online
grooming stage in contrast to the sexual stage. We use a widely used
word-counting program (LIWC) to create psycho-linguistic profiles for each of
the six online grooming stages to discover interesting textual patterns useful
to improve our understanding of the online pedophile phenomenon. Furthermore,
we present empirical results that throw light on various aspects of a pedophile
conversation such as probability of state transitions from one stage to
another, distribution of a pedophile chat conversation across various online
grooming stages and correlations between pre-defined word categories and online
grooming stages
Online Child Sexual Abuse: The French Response
Online child sexual abuse is an increasingly visible problem in society today. The introduction, growth and utilization of information and telecommunication technologies (ICTs) have been accompanied by an increase in illegal activities. With respect to cyberspace the Internet is an attractive environment to sex offenders. In addition to giving them greater access to minors, extending their reach from a limited geographical area to victims all around the world, it allows criminals to alter or conceal their identities. Sexual predators, stalkers, child pornographers and child traffickers can use various concealment techniques to make it more difficult for investigators to identify them and find evidence. Others physically hide removable media and incriminating evidence in rented storage space, impeding an investigatorâs job to find the truth. France has given the protection of children from sexual exploitation and abuse a high priority. Traditional laws have been amended to address the challenges of information technology, violence and to bring at the same time the country into line with international conventions on the rights of children. Accordingly this current article will analyze some of the techniques used by offenders to abuse children online, including recent legal and administrative developments in France concerning online children protection
How to implement online warnings to prevent the use of child sexual abuse material
Online CSAM offending is a challenge for law enforcement, policymakers and child welfare organisations alike. The use of online warning messages to prevent or deter an individual when they actively search for CSAM is gaining traction as a response to some types of CSAM offending. Yet, to date, the technical question of how warning messages can be implemented, and who can implement them, has been largely unexplored. To address this, we use a case study to analyse the actions individuals and organisations within the technology, government, nongovernment and private sectors could take to implement warning messages. We find that, from a technical perspective, there is considerable opportunity to implement warning messages, although further research into efficacy and cost is needed
Finding the Key Players in Online Child Exploitation Networks
The growth of the Internet has been paralleled with a similar growth in online child exploitation. Since completely shutting down child exploitation websites is difficult (or arguably impossible), the goal must be to find the most efficient way of identifying the key targets and then to apprehend them. Traditionally, online investigations have been manual and centered on images. However, we argue that target prioritization needs to take more than just images into consideration, and that the investigating process needs to become more systematic. Drawing from a web crawler we specifically designed for extracting child exploitation website networks, this study 1) examines the structure of ten child exploitation networks and compares it to a control group of sports-related websites, and 2) provides a measure (network capital) that allows for identifying the most important targets for law enforcement purposes among our sample of websites. Results show that network capital â a combination between severity of content (images, videos, and text) and connectivity (links to other websites) â is a more reliable measure of target prioritization than more traditional measures of network centrality taken alone. Policy implications are discussed
A systematic survey of online data mining technology intended for law enforcement
As an increasing amount of crime takes on a digital aspect, law enforcement bodies must tackle an online environment generating huge volumes of data. With manual inspections becoming increasingly infeasible, law enforcement bodies are optimising online investigations through data-mining technologies. Such technologies must be well designed and rigorously grounded, yet no survey of the online data-mining literature exists which examines their techniques, applications and rigour. This article remedies this gap through a systematic mapping study describing online data-mining literature which visibly targets law enforcement applications, using evidence-based practices in survey making to produce a replicable analysis which can be methodologically examined for deficiencies
Quantum surveillance and 'shared secrets'. A biometric step too far? CEPS Liberty and Security in Europe, July 2010
It is no longer sensible to regard biometrics as having neutral socio-economic, legal and political impacts. Newer generation biometrics are fluid and include behavioural and emotional data that can be combined with other data. Therefore, a range of issues needs to be reviewed in light of the increasing privatisation of âsecurityâ that escapes effective, democratic parliamentary and regulatory control and oversight at national, international and EU levels, argues Juliet Lodge, Professor and co-Director of the Jean Monnet European Centre of Excellence at the University of Leeds, U
Cyber Security Active Defense: Playing with Fire or Sound Risk Management
âBanks Remain the Top Target for Hackers, Report Says,â is the title of an April 2013 American Banker article. Yet, no new comprehensive U.S. cyber legislation has been enacted since 2002, and neither legislative history nor the statutory language of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA) or Electronic Communications Privacy Act (ECPA) make reference to the Internet. Courts have nevertheless filled in the gapsâsometimes with surprising results
The Phenomenon of Online Live-Streaming of Child Sexual Abuse: Challenges and Legal Responses
In the recent years, the importance of Internet in the education of children all over the world has grown enormously. But as every other phenomenon, the easy access to the Internet creates a great number of concerns that should not be neglected. Over the past two decades, the internet has become a new medium through which child exploitation and sexual abuse happens. Technology is being used not only as a means of committing old forms of sexual abuse and exploitation of children, but also for creating new ones. This variety of crime types ranges from child pornography, sexting and sextortion to online grooming, and live- streaming of child abuse. This dissertation focuses on a very current, fast developing, and not very explored topic, the phenomenon of live-streaming of child abuse. The research includes a perspective of (public) international law, the situation in Europe due to the activities of the Council of Europe and the EU and also a ârealityâ test with two legal system approaches, Italy and England & Wales, on how to handle online child sexual abuse material and more specifically live-streaming of such abuses. On the basis of this observation, the main objective is to critically analyze the status quo of existing framework in the area of online child sexual abuse and exploitation in order to find out how flexible it is to be applied to this specific crime, if it can be applied, and how can it be improved in order to better respond to this new global reality. Based on all of this I draw conclusions over the insufficiency of existing framework to cover the crime of live-streaming of child abuse and plead for filling the legal lacunae by extending specific criminal provisions -ideally harmonized on an international level- specially made to tackle this crime