Fake it till you make it:Fishing for Catfishes

Many adult content websites incorporate social networking features. Although these are popular, they raise significant challenges, including the potential for users to "catfish", i.e., to create fake profiles to deceive other users. This paper takes an initial step towards automated catfish detection. We explore the characteristics of the different age and gender groups, identifying a number of distinctions. Through this, we train models based on user profiles and comments, via the ground truth of specially verified profiles. Applying our models for age and gender estimation of unverified profiles, we identify 38% of profiles who are likely lying about their age, and 25% who are likely lying about their gender. We find that women have a greater propensity to catfish than men. Further, whereas women catfish select from a wide age range, men consistently lie about being younger. Our work has notable implications on operators of such online social networks, as well as users who may worry about interacting with catfishes

Web-Based Health Services in Forensic Psychiatry: A Review of the Use of the Internet in the Treatment of Child Sexual Abusers and Child Sexual Exploitation Material Offenders

In recent years, web-based health services for a variety of mental disorders have been developed and evaluated. Evidence suggests that guided internet-based therapy can be as effective as conventional face-to-face therapy. In forensic psychiatric practice, few web-based treatments have been implemented up to now. However, to our knowledge, there do not yet exist guided internet-based treatments for child sexual abusers and child sexual exploitation material offenders. This review aims at examining under what conditions patients are most likely to benefit from internet-based treatments. In addition, some computer-based health services in forensic psychiatry will be summarized and their potentials and weaknesses will be discussed. Subsequently, the review focuses on the implications for the development of online treatments for child sexual abusers as well as on a variety of ethical and legal issues that practitioners may encounter during the development, evaluation and delivery of online health services. The review will conclude with proposed quality standards for the development and implementation of web-based interventions for child sexual abusers and child sexual exploitation material offenders. By virtue of the low number of psychotherapists offering therapy to this clientele as well as individual barriers to seeking treatment such as fear of stigmatization, feelings of shame, long access routes, or limited mobility due to physical handicaps, the development of mental eHealth services in this sector could close an important healthcare gap. By increasing the density of supply, more child sexual abusers and child sexual exploitation material offenders would have the chance to engage in treatment and, ultimately, more incidents of sexual assault against minors could be prevented

iCOP:live forensics to reveal previously unknown criminal media on P2P networks

The increasing levels of criminal media being shared in peer-to-peer (P2P) networks pose a significant challenge to law enforcement agencies. One of the main priorities for P2P investigators is to identify cases where a user is actively engaged in the production of child sexual abuse (CSA) media – they can be indicators of recent or on-going child abuse. Although a number of P2P monitoring tools exist to detect paedophile activity in such networks, they typically rely on hash value databases of known CSA media. As a result, these tools are not able to adequately triage the thousands of results they retrieve, nor can they identify new child abuse media that are being released on to a network. In this paper, we present a new intelligent forensics approach that incorporates the advantages of artificial intelligence and machine learning theory to automatically flag new/previously unseen CSA media to investigators. Additionally, the research was extensively discussed with law enforcement cybercrime specialists from different European countries and Interpol. The approach has been implemented into the iCOP toolkit, a software package that is designed to perform live forensic analysis on a P2P network environment. In addition, the system offers secondary features, such as showing on-line sharers of known CSA files and the ability to see other files shared by the same GUID or other IP addresses used by the same P2P client. Finally, our evaluation on real CSA case data shows high degrees of accuracy, while hands-on trials with law enforcement officers demonstrate the toolkit’s complementarity to extant investigative workflows

“Obscenity has fallen to the wayside”: The decline of the obscenity provisions amongst law enforcement professionals in Canada

Since the landmark Butler case in 1992, obscenity, or more specifically adult pornography, has “fallen to the wayside,” in terms of legal consideration. Recent legal consideration has focused primarily on child pornography, and internet-based pornography, in a post-Butler era. Consequentially, the criminal justice system has experienced a shift in priorities; since Butler, only child-related obscene materials are subjected to criminal justice system scrutiny. This study explores the experiences of criminal justice system personnel to learn about shifts in law enforcement priorities since the enactment of the child pornography provision in 1993 and the role of the internet in this shift in priorities. I conducted 16 qualitative semi-structured interviews with criminal justice system personnel, guided by a feminist lens. Participants included current and retired members of the police (municipal and RCMP), Crown counsel, and defence lawyers; five participants had been involved in major court decisions of obscenity and child pornography (Little Sisters, 2000; R. v. Butler, 1992; R. v. Klassen, 2012; R. v. Neil, 2015; R. v. Sharpe, 2001). Analysis revealed a changing definition of obscenity, that material which historically would not have been tolerated for consumption, was now tolerated by the general community. More importantly, the perception emerged that obscenity was readily accessible via the internet, and no longer viewed as a priority for the criminal justice system. Participants identified the internet as a game changer; the availability and accessibility of child pornography online flooded the criminal justice system with depictions of the sexual abuse of real children that necessitated a priority response. As such, the focus and emphasis from the criminal justice system shifted away from violence against women and children, supported in Butler (1992), to child pornography, particularly that which features the sexual abuse of children. This shift in priorities resulted in a decline in law enforcement focus on obscene material, ultimately letting obscenity fall to the wayside. This research concludes with policy recommendations, including educating parents and children early about the issues with obscenity

Digital behaviours and cognitions of individuals convicted of online child pornography offences

BACKGROUND: Modern Child Sexual Exploitation Material (CSEM) offences predominantly occur within a technological ecosystem. The behaviours and cognitions of CSEM offenders influence, and are influenced by, their choice of facilitative technologies that form that ecosystem. OBJECTIVES: This thesis will review the prior research on cognitive distortions present in and technology usage by CSEM offenders, and present a new theory, Lawless Space Theory (LST), to explain those interactions. The cognitions and technical behaviours of previously convicted CSEM offenders will be examined in a psychosocial context and recommendations for deterrence, investigative, and treatment efforts made. PARTICIPANTS AND SETTING: Data was collected using an online survey collected from two samples, one from a reference population of the general public (n=524) and one from a population of previously convicted CSEM offenders (n=78), both of which were composed of adults living in the United States. METHODS: Two reviews were conducted using a PRISMA methodology - a systematic review of the cognitive distortions of CSEM offenders and an integrative review of their technology usage. A theoretical basis for LST was developed, and then seven investigations of the survey data were conducted evaluating the public’s endorsement of lawless spaces; the public’s perceptions of CSEM offenders; the self-perceptions of CSEM offenders; the suicidality of the offender sample; the use of technology and countermeasures by the offender sample; the collecting and viewing behaviours of the offender sample; and the idiographic profiles of the offender sample. RESULTS: The reviews found that the endorsement of traditional child contact offender cognitive distortions by CSEM offenders was low, and that they continued to use technology beyond its normative lifecycle. LST was developed to explain these behaviours, and the view of the Internet as generally lawless was endorsed by the reference and offender samples. The public sample showed biased beliefs that generally overestimated the prevalence of, and risk associated with, CSEM offending when compared to the offender sample. Offenders were found to have viewed investigators as having a lack of understanding and compassion, and they exhibited very high suicidal ideation following their interaction with law enforcement. Offenders exhibited similar technical abilities and lower technophilia than the reference sample, chose technologies to both reduce psychological strain and for utility purposes, and many exhibited cyclic deletions of their collections as part of a guilt/shame cycle. CONCLUSIONS AND IMPLICATIONS: Understanding CSEM offenders’ technological behaviours and cognitions can inform more effective investigative, deterrence, and treatment efforts. Law enforcement showing compassion during investigations may generate more full disclosures while facilitating offender engagement with resources to reduce suicidality. Deterrence efforts focused on establishing capable guardianship and reducing perceived lawlessness provide the potential to reduce offending. Treatment of criminogenic needs for the majority of CSEM offenders is not supported by evidence, but non-criminogenic treatment warrants broader consideration

Online Child Sexual Victimisation

Focusing on online facilitated child sexual abuse, this book takes a rigorous approach to existing literature to address some of the most pressing public and policy questions surrounding the evolution of online child sexual abuse. The authors provide an unparalleled examination of which children are most vulnerable to this type of abuse, how their vulnerability is made, what they are vulnerable to and how resilience, both human and technical, can be promoted. They also consider the changing nature of child sexual abuse in the digital age and the consequences of this for victims and survivors, as well as for practitioners and policymakers working in response and prevention

Measurement and analysis of child pornography trafficking on P2P networks

Peer-to-peer networks are the most popular mechanism for the criminal acquisition and distribution of child pornography (CP). In this paper, we examine observations of peers sharing known CP on the eMule and Gnutella networks, which were collected by law enforcement using forensic tools that we developed. We characterize a year’s worth of network activity and evaluate different strategies for prioritizing investigators ’ limited resources. The highest impact research in criminal forensics works within, and is evaluated under, the constraints and goals of investigations. We follow that principle, rather than presenting a set of isolated, exploratory characterizations of users. First, we focus on strategies for reducing the number of CP files available on the network by removing a minimal number of peers. We present a metric for peer removal that is more effective than simply selecting peers with the largest libraries or the most days online. Second, we characterize six aggressive peer subgroups, including: peers using Tor, peers that bridge multiple p2p networks, and the top 10 % of peers contributing to file availability. We find that these subgroups are more active in their trafficking, having more known CP and more uptime, than the average peer. Finally, while in theory Tor presents a challenge to investigators, we observe that in practice offenders use Tor inconsistently. Over 90% of regular Tor users send traffic from a non-Tor IP at least once after first using Tor