Silicon Valley under pressure over online child sexual abuse

Home Secretary Sajid
Javid.
Chris J Ratcliffe/Getty
Images

• Home Secretary Sajid Javid has warned about the sheer
  volume of paedophilic content available online.
• He is expected to announce new measures to combat the
  problem later on Monday.
• The UK’s National Crime Agency revealed that it
  received over 80,000 industry referrals for child sex abuse
  images in 2017, which represents a 700% increase since
  2012.
• The agency asked tech companies to cooperate with law
  enforcement more to combat online child sexual abuse.
• Google also announced on Monday that it is rolling out
  a new AI tool to help NGOs and industry partners track down
  child abusers.

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Silicon Valley is having a rough week.

After salvos from President Trump over purported bias in Google’s
search results, and calls from powerful broadcasters for more
regulation, tech firms are now under pressure from UK authorities
to tackle online child sexual abuse.

On Monday, the UK’s National Crime Agency (NCA) said it received
more than 80,000 industry referrals for child sex abuse images in
2017. That’s a sevenfold increase over five years.

Home Secretary
Sajid Javid used the numbers as the jumping off point for an
editorial in The Sun, where he said he was making it his
mission to crack down on child sexual abusers online. He is
making a speech later today in which he is
expected to announce new funding for law enforcement.

While it did not name names, the NCA stated that it had seen an
increase of, “hidden or encrypted online opportunities for higher
risk offending.”

“We are seeing an increase in the number of sophisticated
offenders using the dark web to groom and harm children on the
mainstream internet,” said NCA Director Rob Jones.

He said that investigators are having to deal with offenders who
are committing preventable crimes such as sharing illegal images
already known to law enforcement, and he suggested that tech
companies could have the answer.

He said: “The technology exists for industry to design out these
offences, to stop these images being shared. Whilst some online
platforms have taken important steps to improve safety, we are
asking them to take it to the next step; to innovate, to use
their brightest minds, and to invest in preventing these online
offences from happening in the first place.”

At least some of the commentary seems to be directed at Google.
Foreign secretary Jeremy Hunt
accused the search giant last week of not cooperating with
intelligence agencies in removing child abuse content.

He wrote: “Seems extraordinary that Google is considering
censoring its content to get into China but won’t cooperate with
UK, US and other 5 eyes countries in removing child abuse
content.”

Google announced on Monday the release of a new free artificial
intelligence tool to help charities and industry partners track
down child sexual abuse material (CSAM).

“By using deep neural networks for image processing, we can now
assist reviewers sorting through many images by prioritizing the
most likely CSAM content for review,” the company said.