I was able to see a presentation about this topic one time by ICE. It tragic in two senses:
1) The crimes themselves are absolutely intolerable to society.
2) The lack of serious resourcing the seriousness of this crime should warrant.
Part of the presentation was specifically on identifying the location a sequence of photos was taken in the hopes that it would narrow down the search radius for the offender. The team that did the work were members of the ICE HERO program -- one of the coolest veteran-to-civilian programs I've ever seen [1][2]. The folks literally spent weeks "driving" around likely areas in Google maps trying to identify the location. Because the photo was taken from an angle that the car wouldn't have seen, they weren't able to use any automation at all and it literally took a human's intuitive understanding of 3-D spaces to eventually figure it out.
However, what was really tough was that the HERO program only exists because it offers an internship that costs very little to DHS -- they simply can't afford a large group of full-time staff.
I urge anybody who can to petition to better fund anti-child abuse programs.
How does the effectiveness of tracking down individual cases in this way compare to e.g. improving the eoconomic incentives overall? Commercial child abuse is mostly a result of deprived economic circumstances, in which people see more benefit in selling their children rather than giving them the best future possible, if I'm not mistaken.
I don't intend to spoil the enthusiasm here, but wouldn't supporting welfare hence be a more effective measure than investing in fancy tech? That latter only increases the deterrants which seem hard to increase any further to begin with.
https://www.thorn.org/ (non-profit) is working hard to provide tooling to law enforcement to address the issues you mention, and posts on HN's Who's Hiring threads (front end engineers) [1].
I don't know if they accept volunteers for code contributions, but I hope they consider it if they already don't.
Is there not a volunteer program people can help with in this situation.
I'm a British citizen but looking at spending 2 or 3 months out in Cambodia working on coding projects an exploring a country I've never visited.
Unfortunately, I know Cambodia has had problems with child abuse and child sex tourism in the past. Working on something like you've just described seems like a fantastic way to explore a country and also track down nonces
This is when I spare a thought for people whose job is to moderate user-posted content.
None of these pictures have signs of immediate physical violence, but just looking at them and thinking of their possible backstories makes my stomach churn.
Kind of disappointed in how few images there are there, considering the scale of child abuse mentioned in the article it is odd how there is only a dozen or so images to look at and try to identify.
The context makes these cut outs really upsetting to see in some cases. Like the hyper zoom-ins of dolls and figurines in what may be a child rape scene.
Remember when 4chan weaponized agains Shia LeBouf's flag and were able to determine the location of the ground flag based on the contrail evidence of the flight path of what the camera could see. The camera was only pointing at the sky, with the flag in the image. They were able to determine approx latitude due to the live stream revealing the sunset - and then comparing the paths of planes seen in the camera with flight data...
Then they drove to the location and took out the flag
Using "only" North Korean propaganda videos and commercially available satellite images and published memoirs from NK defectors, they were able to located the building where NK is making their TELs.
I'd bee willing to join an IN team trying to do this ... If you can string together a few non-traditional clues to the general area you could target the crowd-sourced part more effectively. Might even be able to get cloud providers to donate unused CPU.
That's an interesting design of swingset; not one I've seen before.
Unlike the bog-standard swingset in the US, which is typically all steel tube, that one looks like it has extruded (aluminum?) verticals and then a tubular horizontal weldment as the top piece. Further, the horizontal looks like it was hot-dip galvanized as a finished unit. The verticals were painted before assembly, not after, because of the bare-metal bolt heads. The fasteners are presumably stainless, since I don't see any rust marks below them. It's got an interesting bearing/bushing at the top of each chain, probably to make it not squeak; that strikes me as a fairly luxe feature.
I couldn't find any similar ones searching around online, although my Google searches don't turn up many European models at all (thanks, Google).
The photo doesn't go up enough to be sure, but it looks like the top bar is an unbroken one-piece section. That would make it pretty bulky and awkward to ship. (The vertical pieces look like they come apart into about 4 ft sections, which means they were likely palletized at one point. Maybe the extrusions are not done in the same place as the rest of the manufacturing..? That's certainly plausible.)
If someone recognized the design/model, I think that would probably be a significant clue towards the photo's location; at the very least, the manufacturer would probably have a fairly good idea of where they normally sell to.
It has the swept-bend tubular corner reinforcements, the polyethylene (or some other kind of plastic) panels on the upper corners, etc. The only difference I can see between the product photo and the Europol one is that, in the Europol photo, the top bar seems galvanized rather than painted. But that's the sort of thing that could easily change as a product is marketed.
It appears the company is out of Krasnodar (Краснода́р), located in southern Russia.
I wonder if people who use a popular photo sharing site like Google Photos would be in favor of there photos with location meta data being used for a project like this.
I think I would if I could trust that it was only being used for something like this & not commercial advertising type projects.
What incentive could be added to have people view these photos on a regular basis? I think facebook could be one answer with it's global reach. They could do an official page or something and offer real discounts at partnering restaurants or stores from around the world if you spend time each month viewing all the pictures. Imagine the reach they could have. At the same time I feel that there should not be a business of restaurants and the like selling coupons on abuse photos but I think the greater good of finding these kids may be there. The reason I add a type of payment is because it is my belief that though people do mean well, without an incentive they are less likely to view these images. Or perhaps if add companies put those kind of pictures on the websites instead of ads I would disable the adblocker.
Photo number 9. The box shows a picture of an Asteraceae that fits well with Cichorium intybus, a vegetable cultured in temperate areas (from Europe mainly), and the colours of the Romanian flag.
Can't identify the background trees at this low resolution, but there is a small Fabaceae tree in the photo that looks like either Robinia pseudoacacia or Sophora. This trees have heavy seeds that do not go very far. Some bigger trees from one of this species could probably be seen near this area. Maybe in the streets (or in a garden).
Just realized that is the same area as this second photo, so if is Asia nothing of the former is appliable. The list of possible fabaceae trees is much bigger then. There is a pinnate-leaved palm also, so in principle areas colder than -12 could be excluded (USDA 8a).
In this photo there is a small tree at rigth that is partially clipped. Compound leaves with five leaflets. Probably Fraxinus. Fits well. Temperate area in this case.
It would be great if that was possible. But in the meantime human beings are amazingly good at this kind of thing. Our brains are highly optimised for this kind of work.
Hopefully we'll come to a point soon where AI and deep learning can help out in this space. I remember models being trained that could predict the country based on a street view photo with a high degree of accuracy, which would be a good first step. The next one would be to either match a top-down satellite photo with a picture, or figure out a way to match street view photos based on similarity.
Given that Google actually has the data as well as the skills and computing power to help out Europol, I'd have hoped they'd be jumping at the opportunity to do so. At the least it would make for great PR, but perhaps they're afraid of the possible privacy issues and discussions as well (I can already see the headlines: "Google knows the location of any yard appearing in a photo!").
In any case, it's telling how humans are so good at this stuff and picking up on clues and patterns. It'll still take a while before machines are as good.
That’s not really how any of this works—you can’t simply throw a bunch of unrelated data at some algorithms and expect usable output. (There’s also no such thing as “deep learning”.)
Law enforcement and related organizations already use machine learning quite a bit, particularly for image enhancement. Yes, Google does have a lot of images of various locations from a top-down perspective, but that isn’t helpful for accurately determining a location from the images that Europol collects.
Also, keep in mind that Europol is only posting images here when all other means of determining location and identity have been exhausted. The images are usually indoors and don’t contain enough information for ML to be of any significant use. You might be able to narrow it down to a probably country based colors and design patterns, but that’s hardly sufficient and not solid enough evidence to actually do anything.
bane|7 years ago
1) The crimes themselves are absolutely intolerable to society.
2) The lack of serious resourcing the seriousness of this crime should warrant.
Part of the presentation was specifically on identifying the location a sequence of photos was taken in the hopes that it would narrow down the search radius for the offender. The team that did the work were members of the ICE HERO program -- one of the coolest veteran-to-civilian programs I've ever seen [1][2]. The folks literally spent weeks "driving" around likely areas in Google maps trying to identify the location. Because the photo was taken from an angle that the car wouldn't have seen, they weren't able to use any automation at all and it literally took a human's intuitive understanding of 3-D spaces to eventually figure it out.
However, what was really tough was that the HERO program only exists because it offers an internship that costs very little to DHS -- they simply can't afford a large group of full-time staff.
I urge anybody who can to petition to better fund anti-child abuse programs.
1 - https://www.ice.gov/hero
2 - http://www.herocorps.net/
justasimpleman|7 years ago
I don't intend to spoil the enthusiasm here, but wouldn't supporting welfare hence be a more effective measure than investing in fancy tech? That latter only increases the deterrants which seem hard to increase any further to begin with.
toomuchtodo|7 years ago
I don't know if they accept volunteers for code contributions, but I hope they consider it if they already don't.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19281914
botwriter|7 years ago
I'm a British citizen but looking at spending 2 or 3 months out in Cambodia working on coding projects an exploring a country I've never visited.
Unfortunately, I know Cambodia has had problems with child abuse and child sex tourism in the past. Working on something like you've just described seems like a fantastic way to explore a country and also track down nonces
astrodust|7 years ago
[deleted]
dennisgorelik|7 years ago
Why victims are not complaining about these crimes?
Snoozus|7 years ago
dictum|7 years ago
None of these pictures have signs of immediate physical violence, but just looking at them and thinking of their possible backstories makes my stomach churn.
BearsAreCool|7 years ago
nothrabannosir|7 years ago
That card looks like a pokemon card with a Google Chrome logo. Frustratingly familiar.
Waterluvian|7 years ago
luxpir|7 years ago
blackflame7000|7 years ago
tyingq|7 years ago
samstave|7 years ago
Then they drove to the location and took out the flag
Joe Rogan on it:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AoBK1_ixiro
Some random on it:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n-ABXvbMSc4
emilga|7 years ago
Here's a Twitter thread where BBC solved a murder in Cameroon: https://twitter.com/bbcafrica/status/1044186344153583616?lan...
From a single video of the crime, they were able to figure out where, who, and when (!) the crime was committed. (Using Google maps.)
And here's Jeffrey Lewis presenting how they figured out "Where does North Korea Build Its Missile Launchers?" (1h video): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E9QbI8Jf4hg
Using "only" North Korean propaganda videos and commercially available satellite images and published memoirs from NK defectors, they were able to located the building where NK is making their TELs.
Does anyone have any other examples?
wp381640|7 years ago
they triangulated the location of the ISIS execution videos using nothing more than shadows and geographical mounds in the desert
https://www.bellingcat.com/tag/geolocation/
yummypaint|7 years ago
smoyer|7 years ago
unknown|7 years ago
[deleted]
Kadin|7 years ago
That's an interesting design of swingset; not one I've seen before.
Unlike the bog-standard swingset in the US, which is typically all steel tube, that one looks like it has extruded (aluminum?) verticals and then a tubular horizontal weldment as the top piece. Further, the horizontal looks like it was hot-dip galvanized as a finished unit. The verticals were painted before assembly, not after, because of the bare-metal bolt heads. The fasteners are presumably stainless, since I don't see any rust marks below them. It's got an interesting bearing/bushing at the top of each chain, probably to make it not squeak; that strikes me as a fairly luxe feature.
I couldn't find any similar ones searching around online, although my Google searches don't turn up many European models at all (thanks, Google).
The photo doesn't go up enough to be sure, but it looks like the top bar is an unbroken one-piece section. That would make it pretty bulky and awkward to ship. (The vertical pieces look like they come apart into about 4 ft sections, which means they were likely palletized at one point. Maybe the extrusions are not done in the same place as the rest of the manufacturing..? That's certainly plausible.)
If someone recognized the design/model, I think that would probably be a significant clue towards the photo's location; at the very least, the manufacturer would probably have a fairly good idea of where they normally sell to.
Kadin|7 years ago
http://igra23.ru/katalog/karuseli-kacheli-balansiry/kacheli-...
It has the swept-bend tubular corner reinforcements, the polyethylene (or some other kind of plastic) panels on the upper corners, etc. The only difference I can see between the product photo and the Europol one is that, in the Europol photo, the top bar seems galvanized rather than painted. But that's the sort of thing that could easily change as a product is marketed.
It appears the company is out of Krasnodar (Краснода́р), located in southern Russia.
usr1106|7 years ago
gpm|7 years ago
[0] https://www.eibe.net/en/swing-kondor-51007201100.html?c=5010...
IntegrationDude|7 years ago
mattferderer|7 years ago
I think I would if I could trust that it was only being used for something like this & not commercial advertising type projects.
anotheryou|7 years ago
e.g. https://www.reddit.com/r/whatisthisthing/ works great.
pavel_lishin|7 years ago
14|7 years ago
anigbrowl|7 years ago
pvaldes|7 years ago
https://www.europol.europa.eu/sites/default/files/styles/eur...
over the green square, appears a whitish blur that could easily say Cicoarea in a stylised way (or maybe is just another picture)
gonzo41|7 years ago
pvaldes|7 years ago
https://www.europol.europa.eu/sites/default/files/styles/eur...
Robinia is a fully hardy and widespread species that can be found in almost all Europe and USA, USDA area 1a.
pvaldes|7 years ago
https://www.europol.europa.eu/sites/default/files/styles/eur...
pvaldes|7 years ago
https://www.europol.europa.eu/sites/default/files/styles/eur...
If is Fraxinus excelsior (probably) Europe. If Fraxinus pensylvannica: Eastern half of USA or Argentina.
bobowzki|7 years ago
howard941|7 years ago
http://dish.andrewsullivan.com/vfyw-contest/
JeanMarcS|7 years ago
Like « this picture seems to be located in this area/country » and then people from the area could have a look.
I’m pretty sure people would like to help.
7952|7 years ago
wickedsmile|7 years ago
Once AI is brought into equation, project executives put all efforts into removing Humans from the chain because AI is cheaper
See YouTube AI based moderation and infractions, it's too difficult and no where to go if AI slaps you
HNLurker2|7 years ago
LifeLiverTransp|7 years ago
ekianjo|7 years ago
unknown|7 years ago
[deleted]
drawinglibrary|7 years ago
[deleted]
Macuyiko|7 years ago
Given that Google actually has the data as well as the skills and computing power to help out Europol, I'd have hoped they'd be jumping at the opportunity to do so. At the least it would make for great PR, but perhaps they're afraid of the possible privacy issues and discussions as well (I can already see the headlines: "Google knows the location of any yard appearing in a photo!").
In any case, it's telling how humans are so good at this stuff and picking up on clues and patterns. It'll still take a while before machines are as good.
zenexer|7 years ago
Law enforcement and related organizations already use machine learning quite a bit, particularly for image enhancement. Yes, Google does have a lot of images of various locations from a top-down perspective, but that isn’t helpful for accurately determining a location from the images that Europol collects.
Also, keep in mind that Europol is only posting images here when all other means of determining location and identity have been exhausted. The images are usually indoors and don’t contain enough information for ML to be of any significant use. You might be able to narrow it down to a probably country based colors and design patterns, but that’s hardly sufficient and not solid enough evidence to actually do anything.
tomohawk|7 years ago