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Am I reading this correctly that the address where they found the child was where her mother’s boyfriend was living?

> "So we narrowed it down to [this] one address… and started the process of confirming who was living there through state records, driver's licence… information on schools," says Squire.

> The team realised that in the household with Lucy was her mother's boyfriend - a convicted sex offender.

There’s a lot of focus on Facebook in the comments here, but unless I’m missing something the strangest part about this story was that the child’s mother was dating a convicted sex offender and they had to go through all of this process to arrive at this? It’s impressive detective work with the brick expert identifying bricks and the sofa sellers gathering their customer list, but how did this connection not register earlier?

EDIT: As others have pointed out, the wording is confusing. They made these connections to the identity only after identifying the house

Sex offender registries are just registries. They only work if someone decides to actually do a query. It might prevent them from getting a childcare job, but it doesn't really prevent them from accessing children at all.

The registers are also massively bloated, some people get put on them for nothing more than public urination.

The only sex offenders who actually get regular checks that might identify this type of thing, are those on parole, or similar court ordered programs.

> the strangest part about this story was that the child’s mother was dating a convicted sex offender

70.6% of beaten children are beaten at the mother’s custody. Most often it turns out the choice of companion of the mother is inappropriate. While many see that as blaming the mother and it is a huge taboo in our society, it is such a huge humanitarian problem that it’s worth educating women better over that specific problem, and taking sanctions if necessary.

70.8% in the case of death. Source: CDC 2001-2006 if I remember. Incoming: Many ad-hominem about the source, it’s a problem that never gets addressed.

> an abused girl his team had named Lucy

> It was impossible to work out who, or where, Lucy was.

Lucy is a pseudonym. They were trying to get Facebook to tell them who the girl was through facial recognition. There’s no reason to expect a priori that the offender would be in any registry.

The registry did come up, as soon as they had enough information for it to be useful. They were looking for a specific child, starting just from the images that her abuser was sharing on the internet (in which he intentionally tried to hide identifying details).

The registry is just a big list of names and addresses.

There are a lot of women out there drawn to criminals of every kind. The primary demographic of true crime shows are women for a reason, not to mention the letters murderers and such receive. I would be curious to know why this is, and if it happens in other cultures too.
They couldn't ID the child initially.
I think the order went finding the house first and only then were they able to identify the victim (and consequently the offender)
Sorry, but the wording isn't confusing, I think you just didn't read it properly. All they knew was a girl, somewhere, was being abused. They didn't know who her mother was or, obviously, who was taking the pictures.
I’ve spent just a teeny bit of time helping international ICE investigators (not that one; internet child exploitation) postpone PTSD with technology. It seems like after two years of their job, they’re going to have a mental break. So postponing is all you can really do.

It’s disheartening how underfunded these agencies are compared to, what feels like at least, the severity of the crimes they’re up against.

These folks are heroes. This is one place AI has a lot of potential (but very little commercial value).

So do I read it correctly that good old detective work did the job, and that breaking e2e encryption and client side scanning wasn’t needed? Politicians tell me a different story.
periodically the various forces tackling CSAM release images which are ENTIRELY SFW, and are purely of a jersey, a backpack, a location, a tea setting, and ask people to tell them things: Was this available in Belgium? Did you ever see this in a second hand shop? Do you recognise the logo on this bag?

Information inside images is useful for this kind of struggle to identify victims of crime.

This wouldn't have helped here but there is a related field of research called hotel recognition. Many of these videos are filmed in hotels so being able to recognize if it was a Mariott or even better a non chain local hotel can be very helpful to investigators. They basically train CNNs that learn to pick up on the bathroom fixtures or kind of bedding used by different hotels. One researcher in particular has done a tone of work on this: https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=mNoB9SgAAAAJ&hl=en

I wonder if you could get the interior of every house from Zillow/realtor websites and then do something like this for every house in the country... Clearview for bedrooms?

This speaks volumes of the moral values of Facebook vs the brick industry.
> "And the woman on the phone was awesome. She was like, 'how can the brick industry help?'"

That is an epic sentence!

This is awesome - but they shouldn't have revealed the secret on how they caught them.. like 1000's of other offenders could land up making similar mistakes. It just makes sense to keep your mouth shut and keep on hunting.
>Flaming Alamos were not visible on the outside of any of the homes, because the properties were clad in other materials. But the team asked Harp to assess - by looking at their style and exterior - if these properties were likely to have been built during a period when Flaming Alamos had been on sale. "We would basically take a screenshot of that house or residence and shoot it over to John and say 'would this house have these bricks inside?'" says Squire.

Zillow and tax assessors will list the age\year built of any property.

You can do the same yourself here: https://www.europol.europa.eu/stopchildabuse
So, I had a friend. Had because he's dead. He did this work for a decade and a half and then couldn't deal with it anymore. In that time he put countless assholes behind bars. At some point he stopped responding to my emails so I called the unit and they were absolutely devastated, this guy was the backbone of their operation, the one with by far the most computer experience of all of them. RIP Ronald.

It is very hard to imagine what the life of someone on the frontline is like, the ones that are really battling online scum. So take that 'think of the children' thing and realize that there are people who really do think of the children and it is one of the hardest jobs on the planet.

Quote from TFA:

"The BBC asked Facebook why it couldn't use its facial recognition technology to assist the hunt for Lucy. It responded: "To protect user privacy, it's important that we follow the appropriate legal process, but we work to support law enforcement as much as we can."

So, privacy matters to FB when it is to protect the abusers of children. How low can you go...

A article this long just to blame facebook to not give away private data to a three letter organization.
> They contacted Facebook, which at the time dominated the social media landscape, asking for help scouring uploaded family photos - to see if Lucy was in any of them. But Facebook, despite having facial recognition technology, said it "did not have the tools" to help.

Willing to bet my life savings that they are able to do exactly this when the goal is to create shadow profiles or maximize some metric.

Human agents, for once, not AI agents.
On the one hand, this is a beautiful (but depressing) story about humans standing up for each other.

On the other hand, this is clearly propaganda from the BBC to push police state functionality on the UK population by pre-justifying it. "See what happens? Never mind the part about it taking six years. Let us see everything in your fucking lives, you twats."

I'm impressed by the people doing this job. How do you turn off at the end of the shift and go home to sleep, when you know an hour more of work could make a more immediate difference? How does work/life balance work in this profession?
Maybe it's just me, and I wouldn't have thought this a few years back, but my immediate reaction as I started reading this was "Oh look, somehow they got the fucking _BBC_ to run a DHS whitewashing feel good story. I wonder what's about to hit the media that they'd like buried?"
This is amazing ingenuity and collaboration.

I wonder if Rainbolt (or other GeoGuessrs) gets regular requests for consultation, or maybe he should if he is not already: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trevor_Rainbolt

Not sure how we can help such heros !! These are the people that make the world a better place !!
This is an old story about an old investigation. It is old news dredged up to try to win sympathy for DHS/ICE. It is propaganda resurrected to make DHS look useful.

They cherry-picked a story that they knew would win public sympathy since no one wants a child molester to run free. Lets show a time when an agent solved a case for an excellent outcome.

Pick a DHS/ICE story from this year and see what kind of dystopic shitshow you report on.

This is propaganda. Gullible people fall for this shit every day. Put some thought into the context before you swallow the turd.

Strange to think that right now, the people doing that work are not getting paid for it.
I wonder if the GeoGuesser guy has ever been reached out to by LE.
Very interesting account, but this article is also sounding like it’s for eliminating the thin layer of privacy that we have remaining.
Is there a way to volunteer for such investigations?
Great article. On HN though “dark web agent” sounds like some AI bot did the work. It was far more interesting the way they did it.
Related: A researcher for Meta, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram, warned executives at the tech giant that there may be upward of 500,000 cases of sexual exploitation of minors per day on the social media platforms.

https://www.foxbusiness.com/lifestyle/meta-researcher-warned...

Who needs the dark web when Meta exists and is protected by the US government?

Edit: downvotes? Lol

Another example of tiny details being used to catch sex offenders is this story about marks on people's hands: https://www.wired.com/story/sue-black-forensics-hand-marking... / https://archive.is/89vOJ

It turns out that, even if all you can see is the assailant's hands, that may be enough to identify them.

> The team realised that in the household with Lucy was her mother's boyfriend - a convicted sex offender.

Erm... Are they that clueless they didn't start from there?

Good thing the perp wasn't part of the Epstein class, otherwise they would have done all that work for nothing.

On a more serious note, there is a subreddit where police can post redacted pics of CSAM and they crowd source info on the background. I can't remember the name of it though.

They post godbolt style questions like "where is this beach/playground/parking lot", or ask what brand an object is. I don't know how much success they have had but it's a worthy cause and the more people who try, the higher their chances.

Just got done the doc they made. Long, disgusting, but informative/interesting from a tech/problem solving prospective. Not an easy watch tho. https://youtu.be/mNUku0jd4FA
first part of the article reads: Darkweb a encrypted part of the internet. Isn't darkweb just the part where bots don't index? is it realy encrypted?
Fricken love this story ...

And now I'm thinking who *wouldn't* want to volunteer to go all in on this kind of stuff once their main work winds down? (Facebook apparently).

... starts looking for dark web vigilante groups

Yet at the same time the status of Terabytes of abuse material seized from Epstein's properties is unknown because the abusers are rich guys protected by the president who is probably one of them. And law enforcement is actively helping to obstruct justice for the thousands of victims.

There's dozens or hundreds of abusers easily identifiable in there and so this hero story is just propaganda at this time.