By: Hannah Kazemi, Staff Writer
Richard Frank, SFU researcher and associate professor for the School of Criminology, recently conducted a study to identify strategies to combat online child exploitation. The Peak sat down with Frank to learn more about his research and its implications.
Research into automating a process to combat online child exploitation started over a decade ago, in collaboration with a graduate student at the time. Frank described the method and process, indicating it involves using digital fingerprints of images given to them by the RCMP. “Once we download some of these images and fingerprint it and compare it to a database that the RCMP gave us, that is how we would identify a known child exploitation website,” Frank explained.
This process is automated so that it uses software to identify child exploitation websites, thus initiating a continuous loop of identifying websites. “The idea behind the paper is that these websites have links to each other. If a person is looking for child exploitation images, they would go to a website, look around, find a link [ . . . ] follow it into another website [and so on]. So they can discover multiple websites this way.”
The automation of the destruction of exploitative websites is simple: “We wanted to map this network out and identify websites which, if you were to remove it from the network, would cause the biggest disruption to the network. So an offender or person interested in this content wouldn’t be able to discover other websites.”
Frank told The Peak that through their research, they found online child exploitation is a much more severe problem than originally thought. He said they were “surprised by just how easily discoverable [child exploitation] was. But looking at statistics, a lot of statistics show that the problem is much more severe than the networks that we had built up.”
These networks continue to evolve; Frank said that over time, some websites are removed from the network “possibly by law enforcement, possibly by good samaritans. People who have the ability to hack into these websites will take them out, because no one likes that kind of content on the internet. So it is a fine target for a lot of ethical hackers.”
Frank said before starting this project, he approached the RCMP to work out the legal aspects of conducting this specific research and mapping online activity, and learned that the RCMP has also attempted to tackle this issue. However, due to how quickly the internet changes and the way websites pop up and disappear, Frank said the RCMP was “completely overwhelmed. Given the resources they have, they can only look after the worst of the worst of the worst offenders. So we wanted to see how we could help in that process.”
This study into combating online child exploitation is the predecessor to other research and work done by Frank; he has created a tool called The Dark Crawler. It is a data collection tool Frank developed in order to search for and identify both online child exploitation, and online extremist activity.
When asked about what’s next on the path to research methods of combating online child exploitation, Frank said he can’t do it on his own. “Much of my research is student-driven [ . . . ] If a student approached me saying, ‘I’m really interested in mapping out child exploitation networks, or try to identify other ways of combating this problem,’ I would happily take them on and continue this work. I can’t do it myself, unfortunately. So if help is available, I’m very happy to continue.”
For more information on The Dark Crawler project, visit their website.
