With the help of their 1.8 petaflop supercomputer, Jaguar, researchers at the in Tennessee are sifting through internet traffic in search of suspicions patterns that will lead police to the perpetrators of child pornography.
In standard police work, checking a suspect鈥檚 hard drive will show whether they have been downloading illegal content such as child pornography. But catching the criminals that produce such material in the first place is even more important, because they can often lead police to the children who are being abused. It is far from easy, since you can鈥檛 necessarily tell who took the illicit images stored on a hard drive.
The problem with policing child pornography online is that there is simply too much of it, says Grier Weeks, executive director of the . 鈥淲e could quadruple our law enforcement dedicated to this problem overnight, and they鈥檇 still be overwhelmed,鈥 he says.
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He approached the computer scientists at Oak Ridge in search of a solution, 鈥淭hey were genuinely stunned and moved by what they鈥檇 heard,鈥 he told New Scientist. 鈥淎nd within a week they were making a visit to the Knoxville 鈥.
Child porn
The lead investigator on the project at Oak Ridge, Robert Patton, has developed algorithms that analyse traffic, looking at the search terms people are using on peer-to-peer, file-sharing networks. Search terms that indicate someone is looking for child porn are flagged, and the algorithm watches to see how different IP addresses respond to the queries. In this way, the system points law enforcement agencies toward the computers that are posting new material on file-sharing networks.
鈥淔rom a law enforcement perspective, you have to make a critical decision, 鈥楬ow do I devote my resources to have the most impact?'鈥 Patton says. 鈥淎nd that鈥檚 where you really want to go after producers, because you鈥檙e going to get the impact there. We want to be able to say 鈥楬ey, of all of the data you鈥檙e looking at right now, here are a handful of IP addresses that you should investigate further.鈥
The project will run for a year and has been allocated 1 million processor hours on Jaguar. 鈥淭his is real science, there鈥檚 a real scientific challenge here,鈥 says Grier. 鈥淭his work is not just some charitable side project.鈥 For Patton, the program offers a more immediate return than traditional research projects: 鈥淔or me that鈥檚 the real reward. Hopefully, the work that I鈥檓 doing here will help save somebody鈥檚 life.鈥
