Bill Gates answers detective's plea to stop child porn

A "really rotten day" at work in late January prompted a just-about-had-it Toronto police officer to e-mail a spontaneous plea to the world's richest man for help fighting child pornography.

"To be real honest, I didn't expect anything back. I didn't even save the e-mail," said Detective Sergeant Paul Gillespie, a 25-year veteran of the Toronto force.

But his effort paid off. Microsoft founder Bill Gates forwarded the e-mail to Microsoft Canada.

"Three weeks later, I got a call. They said, `We'd like to talk to you about your e-mail,'" Gillespie recalled.

Microsoft and the Toronto police, where Gillespie is in charge of the section dealing with child exploitation, are now developing software that will make it easier for police to investigate the dissemination of child pornography on the Internet. They hope to complete an initial version of the software in a month.

The software is designed to store and analyze copies of all the images police find, largely automating a job that consumes a huge amount of police labor.

"I just wondered if there was a possibility of designing ... software to assist some of our investigators," Gillespie said. "At least so they don't have to always go look at these awful images ... and have nightmares every night."

Microsoft Canada has already invested C$600,000 (US$450,000) in the software project, which got under way in February, and does not know what the final cost will be. The Toronto software, called the Child Exploitation Linkage Tracking System, will document every piece of information available on child pornography suspects and the victims.

The explosion in technology and the Internet have made the task of handling the exponential increase in child pornography almost impossible, police say.

"Several years ago, you might see 15 pictures, 20, 100 or 150 and a few videotapes. Now, we're to the point, on a typical seizure, we could see up to 10,000, 100,000, 500,000 images," Gillespie said.

And, he says, the pictures are getting harder to look at.

"Three or four years ago ... the majority [of victims] would be 10, 12, 14 [years old] -- not to say that's better child porn, it all just memorializes criminal acts of the most heinous nature -- but in the last couple of years, we've just seen such young children on regular seizures -- babies, two-, three-, four-year-olds."