A tip-off from Google about the contents of a Gmail account led to the arrest of a 41-year-old Texan for possession of child abuse material, police said last week.
Police said the search firm tipped off the US’ National Center for Missing and Exploited Children about material that it detected in an e-mail sent by John Henry Skillern, a registered sex offender from Houston.
“He was trying to get around getting caught; he was trying to keep it inside his e-mail,” detective David Nettles told local news channel KHOU 11. “I can’t see that information, I can’t see that photo, but Google can.”
Google would only say that “we don’t comment on individual accounts,” but the Guardian understands that the process is similar to the system that the company rolled out in 2008 to try and clear its search results of child abuse material.
Images are hashed, a process that creates a unique identifier (known as a hash) while rendering it impossible to recreate the initial image, and the hash is compared to a database of known child abuse images. The technology used by Google to hash the image was developed specifically to solve this problem.
The hashes are then compared with a database of known child sexual abuse images, and if they match, the image is passed on to the US center, or its British counterpart — the Internet Watch Foundation. At that point the first human — a trained specialist at one of the two organizations — sees the image and decides whether to alert the authorities.
Last year, Google expanded this system, partially in response to pressure from British Prime Minister David Cameron.
Providers do not tend to shout from the rooftops that they operate such programs, partly to avoid disclosing details that will allow criminals to abuse the system. However, it is also because privacy campaigners tend to criticize the companies for handing over private e-mails.
The American Civil Liberties Union’s Christopher Soghoian wrote in the Virginian Pilot that the ability to scan e-mails for child abuse images can easily be expanded to other ends.
“The impact of this system extends far beyond the company’s desire to assist in the discovery of this particularly horrible form of illegal content,” he wrote. “Such expanded surveillance can be performed, quite easily, if the government provides AOL with a list of additional hashes to add to the company’s database and then forces the company to detect the transmission of those other types of prohibited content.”
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