Here's a story that is both cool and scary--frankly, we'd like to know more about this technology.
It seems that police in Virginia are using a new computer technology that can track an image to any computer. In this case, they are using it to tag images containing child pornography and then tracking it to computers where the images are stored.
Using this approach, police have identified 20,000 computers in Virginia with the illegal images, including 500 in Arlington. The child pornography capital of Virginia, however, is Herndon, a small town where more than 1000 computers are housing this trash!
Now, it's pretty cool that police can use this to track down child pornography--the technology alone should greatly diminish activity in this illicit sphere, at least until someone figures out a technological way around it (as surely they will).
[Police can't just go in and arrest anyone who owns such a computer--they need additional evidence and prosecutorial resources.]
But it's also pretty scary from a Big Brother standpoint. If police can track down child pornography to individual computers, think what else they can do. This is just a good reminder that for most people on the internet, you're anything but anonymous--all kinds of information is being tracked on you and stored in massive databases. The implications are pretty profound.
Just to start with, what if police published a list of the locations of all the computers they discovered in their search? Some would probably be at businesses (ask the IT person at any large business how many computers have downloaded porn (not usually child porn, though) and they'll roll their eyes and tell you it's most of them), others at homes or apartments with multiple occupants.
But then what about tracking something besides child pornography? We can just imagine what the FBI might be doing with this technology if you downloaded an image of Osama Bin Laden. Or maybe the Bush administration is tracking our downloading habits of more benign images.
While we ruminate on the privacy issues, however, we'll keep our kids out of Herndon.
5 comments:
There is something amiss with the police numbers.
They say 1,000 computers in Herndon have child porn on them.
That is 4% of the population of Herndon.
I wonder if these images can get on one's computer in error by visiting infected sites or by bad emails and unprotected computers.
Child porn people are sickos, but I just find it really hard to believe that 4% of the people in Herndon are this kind of creep. The overall numbers for Virginia indicate that only 1.3% of the population has child porn on their computers.
I agree the Herndon numbers look suspicious--could be some business where someone has downloaded to a bunch of computers.
Not sure where you get the Virginia percentage from--the Post article said 20,000 computers for Virginia, which has a population of 7.5 million, so that's something like .25% of the population. Of course, if you take adult males, it's larger.
Any way you look at it, however, it's still a lot of sickos.
I got the Virginia number from my poor memory! I didn't go back and look at the article and thought that the number was 100K for Virginia.
That makes Herndon even more of a statistical anomaly.
I’m a little troubled by this police practice too, but not necessarily because of privacy violations. With all the spider/data mining software floating around on the web, a lot of our computers wind up with many files on them that we don’t even know about. Try as I might, I never feel I can get all the spyware/malware completely removed from my machine, as no matter what programs I run, I often wind up with little artifacts popping up here and there.
Of course, I don’t know if anyone has set up spyware that shares child porn, but then again, if it gets to the point where police try to crack down on machines that have it, hackers will probably use it to oversaturate the computers in their area with it so they can hide.
That's an excellent point, Malice.
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