Finding one child

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MYRNA BROWN, HOST: Coming up next on The World and Everything in It: fighting child exploitation.

This story contains some very difficult subject matter that may not be suitable for children.

MARY REICHARD, HOST: President Donald Trump signed the Secure America Act yesterday, appropriating 70 billion dollars to fund the DHS, the Department of Homeland Security. 

The bill includes more than 108 million dollars specifically to combat child exploitation.

WORLD’s Mary Muncy has the story.

MARY MUNCY: Last month, Missouri Senator Josh Hawley made a floor speech telling how one DHS investigator tracked images to try to find a little girl.

SENATOR JOSH HAWLEY: They could see the the sick torture that she was being forced to endure. They could see the pain in her face, but they had no idea where she was.

The investigator eventually determined she was in the South, but that’s all he knew for years.

That type of story is all too common.

Last year, the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children’s tipline received 60 million files related to suspected child sexual exploitation.

The DHS’s Cyber Crimes Unit analyzes them and tries to find the children.

HAWLEY: Here's the only problem with that. There's only seven of them. That's right, there's seven forensic analysts, seven experts who can analyze these images.

Now, thanks to Hawley’s proposition, the DHS will hire another 200.

Jeff Tiegs is the founder of Skull Games, a non-profit that fights human trafficking. He says the move will help with finding the worst offenders.

JEFF TIEGS: I think what this bill is going to support more is the stuff that resides on the deep and dark web, and these closed forums that these pedophile networks have, and they communicate back and forth.

There are laws against accessing those sites and against viewing child sexual abuse material in general, so only government officials are able to investigate those cases.

Tiegs says if Skull Games touched it, he’d be under investigation as well.

TIEGS: The U.S., and in conjunction with the world, has built some pretty good flagging systems. We see a good amount of the abuse that's happening.

Skull Games works on the open source side of the internet… investigators send them a few child exploitation suspects a week that they want to find more information on. But that’s a fraction of the work that needs to be done.

TIEGS: But it's moving so fast, and they are leveraging every technological advantage they have as well.

And separating AI-generated images from real ones has brought new challenges.

Tiegs says the next investments will need to be in storage space and image sorting programs.

TIEGS: If you have 10,000 flags that have come in and those flags are going to show you what the IP address has downloaded, that all has to be stored in its own secure sector.

Prosecutors need that evidence to be pristine to build a case.

Tiegs says over the past few years, pornography has been trending younger and more deviant.

TIEGS: I can't define what pornography is, we know it when we see it, but I also know what degradation looks like, and humiliation, and violence. And unfortunately, pornography has been really intertwined with that, and you're seeing the same thing with... these internet crimes against children.

In the case Hawley described, the investigator eventually saw a picture with a playground in it and used it to identify where the child was.

JOSH HAWLEY: And after that, Homeland sent a team of investigators to start walking blocks.

They eventually found the girl. And now with more DHS staff the goal is to help even more children.

Reporting for WORLD, I’m Mary Muncy.

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