Internet child exploitation officers struggle to keep up
Police say a pair of legal decisions is hindering their work in online child exploitation cases
Internet child exploitation investigators in Alberta are facing a Supreme Court double-whammy that could stall the start and potentially jeopardize the end of some investigations.
Concerns about timely access to basic Internet subscriber information needed to launch many investigations into potential suspects have lingered since the 2014 Spencer decision, a ruling intended to protect privacy and anonymity but which police argue is front-loading undue pressures.
Then the Supreme Court’s 2016 Jordan decision came down, putting a presumptive ceiling of 18 months on the length of a provincial court criminal case from charge to end of trial.
In an era of exponential growth and ubiquitous technology, investigators are further pushed to their limits by the sheer magnitude of images collected from home computers and digital devices that need to be categorized.
Police argue that as gigabyte hard drives make way for terabyte thumb drives capable of storing millions of child porn images or videos — each one needing to be categorized by an analyst for forensic reports — the length of time to process each case continues to climb.
LOGJAM
That is causing a logjam for those at the vanguard of trying to prevent contact sexual offences and stop the collection, production and dissemination of child pornography.
“It’s very difficult for us to get to the files before they time out or the evidence goes dry because of the time it takes to get to that file,” says Alberta Law Enforcement Response Teams’ northern Internet Child Exploitation Staff Sgt. Stephen Camp.
“We are in a fight not to lose files (because of the Jordan ruling) and it’s a real challenge for us ... I don’t think the Jordan decision took into account technology and forensic technicians.”
In the 2016-17 fiscal year, the Edmonton-based ICE unit, which covers an area from Red Deer to the province’s northern border, dealt with 501 files. Of those, 33 cases are currently before the courts and almost 240 are still active.
CARRYING THE LOAD
Not yet halfway through the year, the unit is already poised to topple the 2016 case load.
With between four and six investigators officially on the job at any one time — for the past seven months they have been down to just four — the number of case files coming across desks is growing faster than officers can close them.
From the day a warrant is issued to a forensic report being issued is currently about five months. It had been up to eight months when the ICE unit was down to four members. And, as the number of cases continues to spike, ICE no longer works on a “first in, first out” system.
Instead, Camp says, they are responding to the growing amount of research showing child porn collectors are at higher risk of becoming contact offenders and honing their attention on red-flag cases that could lead to child rescues.
“If we do 100 search warrants, I want those 100 to be child rescues,” Camp says.
Investigators are also now developing a sophisticated, empirical risk assessment tool based on the latest academic papers to help better prioritize each file.
But the fact remains, for almost all cases that come across Camp’s desk, the investigative jumping-off point is access to basic subscriber information.
GETTING BASIC INFORMATION ISN’T SO BASIC
There’s no such thing as a typical investigation when it comes to child exploitation.
Some cases come to police attention by accident; in one incident, an offender sent sexually explicit messages to someone they thought was their young victim but actually sent it to a woman selling birdhouses.
Others come from complaints by parents who have discovered their child is being targeted online by sexual predators.
A growing number of reports, however, come via mandatory reporting by technology and social media companies in the U.S. They are actively looking for child abuse material and report their findings to the National Centre for Missing and Exploited Children.
They and other international organizations charged with preventing child sexual exploitation report what they’ve found and send the IP address to Canada’s National Child Exploitation Coordination Centre which in turn shares the information with relevant ICE units around the country.
Those IP addresses are predominantly where investigations begin and where the challenges begin.
Prior to the 2014 Spencer decision, police submitted a Law Enforcement Request to an Internet Service Provider who, as a general rule, would hand over basic subscriber information (BSI) attached to the IP address within 48 hours.
That BSI included details like names and addresses and would allow officers to begin their investigation using a combination of open and closed source intelligence techniques.
The aim is to determine if the suspect is a red flag, i.e., do they have children, are they in a position of trust or authority, are they a former contact sex offender or are they a previous suspect in online sexual assault investigations?
Investigators must now draft a 10- to 20-page production order, submit it to a judge or justice of the peace to sign and then send it to the Internet service provider, a process that can take up to 30 days.
In an “emergency,” there are provisions to fast track that process, but that is reserved for the most heinous and egregious cases.
“It’s a problem for me because that could be 30 more days of child exploitation that could potentially happen … We want to move quicker than 30 days,” says Camp. “It’s really hampering and affecting victims out there for sure.”
PRIVACY CONCERNS
Privacy experts accept that the amount of red tape ICE investigators have to go through has increased, but they argue people should have a “reasonable expectation” to privacy and anonymity online.
Camp acknowledges that judicial oversight should be a requirement and suggested ICE units, because of the role in capturing child sexual predators, should be given a special exemption to the Spencer ruling.
Another alternative is to return to a simplified Law Enforcement Request, but to add a layer of oversight by requiring the signature of a judge or justice of the peace, but wouldn’t require the reams of paperwork that accompanies the warrant.
A cybercrime working group is currently mulling these options, says Camp.
But neither option sits well with lawyer and privacy advocate David Fraser, who notes that prior to the Spencer decision, BSI checks “happened completely in the shadows, completely beyond public judicial or administrative scrutiny.”
And while he is adamant privacy trumps police inconvenience in every case, another solution would be to increase resources to compensate for the increased workloads.
“They need to put more resources into more judges, they need to put more resources into justices of the peace and more resources into police officers,” he said.
“You don’t create shortcuts around civil rights because civil rights create inefficiencies. You put more resources into these sorts of things.”
You don’t create shortcuts around civil rights because civil rights create inefficiencies. You put more resources into these sorts of things.