Hunting for sexual predators on the web
Waterloo company partners with Child Rescue Coalition
WATERLOO — The founder of Magnet Forensics and president of the Child Rescue Coalition crossed paths before in their work in law enforcement, reaching into the dark recesses of the internet to discover child predators.
Now Jad Saliba, founder and chief technology officer of the Waterloo-based company, and William Wiltse, president of the Child Rescue Coalitiion, have partnered again to integrate their technologies to better identify the bad guys out there and keep children safe from sexual exploitation.
The partnership was announced at the start of May and will use Magnet Forensics technology to integrate some of its digital investigation software with Child Rescue Coalition’s Child Protection systems to track predators, monitor their activities online, prevent potential abuse and eventually lead to successful prosecutions.
Magnet Forensics will also provide a multi-year donation to the coalition in support of the group’s technology that is used in all 50 U.S. states as well as more than 79 countries around the world. That system has tracked 54 million sex offenders around the world and aided in the arrest of 10,000 online predators and lead to the rescue of more than 2,300 abused children over the last four years.
“There is good that comes out of technology, and potential bad in providing a place for people who do those things to learn from others and it’s definitely given them a safe haven online,” said Saliba, a former Waterloo Region Police officer who developed digital forensic search tools to identify those perpetrators while on the job and launched his company in 2011 to improve the ability to find that digital evidence left behind. “This is one of the things that drove me to start the company and is one of the investigation types we do that we are most passionate about outside of our counterterrorism investigations.
“We saw this as an opportunity to work together and combine the two technologies we work on and build to make that fight (against child sexual abuse) even stronger and assist investigators to help them get to the truth, and help children that need to be rescued.”
Wiltse said the internet is borderless and they have helped save children around the world, leading law enforcement officials to break up sex abuse rings and bring abusers to justice.
“We try to gather those leads using every technological means possible and to get those leads into the right law enforcement officers hands in those 80 countries so that they can save kids and find the kids that are being abused,” said Wiltse. “Borders, to us, only mean to which investigator should we give this lead to.
With the developments in digital photography and the ability to share files and images, crimes happen all over the world. The key is to identifying where those images are coming from and tracking down the children in need of rescue. More than 90 per cent of the web is not controlled by traditional search engines, and this “dark web” is a breeding ground for all sorts of criminal activity.
“We police all the unowned areas of the internet,” said Wiltse. “These areas don’t have any corporate structure and they don’t have any feeling of responsibility to report criminal conduct on these networks, we try to identify when these networks are being used for illegal purposes and be the reporting agency for any criminal conduct on these networks.”
Saliba said the technologies intersect with the work that Magnet Forensics is doing, and their reach can extend to the devices they have in addition to the computer to the tablet and the smartphone, where people spend their most time online.
“It’s about recovering all the different traces of activity that have occurred on those devices and the communication, the places you’ve been and the things you’ve searched for,” said Saliba. “So when law enforcement has the legal authorization to go through those devices and seize them, their using our tools to recover all that different user activity.”
“This will help law enforcement identify children at risk and rescue them from bad situations.”
Wiltse said that works includes preventing potential abuse. He said the technology identified a sexual offender who was banned from technology who managed to find his way back online and was targeting a local girl in his community. They were able to give local law enforcement a heads up and prevent the abuse.
“This girl and her parents had absolutely no idea this bad guy had her in his sights,” said Wiltse. “We were able to prevent the abuse from occurring in the first place.”
Saliba said that is the driving force behind this new partnership — protecting kids.
“This is about getting kids out of bad situations and protecting them from people who would do them harm,” he said.
“It’s through these technologies that law enforcement is able to keep up with the changing landscape.”