Child Predation and IINI

Tools are passive, and morality free. A hammer can be used to build and create, yet the hammer is one of the most common weapons of assault and manslaughter in the US. Guns can defend lives or create them. The Internet is just a tool, and can be a powerful force for good, or for evil.

Along with the good that has come from the prevalence and ubiquity of the Internet, child predation and child pornography, aided by the Internet, have grown dramatically, and changed police work as a result.  In the decade ending 2009, child pornography in the United States has grown 330%.  According to the US Department of Justice, more than 9 million PCs in the United States had shared an image of child pornography in the year ending 10/2009, a figure that is alarming and revolting.  The FBI now handles more than 2500 new cases of child pornography and child sexual exploitation (CP/CSE) each year.  

"Before the Internet," reports U.S. Attorney Neil MacBride, "child pornography had been almost eradicated." (Oberst, 2011)  As of April 2012, the FBI has over 5600 CP/CSE cases pending, as the trend continues to increase.  Electronic communications and telecommunications (SMS/ "Sexting", social media, chat rooms, etc.) have now grown to be the primary conduit both of illicit images of children, and also as the primary means to lure children as victims.  Telecommunications has also served to connect a sub-culture of deviants with a predilection for child predation, serving to identify and validate that deviancy.  (FBI, 2013)

To combat child pornography and child predation, the FBI has created task forces and specialized training, and has installed a special prosecutor focusing on child exploitation in each federal district, as a part of "Project Safe Childhood".  The FBI has also created the national Innocent Images National Initiative (IINI) to provide centralized evidence collection and analysis. (Oberst, 2011)  As well, the FBI has IINI representatives in all 56 field offices, and collaborate with other federal, state and local law enforcement agencies in both undercover operations, enforcement and investigations focusing on combating CP/CSE.

The FBI now monitors:

• Peer-to-Peer (P2P) File sharing
• Internet Relay Chat (IRC) channels
• Websites hosting images of child pornography
• Bulletin Board Systems (BBS) and other online forums
• Internet news groups
• Online groups and organizations (e.g. Yahoo Groups)
• Social networking sites   (FBI,2013)

Since the inception of the IINI in 2001, it has lead to 11,000 arrests and 11,400 convictions. (Ibid)

The FBI has also been coordinating with the NSA (National Security Agency) and NRO (National Reconnaissance Office) to provide for image processing of the Internet (The NRA & NRO capture a snapshot of the entire Internet each day) in order to provide for correlation of images.  Like photocopiers that will put a tiny dot in the same location of all pages photocopied, digital cameras have irregularities in manufacture that provide for traces in images for pixels that are slightly off in the precisely same location in each image.  These are caused by currents in the acid bath, breezes in the clean room in which they are manufactured, adhesion issues with the silicon medium, etc.  Although these traces cannot be observed with the naked eye, they are readily apparent with forensic analysis, and are able to provide evidence of the make and model of the camera, as well as a digital "fingerprint" of the camera ("Bob", 2005).  

By comparing (attributed) vacation photos from Flickr and Facebook to (anonymous) images captured from child pornography & predation sites, law enforcement has new tools to be able to correlate the actual production of child pornography, cutting to the supply rather than the distribution. (Ibid)  This is just one way in which law enforcement is changing their use of technology to meet emergent needs for different policing to adapt to new aspects of criminality.

Why the boom in child pornography?  I would conjecture that it's a combination of:

1. the feeling of anonymity (even though rarely true on the Internet)
2. easy access without perception of personal risk (don't have to physically enter a seedy dive of blackmarket porn), just as VHS caused an explosive in mainstream porn, as it could be viewed at home rather than driving to an adult theater, 
3. validation and normative bias of a sub-culture enabled through extensive and direct interaction within chat rooms, forums, etc.
4. electronic copies can be created without exposing the distributors to physical constraints of duplication - just as .MP3 files caused an explosion in music distribution that was not possible with cassette tapes, records and CDs.

I think there may be a (very) small fraction which is accidental.  There was an infamous case of a child who worked in the adult industry while a minor, but was undetected until years later... can't remember the name.  I'm not excusing the crime, just noting that the age of consent is 16 in almost all states and countries, but child pornography is under 18, which leaves a 2-year gap where someone could be perceived as adult and with mature secondary sexual characteristics, and permitted by law to have sex with adults, but is still a minor.

Regrettably, I once had to investigate a child pornography case, and this deviant had thousands of movies on his (work) computer, and there was nothing accidental about it.  Some involved children under 3.  Horrible horrible horrible horrible.  I had trouble sleeping for 2 years and had to get counseling.  I'm haunted by the fact that my employer at the time would not go to the police, destroyed the evidence and fired the guy, setting a monster loose on the world.  (this was before the law changed, compelling disclosure)

__

FBI (2013). Overview and History: Online Child Pornography/Child Sexual Exploitation Investigations, The Federal Bureau of Investigation, Innocent Images. Retrieved 15-Feb-2013 from http://www.fbi.gov/stats-services/publications/innocent-images-1

Oberst, Lindsay. (2011). US Child Pornography Cases Rise Dramatically. Juvenile Justice Information Exchange, 12-Aug-2011. Retrieved 15-Feb-2013 from http://jjie.org/child-pornography-cases-rise-dramatically/20037

"Bob" (2009). As told to the author in the presentation of a peer-reviewed research paper by distinguished researchers, at the COSAC Information Security Conference 2005, Naas, Ireland.  Under Chatham House rule, I may not divulge who was present, while I may quote them anonymously.

Victim Precipitation & Columbine

I think that there are substantial influences of victim precipitation on many violent crimes, in particular those involving alcohol.  When people lower their inhibitions and effect their judgement via alcohol, they may be more inclined to pick fights, stagger into others provoking a response to an imagined attack, or aggressively pursue an undesired romantic interest, all of which can precipitate assault and other forms of violent crime.  

Victim precipitation has often been blamed for the Columbine school massacre, playing on the beliefs that the killers had been taunted, and were lashing back at the victims.  However, I do not think that there was any victim precipitation in the attack on Columbine.  This seems one of the myths of Columbine created in the media circus following the event.  

In the CNN Article, Debunking the Myths of Columbine, 10 Years Later (CNN, 2009 - http://www.cnn.com/2009/CRIME/04/20/columbine.myths/index.html?_s=PM:CRIME ), author Stephanie Chen discusses many of the myths believed by the general public about Columbine.  Among these are that the killers were part of the Trench Coat Mafia (they weren't), that they had been harrassed or teased before (no more than typical high schoolers), were loners (in fact, they were popular with a tight circle of friends), and targeted jocks and blacks (which they did not).  

Another myth of Columbine was that the students created a hit list of intended targets.  However, the list had several joke entries (e.g. Tiger Woods), and nobody on the "hit list" was injured or killed in the event.  Rather than being outcasts, Harris and Klebold were reportedly far more accepted than most of their peers. (Sidebar, Slate Magazine, author & pub. date unknown http://www.slate.com/sidebars/2004/04/sidebar_3.html ).  If anything, the victims of Columbine seems to have been selected because the target was a known, familiar ground to the killers, much as the poor frequently prey on the poor in their neighborhood.  

According to Dave Cullen, in an article published 4/20/2004 in Slate, The Depressive and the Psychopath: At last we know why the Columbine killers did it (http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/assessment/2004/04/the_depressive_and_the_psychopath.html), FBI psychiatrists and psychologists have categorized Klebold as a depressive, suicidal and disturbed young man who blamed himself for his problems.  Harris however, has been classified as a psychopath by the FBI, a cold, calculating and homicidal killer, and not just a depressed loner.  

According to Cullen, who spent years meticulously researching Columbine, the students were not seeking a school shooting at all, and mocked the notion of a school shooting.  Their intent, rather, was a massive detonation of bombs both inside and outside the school, while providing strafing fire to gun down any who escaped the carnage.  They planned on a body count to inflict the "largest number of deaths in U.S. history," intent on topping the murders committed by the Oklahoma City Bombing.  Precipitation does not seem to have been a factor in the aggregate in the Columbine shooting.  Only at the micro level, as individual students chose to run, cower, hide, and other minute decisions did those precipitate their personal victim status -- if they chose wrong, they were injured or killed. This doesn't seem, however, to be victim precipitation, as a crime was already in progress, and it was just their response to it.

Lies, Damn Lies and Crime Stats

I reviewed two articles designed to better illuminate sampling and coding bias in US crime statistics, and thought I'd share.  I had always quoted the FBI UCR as gospel, and am now shamed that I had been so ready to accept granular numbers at face value.  After all, doesn't 14,467 seem far more precise than 15k?

Read them for yourself, and see if you agree...

In their article "Reporting Crime to the Police, 1973-2005: a Multivariate Analysis of Long-Term Trends in the National Crime Survey (NCS) and National Crime Victimization Survey (NCVS)", Baumer & Lauritsen provide an illuminating overview of the difficulties in providing succinct statements about long-term crime trends in the United States.  The authors consulted diverse data sources to provide broad attribution to changes on reporting rates of crime, from improved police/community relations and trust, 911 network improvements and pervasive mobile communications to victimization efforts and reclassification of activity into crimes (e.g. date rape).  McGruff the Crime Dog, neighborhood watch programs and even America’s Most Wanted provided reminders to citizens that they should remain alert and to report crimes.  However, the authors likewise pointed out negative forces in the reporting of crime, including “anti-snitch” culture shifts, changes in organized crime and decreased belief in the general population that reported incidents would lead to prosecution.

I appreciated that the authors shared the coding information, and normalization assumptions they had made, this was vital to understanding sampling bias.  There were various interesting anomalies in coding that I noted where I would have liked further information about the choices made by the researchers – overall, “unknown” was glaringly missing, since offenders’ ages, race and gender are not always known, nor sometimes the victims’, so explanation of assumptions for where “unknown” was mapped would have been helpful.  

Likewise, additional demographic coding for analysis was not as granular as I would have expected. Both gender and household coding were binary, apparently not providing transsexual/ambiguous/undeclared/other gender identification to be represented in the information.  Marriage was also encoded as a binary value, not representing non-intimate cohabitation, intimate co-habitation or homosexual relationships in the analysis.  I found these curious omissions without commentary by the authors.  Likewise, the White/Black/Other racial coding was very coarse, though the footnote (6) made this fairly clear why this limitation was imposed.  Further exploration of more granular demographics might prove interesting.  I would have also liked to have understood why they coded a multiple-offender mixed gender incident as all-male, which seems rather odd.

The dramatic changes over the study in reporting rates for criminality were very surprising, as I had not thought that there would be much, if any, positive change.  The incidence of reported crime within the family was in the direction I had thought, but was a dramatic (and rather encouraging) indicator.  I must confess that my skills at reading raw statistical regression tables and drawing conclusions kept me from getting as much from this article as I would have liked, but overall it was very eye-opening nonetheless.  To truly understand crime, it seems this avenue of research must be encouraged and repeated to capture changes in reporting of crimes caused by broad societal changes.

The second article, “The Use of Official Records to Measure Crime and Delinquency” by Lofton and MacDowall, provides for a stark and shocking coverage of the UCR, and I was floored by the graph showing zero (0) report of criminal homicide for Florida for so many years.  What was heartening was the increase in additional sources of information, as well as the raw UCR data, which are made available for more informed evaluation.  The article also details the changes in crime reporting due to development and use of the National Incident Based Reporting System (NIBRS), which I had not understood.

It seems that, as the YouTube video “Crime Trends and Measurements” by gscottpleasants indicates, a blended use of reports likely leads to a more normalized view of crime trends in the US.  Analyzing the raw data as well can help identify inexplicable gaps in data.  By ensuring a blended view of the UCR, UCVS and other surveys, anomalous indicators could more likely be identified to avoid dramatic error.  Additionally, the data must be viewed with skepticism in other than very broad trending information.  Unless data are viewed with a critical and skeptical eye, errant inputs will create invalid conclusions.

Based on the articles, and a study of the UCR graphs, it seems that crime has been in a steady decline, as a general trend (though I feel conflicted reporting that, with the known errors in the UCR).  Based on the Baumer & Lauritsen article that shows a demonstrated increase in the likelihood that crimes will be reported, this gives credibility to the declining graph, since a flat crime rate with a year-over-year increase in reporting of crimes should create an elevated UCR.

I was not surprised by this information, because I had already done the UCR research (though I was ignorant of the various flaws until I read the other articles).  Because I am an advocate for Concealed Carry and self-defense, and have done extensive armchair analysis of crime statistics, I was already aware of the trending information.  I had also done several hours of analysis cross-correlating gun control information (e.g. Brady Campaign State ScoreCard cross-referenced with state-by-state violent crime statistics).  

Please don't mistake this for arrogance, my knowledge is proof that, "In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king", and my rumination is of suitable rigor for coffee shop discussions.  My research has not had the rigor of peer-reviewed research.  Because I have engaged hundreds in conversations on these issues, and largely find advocates for gun control to be ill-informed, I was aware that the crime statistics were broadly misunderstood.  However, I had ignored sampling error, bias, discretionary policing and politics in the formation of the UCR data.