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Technology is evolving faster than ever before. Today, if you want to communicate with family and friends, share pictures with loved ones, browse on the internet, or upload a post on social media, it is second nature to just whip out a mobile device and do it all from the palm of your hand.

U nfortunately, for all their benefits, always- on, connected devices and networks have created channels for predators to exploit children and proliferate explicit material. Nearly every week, the media reports on yet another tragic victim of child sexual exploitation (CSE) and abuse. The number of photos and videos seized and reviewed annually is staggering. In a 2016 report by the US Department of Justice, The Na- tional Center for Mission & Exploited Children (NCMEC) estimated that more than 26 million sexual abuse images and videos were reviewed by their analysts in 2015 alone. That number con- tinues to climb exponentially each year, challeng- ing law enforcement agencies around the globe. “When I started in forensics, the majority of devices we seized were desktops and laptops,” said Det. Randy Kyburz , Certified Digital Forensic Examiner with the Seattle Police Internet Crimes Against Children Unit. “Years ago, we’d walk out of a crime scene with maybe one of each. Today, we often collect 30+ devices at a crime scene, with smart phones making up about 40 percent of total devices recovered.” Traditional digital forensic workflows com- bined with sentencing guidelines and the sheer volume of offenders has created an epidemic where child victims are often undetected and undiscovered, and the crimes committed against them are never investigated. The failure of this detection enables the continued access to, and abuse of, these children. Thanks to ubiquitous connectivity, offend- ers have virtually unlimited access to unsuspect- ing children and lurid content. An FBI investiga- tion of a single child pornography website hosted on Tor , the anonymous internet network, had approximately 200,000 registered users with 100,000 individuals accessing the site during a 12-day period¹. Individual offenders often pos- sess massive collections of terabytes or even pet- abytes of data on multiple devices. Until recently, when tens of thousands of images of child abuse material were seized by law enforcement, many of those photos or vid- eos were destined to be left on devices, in the cloud and in evidence lockers. However, the tide An Urgent Call to Action

has begun to turn, as innovative digital forensic tools now provide reliable ways to extract, parse and identify images and video of known and unknown victims. Companies focused on iden- tification, extraction and analysis of digital intel- ligence continue to invest significantly to unlock, access and analyze this data quickly and in a forensically sound manner. New analytics algo- rithms provide powerful options for correlating and analyzing files from various computer, social media, cloud, mobile, cell tower and other digital sources. Full integration with Project VIC , the Child Abuse Image Database (CAID) and other defined hash value databases significantly reduces manual analysis efforts, not to mention the psy- chological stress of reviewing sensitive material. Optimizing Shared Resources and Workflows The goal is steadfast: identify and save more exploited children – quickly - by putting the power back in the hands of those dedicated to protecting children around the world. Video analytics empowers forensics practitioners, in- vestigators and analysts to efficiently manage the growing volume of evidential data and reduce case cycle times. Today, all case stakeholders can access fo- rensic artifacts and collaborate in real time using the latest tools on the market. Unique machine learning algorithms accelerate time to evidence. The power of video analytics lies not only in the ability to correlate and review actionable insights across all data sources, but also to help quickly find evidence when investigators don’t know what they are looking for – what people are talking about, languages they are using, locations they’ve frequented, etc. Advances in video and image analytics in solutions available today deliver both critical triage capabilities at the scene and more in-depth investigational analysis in the lab. Specifically, these solutions provide the following benefits: Accelerate Time to Evidence with Advanced Machine Learning Once suspected CSE-related material is ob- tained through a forensic process, video analytics

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