When photo/video evidence is presented/found….I assume someone has to watch/see to document who all is involved, what happened, prove it’s real, etc.
In cases where minors are involved, non-consent, etc…..who has to watch that? How do they keep it from getting out further?
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The investigators have to. A friend of mine did an internship with the county sheriff’s department in college, and she got assigned to a CP case and had to dump hard drives and phones full of evidence and go through it picture by picture. Terabytes of explicit images of kids.
I’ve worked in computer forensics, in most of the cases I’ve been aware of individuals are prosecuted for possession of this material vs. viewing it. There are very strict regulations regarding ‘chain of custody’ for evidence like this, when its not being actively reviewed its secured in an alarmed evidence locker with CCTV monitoring.
If the material is online, the Feds will still seize the systems hosting the content and review both the evidence and the billing/access logs to determine who to prosecute.
I remember shooting a news story about CSA material, and the guy we were interviewing was the one who had to sort through that kind of stuff. When he was off the record, he did not sound like he was in a good place. It definitely affected him. I know him to this day, and I hope he has found a way to compartmentalize that shit.
Pretty much every jurisdiction has a specific defence or exemption against unlawful possession of otherwise illegal items for people acting in the course of their duties, if not a general principle. This includes jurors, prosecutors, attorneys, judges, and government officials who classify and catalogue such material. Otherwise the business of criminal prosecutions would grind to a halt.
A person, and it’s a growing problem, because viewing that sort of material is damaging and traumatic. There have been strides in using AI to catalogue and identify “known” images or videos – it can screen through somebody’s hard drive and say “this jpg matches known existing images on file from previous crimes” and then a person doesn’t have to look at those images in order to make a case against the criminal.
But the economy of abuse material is built on participants being incentivized to constantly produce new and more extreme material. This excellent article talks about it more: [https://www.wired.com/story/tracers-in-the-dark-welcome-to-video-crypto-anonymity-myth/](https://www.wired.com/story/tracers-in-the-dark-welcome-to-video-crypto-anonymity-myth/). In order to access more material on the site, users could either pay in cryptocurrency… or create and upload new material of their own.
However, close examination of the illegal material is sometime necessary, unfortunately, as it can help to identify and rescue the children being exploited. There are law enforcement sites where images are posted of, like, an unusual jacket, carefully cropped out of a picture, in the hopes that someone will recognize it and help to narrow down the search for child who has been so carefully cropped out of the picture. I saw a TED talk of a researcher whose work in biometrics is currently focussed on identifying abusers by the scars and moles and freckles on their hands – often all that’s visible of them on camera.
But you’re correct that, very frequently, a person has to review it. And very often that person is traumatized, and regulations and support for it are all over the place, and it’s not ideal.
law enforcement broadly has a statutory exemption when it comes to evidence. Even more broadly than video evidence something as basic as possessing illegal drugs. If someone is caught with say meth it doesn’t instantly disappear it gets ‘bagged and tagged’ until it needs to be tested and it can even be brought into court.
Yes, seriously. It is even a way to bring a firearm or other weapon into court (it is noteworthy that there are extreme measures to make sure that the firearm is inoperable and the ammo MUST be kept completely separate). The controls on seized evidence is also that level of extreme. Every single person who touches it has to sign it in and sign it out. It seems silly but it ensures that someone can explain where it was at all times
I was on a jury for a CP possession trial. They were trying him on multiple counts and had to show an example video of different types of what he had. The prosecutors can’t just say “trust us, it was CP.” They tried to keep it as brief as possible and they showed us 3 clips a few seconds long each. It was horrible.
I knew a police officer in the UK that worked for a specialist unit dealing with CSAM. They said that reviewing evidence was the worst part of the job. They enjoyed **the knock**, though, but not the early mornings that it often entailed.
They could only do the job for a limited period of time, due to the traumatic nature of the material.
I believe at Google, there is a person/department that does this when they review reports. They’re only allowed to do it for 1 year and have therapy available to them after (or it’s mandatory, not sure). Somebody somewhere has to do it and hopefully there is support for them afterwards. I’d be dead inside.
I used to work as a detective. The detective has to confirm CSAM (child sexual abuse material) and then it will be shown to the jury, if necessary. Usually only the detective has to watch it. The detective is also looking to see if it’s possible to recognize the abuser, location, or other details.
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