Online Child Abuse Victims To Be Identified With New Cloud-Based Archive

A Cloud-Based Archive Could Help Online Child Abuse Victims
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Project Vic is a database of pictures against which those seized in new raids can be matched against to spot children who aren't already on the radar of authorities.

It is the work of US Department of Homeland Security and the International Centre for Missing and Exploited Children, but police forces in the US, UK, Canada, New Zealand and Australia are helping to test it.

The system was developed to overcome the huge duplication of work across the multiple agencies that dealt with child abuse which results in "petabytes" of data.

James Cole, a national programme manager at Homeland Security, told the BBC: "We have issues with deconflicting investigations and also big issues with the amount of data that we are seizing.

"The idea is to allow law enforcement to run data against hash sets that are immediately available through cloud services.

"They can interrogate that data in real time and know a lot of things about it very quickly."

Project Vic is being hailed as the "largest movement of its kind" to deal with identifying child abuse victims.

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