Interpol is using AI to hunt down child predators online

The FBI may have scored a big win with operation Playpen, which helped dismantle a ring of TOR-based pedophiles and prosecute its members (thanks, Rule 41), but that was just one battle in the ongoing war against the sexual exploitation of children. That fight is now a bit easier for European law enforcement, which as debuted a new machine learning AI system that hunts for child porn on P2P networks. The system, known as iCOP (Identifying and Catching Originators in P2P Networks), works similarly to Microsoft's Photo DNA, wherein images of child porn are tagged with a digital signature after being collected in the course of an investigation. These signatures are then shared as a global database for law enforcement. This saves law enforcement the stomach-turning drudgery of manually checking the images against the database.