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Dena Temple Raston
From Recorded Future News and prx, this is Click Here. Hi, it's Dena. While the team at Click Here takes a little summer break, we decided to give you an episode of a new investigative podcast we love. It's called Arachnid Hunting the Web's Dog Darkest Secrets. And just as a quick warning, this episode deals with the issue of child exploitation and image based sexual abuse. And if you believe you're a victim of child exploitation, the national center for Missing and Exploited Children can help. You can call 1-800-843-5678. They have an online tip line at takeitdown n cmec.org or in Canada, reach out to Kids Help Phone. What if the worst thing that's ever happened to you played out countless times on anonymous computer screens all over the world. Every day, tens of millions of images of child sexual abuse circulate on global online platforms. And for decades, there's been a tech solution, something called PhotoDNA, which identifies and removes these kinds of images from the Internet. But it isn't being widely used. The podcast team at Arachnid Hunting the web's darkest Secrets took a closer look. Have a listen.
Sage
So the detective in charge of my case at the time asked if he could come over to the house and meet with my mom and I. I didn't know why he was coming over. I remember we met at the kitchen table and he seemed really nervous, which made me really nervous because I didn't know what was coming. And then he started to explain that they we're fairly certain that I was the child depicted in a series of videos of sexual abuse that they had been looking for and trying to locate for many years. And when he said that, I thought, no, there's no way that's me. And then he had some cleaned up images that just showed my face and he started to lay them out on the kitchen table and my heart just sank. Everything went cold. I almost passed out. Not only just knowing that it was true, that it was me in those videos and that other people have seen them, but also seeing those pictures. All of the memories came flooding back of those instances. Even if things were blurred out, I knew where I was and what was going on in those pictures.
Interviewer
The fear and the anxiety that you feel over these images that continue to be distributed and the shadows that it casts, will that ever be over for you? Do you see a point at which you will no longer think about that.
Sage
At this point point, unless really serious changes are made with the tech companies, things that are going on with The Internet and various governments. Unfortunately, I don't see it changing. I used to wish for that, and I used to really think that that was a possibility. But over these couple decades, I have just seen the problem continue. And so at this point, there isn't really evidence that this will at some point not be such an issue for me anymore.
Hani Farid
I started working on this problem in 2008, and I'm just on a daily basis, mystified by this, because for 20 years we have not been able to get our heads around the one problem that should be very, very, very easy to get your head around, which is children as young as a few years old being sexually assaulted and extorted and brutalized around the world. And we cannot, as a technology industry, as regulators, and as a public, get our head around that. What hope is there for anything else? Foreign.
Rob Cribb
I'm Rob Cribb and this is Arachnid. We're diving right into one of the hottest messes of the Internet. A global crisis created by an army of online predators hiding behind anonymity who create and share illegal images of children being sexually abused. The fight to stop this has turned survivors like Sage into activists willing to put aside their own demons and try to save those who remain exploited. Despite the global scope and the staggering human toll of this crime, it has largely remained off the public radar. There are some things we just don't want to talk about, and child sexual abuse appears to be one of them. None of this is new. There have been solutions around for decades. When networked computers first began giving global reach to this trade of child sex abuse imagery, big tech players saw it and they proactively sought help from some pretty smart people. People like Hani Farid. Right now he's on sabbatical from his role as a professor at Berkeley, the University of California. This is a guy who studied computer science and applied mathematics and got a PhD and he was named a lifetime fellow of the US National Academy of Inventors. You get the picture. But what's so important to this story is his specialization in image analysis. He's been called the father of digital Image Forensics, or PhotoDNA. So we visited with Hani to get his take on a problem that has devastated the lives of so many young people and adults. I flew down to Burlington, Vermont to meet up with Hanni.
Hani Farid
So this is not a First Amendment issue. This has never been a free speech issue. That's a big fat lie that he and Musk have been telling for years and you shouldn't buy that story. Have we started. Okay, okay.
Rob Cribb
He's not your stuffy professor cliche hiding in an ivory tower. In a couple of minutes, you're immersed in a straight shooting chat in which he names names, points fingers, and effortlessly calls out bullshit.
Hani Farid
So it's 2008, I'm a professor at Dartmouth College before I moved to Berkeley, and I get a phone call from a guy at Microsoft, cold call, saying, my name is Tim Cranton. I work for the legal department at Microsoft.
Interviewer
What's the name of that guy?
Hani Farid
Tim Cranton. C R A N T O N. Where is he? He, I think, just recently retired from Microsoft.
Tim Cranton
Yeah, so I was leading a group of kind of legal specialists and technologists that were trying to address cybercrime issues.
Interviewer
So he caught up with Tim Cranton.
Rob Cribb
At his home in Seattle, Washington, in that role.
Tim Cranton
I was actively working with the national center for Missing and Exploited Children, and they had brought forward this challeng because they had these known images that were all in what they called a hash database. So we were, you know, trying to figure out how Microsoft at that time could contribute to addressing cybercrime and especially child safety issues online.
Hani Farid
And he said, for five years now, we have been trying to tackle this problem of child sexual abuse, and I'm calling you to see if you can help. And I said, why are you calling me? He said, oh, I read an article in the New York Times that you do work in digital forensics.
Tim Cranton
So it was a cold call. We just, I just, you know, read this article and then we set up a call and I got out in and, you know, just explained the challenges that we were facing and why I thought that maybe he might be able to help and asked him if he could explain more about, you know, the forensic analysis that he did. And, you know, kind of like trying to figure out, is there a way that we could work together to address this particular issue to use your expertise. I was, you know, it was just kind of like, I hope this works type of thing.
Interviewer
It's like, we don't know what else to do.
Tim Cranton
And, you know, he was receptive, but also I think he was probably a little bit skeptical at the time.
Hani Farid
This is how desperate these guys were.
Tim Cranton
That's like literally cold.
Hani Farid
Calling somebody he had read about in the New York Times. Because I had been working in the general space of digital forensics, which had nothing to do with child sexual abuse. And I remember thinking, I know nothing about this problem. And he just said, can you come to D.C. in a few weeks and meet with us? And I thought, all right, I mean, maybe I can be helpful. But I didn't think I could. But I'll go to D.C. for a day.
Interviewer
So you'd done no work on child sex at all?
Hani Farid
Nothing. I was just an expert on image processing, image analysis, and digital forensics. And again, this is how desperate they were. Five years, by the way, all the big tech companies. And I went to D.C. and I sat in a room with a bunch of the then giants of the technology sector. And first of all, I had no idea what was going on in the world. I felt like an idiot that this problem had existed for now decades, where the average age of a child involved in child sexual abuse material was 12. The acts were getting more violent, the kids were getting younger. I had no idea. I had no idea of the volume of content that was being generated and distributed online. And Microsoft and some of these other companies were tasked with, well, how do we tackle this problem?
Interviewer
When this all came to your attention, you started looking at it. I'm just wondering what your impressions were. This is a dark world. This is disturbing material for sure for anyone to look at. You're a lawyer at Microsoft. Suddenly you're brought into this world. Did you. How deeply did you enter into it?
Tim Cranton
I've never seen the images, but I found the whole marketplace to be horrifying. And really, I became very committed to the child safety issues on the team and always made sure that we were prioritizing those. And then I, you know, we spent a lot of time with the national center for Missing and Exploited Children, and then I eventually joined the International center for Missing and Exploited Children. So I was the Microsoft representative on the board there. So I would say, you know, for me, I became very passionate about the issue. And there were several people on our team who also really felt it was important that we, you know, take steps to address this proactively.
Hani Farid
And what I loved about these guys is they were unlike the other folks from the tech industry, they actually really wanted to solve the problem. And they pushed Microsoft hard, they pushed the other technology leaders hard. And they could, because they were Microsoft. They were at the time, they were the big dog, right? I mean, this is 2008 where, you know, Google wasn't Google, Facebook wasn't Facebook, and they were real leaders in this space.
Rob Cribb
It's hard to imagine that kind of big tech activism on child sex abuse imagery in the contemporary context. Consider what we heard from Mark Zuckerberg's recent testimony before the US Senate. Some of the tech CEOs had to be issued subpoenas compelling them to show up for that hearing, their corporate lawyers tried to keep them off the hot seat. But two decades ago, before Google was a verb, tech company bigwigs invited Hani to Washington to roll up his sleeves and tackle the problem together.
Hani Farid
And at the end of the day, Tim or somebody asked me, what do you think, Professor Fareed? And I said, because I'd spent the day listening to these guys, I said, just out of curiosity, how many people in the room was a lawyer? And almost all the hands went up. And I said, let me see if I get this straight. You guys are trying to tackle a technical problem and you send a bunch of lawyers to talk about it. This is absolutely how you don't solve a problem. You guys need more engineers in the room. And I sat down with the folks with Microsoft afterwards, and I said, look, guys, you're trying to solve the wrong problem. What they were trying to do is say, look, people are uploading millions, billions of images, and we need to determine if there's a child in the image, if the image is sexually explicit, and if the child is underage. And this is in 2008, before this AI revolution. And there's just no way you're going to solve that problem at that scale. It was just the wrong problem. And I'd been listening to what a lot of people were saying, and one of the things that really struck me was somebody said that the exact same pieces of content keep getting distributed year after year, decade after decades. I thought, well, that's interesting. First of all, it sort of makes sense. And second of all, well, I don't actually have to find the new stuff. I can just find the old stuff. And that should be an easier problem because if you give me an image and say, hey, look for this image being uploaded, that's a very different problem. Somebody has already told me it is illegal, it is child sexual abuse material. And so what I said to the Microsoft guy said, we should solve this problem, and then we'll solve the next problem, and then we'll solve the next problem. But this one is the right way to start because it's more tractable. And also the other thing I learned is people don't distribute one image or two image. They distribute thousands of images. And if they have just one that I've seen before, I get 999 for free. Just got to find the one bad apple. You don't have to find all the other ones. And they like this idea. And I went back to Dartmouth and I started working with this is how it works, by the way. It was me and one Microsoft engineer and like 12 lawyers. And we just started thinking about what would the technical solution look like to hit certain demands in terms of how long would it take to analyze an image, what would the accuracy be, what would be the false alarm rate. And within nine months we had a pretty good working prototype. We were starting to see some really promising results. And within a year, Microsoft released it in their then cloud. And it just worked. It was, we didn't. I honestly, I didn't expect it to actually work. I thought, okay, this will be version one. We'll figure out what's not working and we'll go back and refine it. And it just started working.
Interviewer
This is photo DNA.
Hani Farid
This is photo DNA. And today that technology is still operating on most of the large platforms. And no kidding, it was two of us and a bunch of lawyers.
Interviewer
And so what did this look like? Is it a lab or something to walk me through what, what ended up happening. He and one of your Microsoft colleagues end up in a lab for like a year.
Tim Cranton
The process took like a year. But it's not really in a lab because it's, I mean, it really is an algorithm, right? So you take known images and you apply a mathematical algorithm to reduce that image down to a series of numbers and letters. That's known as the hash, right? And so then if you take another image and you analyze it and then you compare it against the hash value that you see from the known image, then you have a match. So essentially it was in a lab as much as needing to get images to validate the accuracy and then testing the results as it came out. But the beauty of it was that when, when, once you validate the tool, then you do not need to actually view the image to feel confident that you found one of these images.
Interviewer
So it takes a year. In the end, they come out with what we now call photo DNA, which is essentially code. Yeah, it's code.
Tim Cranton
Yeah, yeah. And then you create a hash database, right? So then initially it was the national center for Missing and Exploited Children were sharing known images and then using PhotoDNA to create a hash database. So that then once you create a hash database, you don't have to actually circulate the images, you just have the hash database shared with trusted people. That, that is just a list of numbers and hash values. And, and then we started, you know, working globally to get a larger set of images. But we wanted to be really careful that the images were clearly child exploitation images and the tool was such that you could turn up the precision so that there weren't false positives, but you could also turn it down. Right. So we just turn it up and say we don't want any false positives. And so then we had a report and we were working at that time across the industry. So at that time it was, you know, AOL was very active and Yahoo and Google was also active. And so we were sharing those results with them because we were giving away the tool. It wasn't a competitive technology. It was a solution that we wanted to be widely adopted.
Interviewer
How'd you feel about it when you saw the final product?
Tim Cranton
I mean, I think it's probably one of the, you know, greatest achievements of, of the DCU team. And then, you know, once we started sharing it with law enforcement, you'd hear back success stories of saved exploited kids. And it was, it was, there was nothing that could be more rewarding. And it always be, you know, it's such a huge problem with making a difference in one kid's life. And it was then at some point it's really hundreds of kids that are getting saved. And that was just amazing.
Interviewer
Where does PhotoDNA stand? When you think about your career, your Legacy, where does PhotoDNA stand?
Hani Farid
I think there's one thing at the top of my, if I think of my 25 year career as academic, there's one thing photo DNA and there's really nothing else. There's nothing that even comes close, honestly. Like, we've done a lot of cool things, we've published cool papers, we've discovered cool things. I've trained amazing students, I've taught students, but there's nothing in slots 2, 3, 4 and 5. There's nothing. And here's why. First of all, we took a bite out of a really nasty problem and we did it at scale. Right. This is something that got worldwide deployment, which you don't really get to do in your career, normally speaking. Right. And it was honestly what I love, I love telling this story to students because you tend to think that if you're going to tackle a problem like this, at a scale like this, you need 100 people. You didn't. You need three people who were committed and wouldn't let it go year in and year out. Like we slogged away at this for years and that's how change happens. A small group of incredibly committed people who won't let something go. That's how change happens.
Dena Temple Raston
This is. Click here and you've been listening to an episode from Arachnid Hunting the Web's Darkest Secrets we'll be right back.
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Dena Temple Raston
You're listening to Click here. I'm Dina Temple Roston. Today we're sharing an episode from Arachnid, hunting the web's darkest secrets. Take a listen.
Rob Cribb
Consider that this is a problem that has already been solved, so you might assume there's a happy ending here. You'd be wrong. Illegal child sexual abuse material is spreading at a rate like never before and some of the most sought after images are those depicting crimes that happened decades ago but continue to devastate the lives of their victims today through constant daily downloads. Think for a moment about Sage. Photodna should have rescued her from ongoing exploitation many years ago. It didn't.
Sage
So it starts when I was in elementary school. There was a family member who groomed me over some time and then eventually started molesting me and that escalated to full on rape. That was on a pretty regular basis. This person did expose me to CSAM as part of the grooming process and would use the CSAM to show me the different things that they wanted me to do. Eventually they also started photographing me and videoing the sexual abuse.
Interviewer
What were the ages that you were abused?
Sage
I remember molestation as early as age 5. However, the majority of the abuse I believe occurred between age 8 or 9 and age 12. And of course I found out later that they were sharing with peers in a network that they were part of. Another thing I Didn't know at the time was that they were taking requests from people in their network of things to do in those videos involving me. And so that went on for a few years, and it was really, really hard to carry that secret with me through those years of what was going on. Eventually, I did end up disclosing when I was an older teenager, after the abuse had come to an end, and after I disclosed, I was able to find out through law enforcement about how those videos had been spread on the Internet. And that day was one of the hardest days of my life. I was filled with so much shame and fear and grief. And in my very late teens and early adulthood, I started to experience some stalking behavior from people who had seen these videos and been a fan of these series of videos online. And it was really shocking. There were things that happened over social media where these people tried to reach out to friends and family of mine and get information about me, what I was up to at that point in my life, and find out where I.
Tim Cranton
Was.
Sage
At that point. My original abuser had gone to prison, and I was thinking, you know, I was safe at that point because that person was gone and out of my life and couldn't hurt me anymore. And then this started up with the stalking, and it really helped me realize that this was a much bigger issue in my life than I had previously conceptualized. It even turned out that a person who I went to college with shared some information about me in one of these pedophile forums. And so for a few years there, I just lived in a lot of fear about this issue. It was difficult to leave the house. It was difficult to have relationships and let people in because I felt like I had to hide myself. I had to hide this experience and the secret. And again, they weren't really helping professionals who knew how to help with the mental health issues that were directly related to the spread of the images and the stalking.
Interviewer
One of the deep regrets, I think of many, is the fact that this tool has not been adopted. It is not being actively used at anywhere close to the capacity that it might be.
Tim Cranton
What's your theory?
Interviewer
What's your hypothesis on the paltry levels of adoption and use?
Tim Cranton
Yeah, I think. I mean, I feel like there's been a lot of progress, but at the same time, keeping pace with the scope of the problem. So you falling farther and farther behind and being, you know, unable to really extend the types of partnerships that created PhotoDNA has become more and more difficult. Everything has become quite polarized in terms of finding blame with with big tech and, you know, which. There's certainly an accountability that needs to be placed forward, but there's no incentive anymore for big tech to, to try to make a difference. The way the laws have developed is that, you know, technology companies actually become more liable if they proactively address issues. And so I feel like if there could be kind of a more of a coming together and looking and saying, like, all right, this is a problem that we all agree needs to be addressed and the problem comes from technology. So the solution has to come from technology. And let's try to figure out how to continue to come up with tools like this that can address these issues. And I, I think everything's become just much more polarized. And then you have the complications of, you know, people being concerned about content moderation, as they call it more broadly, and the implications on free speech. And I think the lines have blurred around that and that it just. The incentives aren't the same as they used to be to really solve the issue.
Hani Farid
Here's how the narrative goes. There's no problem. Whatever you're talking about, terrorism, child abuse, if it doesn't exist, exist, you're wrong. Okay, there's evidence that there's a problem out there. We will agree there's a problem. It's not as big as you think it is. Okay, step three, okay, Problem's pretty big. There is no technological way of solving this problem. Even if we wanted to, we can't do it. That's step four. And then step five is, hey, here's some free technology that you can use. I said, well, we can't use that because we care so much about privacy or fill in some other lame ass. Excuse me. It's a moving target. The bottom line is they don't want to do it. They don't want to create the liability. They don't want to be responsible. I just don't think they care. There's no money to be made. I think it's really, this is what it comes down to. There's either money to be lost or there's no money to be made, or there's nothing in it for them and they have no sense of a moral compass or this is just the right thing to do. So it's greed, unadulterated greed, or indifference or both.
Interviewer
How many people work here?
Leanna McDonald
I think right now we're roughly 85 to 90 people.
Interviewer
So this building that we're in here, this is adjacent to the main building. When I first started coming here, you weren't even in Here, this didn't exist.
Hani Farid
No.
Rob Cribb
It's not easy to describe a woman like Leanna McDonald's, Donald. I've known her now for about a decade. She's fierce and smart and from the very beginning of her career, she has focused on one thing, protecting kids. In her late 20s, she saw an ad to be the director of Child Find Manitoba. She got the job, which eventually morphed into running the Canadian center for Child Protection. It's a small but mighty non profit that now has a vast global network and has grown muscle and earned international respect.
Leanna McDonald
Primarily over the last five years. We've really grown as an organization, so that's why you see so many more people.
Interviewer
So this is a new wing, essentially. So you named boardrooms here. We've been sitting in this one, the Holly Room. Picture of a young girl, looks like she's about 10, 12 years old. Who's she?
Leanna McDonald
Holly Jones. So Holly Jones was a young girl out of the Toronto area, out of Ontario, who was tragically abducted and then murdered by an individual. And so the legacy of this organization is rooted in, in missing and abducted children. So at the very, you know, when we moved into this space and into the other building, we made a very conscious decision to pay tribute to the memories so that these children would never be forgotten. So it actually anchors the team. And when we have visitors or even families or survivors coming in, they understand the importance, importance of this legacy and they understand that as an organization we never forget why every single day we come to work.
Interviewer
I remember that case. I remember that was a huge national scandal, her death, certainly in Ontario. I remember it very clearly. And one of the darkest elements of that story was the abuser. He was, as I recall, a consumer of child pornographic material. And the police had identified the fact that he viewed it prior to committing hands on abuse.
Leanna McDonald
Yeah, this is a very important point. You know, at the time when all of this unfolded, there were those views of people saying, you know what, it's only pictures. People are just viewing it, you know, it's not the same. It was the first time we actually had a case that with evidence demonstrated that in fact this offender had been just viewing child sexual abuse material just prior to abducting, assaulting and murdering her. And so it was really important when we started to examine the gaps in criminal law, when we started to look at the connection and the harm done by the availability of child sexual abuse material.
Interviewer
So for the past obviously four days we've been listening to horror stories, horror stories and following your team, doing its best to harness the tsunami of material and to protect these people. It does feel like an overwhelming task for a little charity in Winnipeg, Manitoba, to deal with. That's certainly how it feels from our lens. Does it feel overwhelming to you?
Leanna McDonald
Without question, it feels overwhelming. I think that, you know, we all get up every day and we are working hard. We have the most amazing people who do their work, the work that we do here. But it's absolutely mind blowing that we are sitting and living in this reality that should not be.
Interviewer
Who should be helping you?
Leanna McDonald
I think first there needs to be a reckoning. There needs to be an acknowledgment of what has happened. And I now, every time I am in front of survivors or victims for the first time or when I see them, I first and foremost apologize and say, I am so sorry. We have failed you and you should not be here. So it is sort of like that. The reparation is so far away right now, and where we need to start is actually acknowledging what has gone terribly wrong. And so when I think and when we speak and when we bring people together, it is really about accountability. When we have new technologies evolving by the weak that have no guardrails or safety nets around children, we are allowing children to play in spaces with adults because we have no way to identify their age. The stories, the gaps, the problems are today endless.
Interviewer
Where do you focus your anger?
Leanna McDonald
Oh, there's. There's a couple parts and places to answer that question. On one, I would say the offender community just I. They just. The outrage I feel, there are no words. What I have witnessed adults can do to children. There really are monsters among us. And I see that every single day. And it terrifies me. Humans can do the worst things imaginable. And when you think of the most vulnerable, vulnerable people that we have so much hope when they come into this world, when we watch some people wanting to shred the souls of small people, what does somebody say? On the other hand, I look at big tech and the billions of dollars that are being made and all the excuses that are laid out with no care. They have justified all past actions. They kick the can down the road and find all the right ways to justify what they do. We have been asking them to do the right thing for 20 years. In terms of tech, I'm not asking anymore. I and my organization have pivoted to focus on the real actors, like governments, who have an obligation in that social contract to take care of its citizens. And so it is going to be the hard way that we are going to find our way out. In the interim, we're going to lose more children.
Rob Cribb
When a force of nature like Leanna McDonald runs up against an intractable challenge, she gets bold. In this case, she unleashes her team on a very ambitious idea inspired by some simple questions. Why are we waiting for kids to call a helpline to tell us they're in trouble? What if we went looking for the problem and those behind it proactively? What if we could shut them down before they ruined lives? Could that even be done?
Leanna McDonald
What we've now watched unfold is the cesspool of the Internet. So now we've seen the failures of removal of this material and how it has allowed the explosion of the material. The anonymity has provided cover for the offender community to share personal information of the victims and survivors. And so we start to do things on our end to help some of our survivors be able to manage, meaning that their safety, looking at ways that we can help with getting their horrific images removed. And we create Project Arachnid.
Arachnid Team
So these are the real time sort of rolling numbers of Arachnid. The, the top number there is the, the total URLs analyzed. So web pages that Arachnid has crawled. So we're in the, I guess that's 5.3 billion web pages to date since inception. And then the number below that is the total images that have been sent through arachmed, which is 169 billion images. About 14 million have been double vetted by analysts as child sexual abuse material.
Rob Cribb
Coming up next time, how a small team in Winnipeg takes the power of photodna and creates Arachnid, the mothership of web crawler.
Dena Temple Raston
This is. Click here and you've been listening to an episode from Arachnid Hunting the web's darkest secrets from TVO Podcasts, the Investigative Journalism Bureau, the Toronto Star and Pitt's Gloria Productions. This six part podcast series follows the survivor's long shot fight against the most powerful companies in the world. You can listen to the rest of Arachnid wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Dena Temple Raston. Click here. We'll be back on Friday with an encore episode of Mic Drop.
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Introducing "Arachnid: Hunting the Web’s Darkest Secrets"
Podcast: Click Here
Host: Dena Temple Raston
Release Date: July 29, 2025
Episode: Introducing "Arachnid: Hunting the Web’s Darkest Secrets"
In this compelling episode of Click Here, Dena Temple Raston presents an in-depth introduction to the investigative podcast series Arachnid: Hunting the Web’s Darkest Secrets. The focus is on the pervasive issue of child exploitation and image-based sexual abuse online, highlighting both the technological solutions developed to combat this crisis and the ongoing challenges in their implementation.
The episode opens with a deeply personal and harrowing account from Sage, a survivor of child sexual abuse. Sage recounts the traumatic revelation of being identified in illicit online videos, a moment that reignited painful memories and underscored the relentless nature of digital exploitation.
Sage (00:02 - 03:33):
"I didn’t know why he was coming over... when he said that, I thought, no, there's no way that's me... my heart just sank." (02:48)
Sage details the ongoing distribution of abusive images and the psychological toll it has taken, emphasizing the emotional scars that persist despite the passage of time.
The narrative shifts to Hani Farid, a professor at Berkeley and a pioneer in digital image forensics. Hani explains the inception and development of PhotoDNA, a technology designed to identify and remove child sexual abuse material (CSAM) from the internet.
Hani Farid (04:13 - 07:16):
"Children as young as a few years old being sexually assaulted and extorted and brutalized around the world... We cannot, as a technology industry, as regulators, and as a public get our heads around that." (04:13)
Hani describes the initial collaboration with Microsoft’s Tim Cranton, outlining the challenges faced and the determination required to address such a complex problem.
Hani Farid and Tim Cranton recount the collaborative efforts to create PhotoDNA, a tool that generates unique hash values for known abusive images, enabling their detection without the need to circulate the actual content.
Hani Farid (07:37 - 10:24):
"You guys are trying to tackle a technical problem and you send a bunch of lawyers to talk about it. This is absolutely how you don't solve a problem." (13:35)
"We should solve this problem, and then we'll solve the next problem, and then we'll solve the next problem." (14:20)
The development process is highlighted as a remarkable achievement achieved by a small, dedicated team working tirelessly over less than a year to produce an effective solution.
PhotoDNA's deployment marked a significant advancement in combating online child exploitation. The technology has been widely adopted across major platforms, significantly aiding law enforcement in identifying and removing abusive content.
Tim Cranton (17:37 - 20:08):
"This is probably one of the greatest achievements of the DCU team... there was nothing that could be more rewarding." (19:13)
"We saved exploited kids. And that was just amazing." (19:55)
Hani Farid reflects on the profound impact of PhotoDNA, considering it the pinnacle of his 25-year academic career due to its global deployment and tangible benefits in saving lives.
Despite the success of PhotoDNA, its adoption has been limited, a point of significant regret for the creators. The episode delves into the reasons behind the slow uptake, including increased polarization, shifting incentives for tech companies, and the complexities surrounding content moderation and free speech.
Tim Cranton (27:44 - 29:38):
"If there could be more of a coming together and looking and saying, like, all right, this is a problem that we all agree needs to be addressed..." (27:37)
"There's nothing in it for them and they have no sense of a moral compass." (30:17)
Hani Farid criticizes the tech industry for prioritizing profit over ethical responsibilities, highlighting a lack of motivation among big tech companies to fully implement solutions like PhotoDNA.
The episode introduces Leanna McDonald, a passionate advocate for child protection, who leads a non-profit organization dedicated to combating online child exploitation. Under her leadership, the organization has grown significantly and launched Project Arachnid, an ambitious initiative aimed at proactively identifying and shutting down sources of abusive material.
Leanna McDonald (34:57 - 38:39):
"It feels overwhelming... we are sitting and living in this reality that should not be." (34:57)
"Humans can do the worst things imaginable... and big tech has the billions of dollars that are being made and all the excuses laid out with no care." (36:42)
Leanna emphasizes the critical need for accountability and technological innovation to protect vulnerable children, expressing frustration with the current state of inaction among major tech entities.
Project Arachnid represents a significant leap forward in the fight against online child exploitation. By leveraging PhotoDNA and advanced web crawling technologies, Arachnid systematically scans billions of web pages and images to identify and remove abusive content, providing a proactive defense mechanism.
Arachnid Team (40:17):
"Total URLs analyzed: 5.3 billion... 169 billion images processed, with 14 million double vetted as CSAM." (40:17)
The team’s impressive metrics showcase the scale and effectiveness of Project Arachnid, underscoring its role as a vital tool in safeguarding children online.
The episode concludes by acknowledging that despite technological advancements like PhotoDNA and Project Arachnid, the battle against online child exploitation is far from over. Continuous effort, collaboration, and innovation are essential to keep pace with the evolving tactics of online predators.
Rob Cribb (39:15):
"Coming up next time, how a small team in Winnipeg takes the power of PhotoDNA and creates Arachnid, the mothership of web crawler." (39:15)
This teaser sets the stage for the next episode, promising further exploration into the initiatives spearheaded by dedicated individuals and teams working tirelessly to protect the most vulnerable.
This episode of Click Here offers a profound exploration of the dark underbelly of the internet where child exploitation thrives. Through personal testimonies, expert insights, and the unveiling of groundbreaking technologies like PhotoDNA and Project Arachnid, listeners gain a comprehensive understanding of both the challenges and the ongoing efforts to combat this heinous crime. The narrative underscores the importance of technological innovation, collaboration, and unwavering commitment in the fight to protect children from digital predators.
Note: All timestamps refer to the episode’s transcript and are included for reference to notable quotes.