Cloaking mechanisms online are enabling users and manufacturers of child sexual abuse imagery to be almost immune to detection, enabling them to operate with impunity, the investigation found. Videos now outnumber images, with Facebook reporting almost 85 percent of the total, among 164 companies reporting findings (including Snapchat, Twitter, Google and Yahoo). “Technology companies reported a record 45 million online photos and videos of the abuse last year,” The New York Times reported last September at the beginning of the paper’s ongoing investigation of what it terms a crisis “at a breaking point,” with tech companies, government and police no match for the online trade.Įarlier this month, the paper reported that the number of photos and videos had grown 50 percent in the past year, with 70 million images and videos reported to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, an agency that works with governments.
The initial tip was sent to the sheriff’s detective Dennis Lashbrook, who’s in charge of the agency’s relatively new cyber crimes unit focused on child sexual abuse, which has been growing exponentially online.
