Dark web agent spotted bedroom wall clue to rescue girl from abuse

> They contacted Facebook, which at the time dominated the social media landscape, asking for help scouring uploaded family photos - to see if Lucy was in any of them. But Facebook, despite having facial recognition technology, said it "did not have the tools" to help.

Willing to bet my life savings that they are able to do exactly this when the goal is to create shadow profiles or maximize some metric.

Am I reading this correctly that the address where they found the child was where her mother’s boyfriend was living?

> "So we narrowed it down to [this] one address… and started the process of confirming who was living there through state records, driver's licence… information on schools," says Squire.

> The team realised that in the household with Lucy was her mother's boyfriend - a convicted sex offender.

There’s a lot of focus on Facebook in the comments here, but unless I’m missing something the strangest part about this story was that the child’s mother was dating a convicted sex offender and they had to go through all of this process to arrive at this? It’s impressive detective work with the brick expert identifying bricks and the sofa sellers gathering their customer list, but how did this connection not register earlier?

EDIT: As others have pointed out, the wording is confusing. They made these connections to the identity only after identifying the house

You can do the same yourself here: https://www.europol.europa.eu/stopchildabuse

I’ve spent just a teeny bit of time helping international ICE investigators (not that one; internet child exploitation) postpone PTSD with technology. It seems like after two years of their job, they’re going to have a mental break. So postponing is all you can really do.

It’s disheartening how underfunded these agencies are compared to, what feels like at least, the severity of the crimes they’re up against.

These folks are heroes. This is one place AI has a lot of potential (but very little commercial value).

This speaks volumes of the moral values of Facebook vs the brick industry.

A article this long just to blame facebook to not give away private data to a three letter organization.

periodically the various forces tackling CSAM release images which are ENTIRELY SFW, and are purely of a jersey, a backpack, a location, a tea setting, and ask people to tell them things: Was this available in Belgium? Did you ever see this in a second hand shop? Do you recognise the logo on this bag?

Information inside images is useful for this kind of struggle to identify victims of crime.

First of all, sorry to hear about the poor girl’s ordeal, and I’m glad she was rescued. But after reading about all that complicated digital sleuthing, it basically comes down to this:

"The team realised that in the household with Lucy was her mother’s boyfriend - a convicted sex offender."

I feel like the police should’ve started there: cross-referencing people in her close circle against a list of known sex offenders.

This is an old story about an old investigation. It is old news dredged up to try to win sympathy for DHS/ICE. It is propaganda resurrected to make DHS look useful.

They cherry-picked a story that they knew would win public sympathy since no one wants a child molester to run free. Lets show a time when an agent solved a case for an excellent outcome.

Pick a DHS/ICE story from this year and see what kind of dystopic shitshow you report on.

This is propaganda. Gullible people fall for this shit every day. Put some thought into the context before you swallow the turd.

Not sure how we can help such heros !! These are the people that make the world a better place !!

Is there a way to volunteer for such investigations?

Non-paywalled copy:

https://www.yahoo.com/news/articles/dark-agent-spotted-bedro...

Strange to think that right now, the people doing that work are not getting paid for it.

Related: A researcher for Meta, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram, warned executives at the tech giant that there may be upward of 500,000 cases of sexual exploitation of minors per day on the social media platforms.

https://www.foxbusiness.com/lifestyle/meta-researcher-warned...

Who needs the dark web when Meta exists and is protected by the US government?

Edit: downvotes? Lol

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Hearing the sentence always pisses me off.

He should have been sentenced to six years of "let's see if we can push the limits of known horror" followed only then by a grizzly end, and share some sample images with his online sicko friends "this is what's coming from you".

Was this guy law enforcement? How did he get the addresses of everyone who had bought that model of couch?

I'm wondering why they didn't cross reference the addresses they had from the furniture stores with those of registered sex offenders, as this abuser turned out to be? And further intersect that with "Flaming Alamo" brick houses??

Note: the "agent" the title refers to has nothing to do with an AI/LLM agent. Originally I thought this had something to do with an AI agent, as if someone put an AI agent in charge of identifying dark web pictures for clues. It's a good story nevertheless and I'm glad the victim was rescued, but nothing to do with AI/LLMs.