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Names and affiliations (stakeholder group, organization) of the participants in the proposed workshop
⇒ Gitte Jakobsen (Civil Society) Save the Children Denmark: Gitte has coined the term "Grey Areas of (Legal) sexual exploitation of children. She has broad expertise in the field of identification of CSAI and the legal situation regards such content in many countries, participation is confirmed (remote participant)
⇒ Thiago Tavares Nunes de Oliveira (Government) Presidente da SaferNet Brasil: Thiago has long-standing experiences in fighting CSAI and in running a hotline for reporting, participation is confirmed
⇒ Marie-Laure Lemineur, ECPAT International, Head of Programme, Combating Sexual Exploitation of Children Online. Marie-Laure has outstanding knowledge on the topic of child safety, participation is confirmed
⇒ Akio Kokubu (private sector) Vice President of the Internet Association Japan / Internet Hotline Center Japan: Akio Kokubu has long-standing experiences in fighting CSAI and in running a hotline for reporting participation is confirmed (remote participant)
⇒ Grégory Mounier (Intergovernmental organization) Europol Cyber Crime Centre: Gregory Mounier has long-standing experiences in fighting CSAI, participation is confirmed
⇒ Marco Pancini (Industry) Google Marco represents the position of the industry partner in the Network No Grey Areas and will explain what is Google's contribution to fight abuse and sexual exploitation of children on the Internet
⇒ Christian Schulze (Technical Community) DFKI – German Institute for Artificial Intelligence: Christian is a well-know expert for his research in artificial intelligence and its application for analysis of content, participation is confirmed (remote participant)
⇒ Jean Paul Nkurunziza (Civil Society) ISOC Burundi, deputy Chair: Jean Paul has broad knowledge on Internet Governance procedures and their relevance for child online safety, participation is confirmed (remote participant)
⇒ Natasha Jackson, (Private Sector) GSMA Mobile Alliance (confirmed)
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If there were presentations during the workshop session, please provide a 1-paragraph summary for each presentation:
Jutta Croll: Network No Grey Areas on the Internet
In November 2014, the Network against Abuse and Sexual Exploitation of Children – No Grey Areas on the Internet was launched under the patronage of the German Federal Minister for Family Affairs, Senior Citizens, Women and Youth, Manuela Schwesig. The objective of the network is to combat abuse and sexual exploitation of children on the Internet in the so called “Grey Area”. It is built of three pillars: The first pillar is a competence centre at jugenschutz.net that continuously monitors depictions of sexual exploitation of children, analyses the experiences of hotlines and involved services providers, identifies hubs and establishes systematic counter-measures, and cooperates with the involved service providers regarding effective techniques for addressing sexual exploitation of children, including relevant technical indications (e.g. hashes, keywords). The second pillar are service providers, so far Google has joined the network. Service providers investigate reports of content depicting the sexual exploitation of children and take appropriate action. This may involve the removal of such content, reports to authorities where warranted and use of automated mechanisms to attempt to identify and remove re-uploads of known abusive images. They also work with the network to educate and warn users about this type of content by guiding users who come across child sexual exploitation material unintentionally to reporting mechanisms and safe resources and by guiding delinquents to safe resources and help sites. The third pillar are hotlines that receive reports regarding sexual exploitation encountered online, inform the service providers involved in the network as well as the competent authorities (prosecution, foreign hotlines of the INHOPE-association, other service providers) when becoming aware of depictions of sexual exploitation of children on the Internet and contact service providers regarding known cases of sexual exploitation of children, if the competent authorities do not (or can not) act in order to get the material removed. The network is coordinated by the I-KiZ, the German Centre for Child Protection on the Internet. The network deals with so called “Grey Area” imagery i. e. posing and modelling images that may not be illegal in all countries but infringe the dignity, the privacy and the physical integrity of children. Criteria for the classification of images to be “Grey Area” lay in the depiction itself, if the production is harmful for the children depicted or other children might be harmed be confrontation with it, or in the context of the provision of the depiction e.g. the amount of images or sexualized comments by users and potential perpetrators.
Gitte Jakobsen: Drawing the picture – What constitutes the "Grey Area" of (legal) sexual exploitation of children?
Save the Children Denmark have issued the report “Images in the Grey Area” in 2014. They have coined the term “Grey Area” and defined it as follows: ”Images in the grey area are still or moving images of children’s bodies, where the photographer’s staging of the child and / or the use of the material in an erotic or otherwise sexualised context gives grounds to presume that the purpose of the recording or display is to satisfy a sexual interest in children.” The definition is based on the Taylor/Quayle Copine scale, referring to the categories 4 = posing, 5 = erotic posing and 6 = explicit erotic posing.
Save the Children Denmark have analysed a minimum of 16.000 images from around 400 URLs. They found mainly images of girls (85 %), a few boys (9 %) and some with both (6 %), the majority of children were aged 9 – 12. They consider exploitation of the child, when they assume that the child has not given consent to the photographer and no permission to the distribution. Commercial exploitation is presumed when financial profit is made from sexual exploitation of a child, f. e. by the production and sale of child abuse images, including sale or advertising on pornographic and other types of websites with CSAM. Images in the Grey Area are often to be found in a pornographic and commercial context on the Internet.
Marco Pancini: Understanding the concepts – Which concepts of provision and search strategies of perpetrators are in use?
Google is committed to try to fight against any kind of abuse and against this kind of images online. The approach is based on three pillars: Removal of the imagery and reporting the abuser as soon as knowledge is gained about this kind of content, investment in technology to protect from this kind of content, and work with industry and law enforcement in order to keep pace with the criminal activities. Google’s policies are absolutely in line, we don't accept on any of our platforms this kind of content. Google builds also on flagging procedures that allow users to report content they consider inappropriate. In the photo DNA database a digital fingerprint of images that are identified as content to be removed is stored, that is a specific technology to make sure that the same image of the same content cannot go up again. Together with the network partners Google identified more or less 1,000 key words and terms that are related to child abuse material in this area. Every time these key words are put in the search engine, a specific word answer shows up informing the person that they search for something illegal. The person receives a clear notice that the activity of searching and disseminating of the content is illegal. In addition links to support and counselling services in order to help the person in trying to get over his illegal activities are shown. If someone is looking for something specific and this link was removed because it was notified by law enforcement, a removal notification is given to state in the search page that this is a link was removed because the content was illegal. Another powerful tool is to work with our engineers on the search quality to make sure that content related to search on child abuse material – also grey area – is deleted on Google so that it does not come on top of the search results.
Christian Schulze: Analysing the background – How can artificial intelligence and so called multimedia opinion mining help to analyse search terms, phrases and sentences of perpetrators?
The presentation gave an overview on technical tools for classification of content in regard of its inappropriateness and exploitative nature. Such content is searched for by perpetrators using specific vocabulary and abbreviations. To cut across such searches and remove the respective content it is necessary to analyse natural language. From a technical point of view it is difficult to understand opinions, emotions and sentiment by a mere analysis of the words in use. The DFKI uses so called multimedia opinion mining. By this methodology firstly texts provided by a search engine on a certain query are analysed particularly regards terms frequency or the occurrence of certain words in amounts. Then with the analysis results particular classifiers can be trained for detecting search phrases or queries. With that technology it is now not only possible to analyse certain segments of text, but also to take other modalities like images and videos into account.
The sentiment concept analysis uses text classifiers, visual classifiers and acoustic classifiers to support a technology based decision whether someone is searching for a certain type of (illegal) content on the web. Especially with regard to posing images in the Grey Area where the context matters this technology can by of tremendous value.
Grégory Mounier: Addressing the commercial aspects – Which commercial transactions and payment measures are supportive to the dissemination and exchange of CSAI, how do they count for Grey Area material? What role do virtual currencies play? And how can the – real and virtual – cash flow be desiccated?
The European Cyber Crime Centre supports the 280 member states to tackle organized crime and child abuse on line and elsewhere. In terms of child sexual abuse and exploitation we have a team of about 15 specialists working full time on that issue. We are working on the basis of information that is sent by our colleagues from law enforcement in Europe and beyond actually. When it comes to child sexual abuse imagery and commercial exploitation the offenders that are in those types of crimes are extremely IT savvy. We see in that particular community of criminals they are using cutting edge encryption technologies, using all the new materials and technology and methods that can obfuscate online and then they are concerned about anonymity and security. So whenever they have to use payment methods, they will naturally go towards alternative payment methods that means money transfers, digital wallets and cryptic currencies. Payment methods also depend on the type of criminal activity, f. e. with the recent trend of live-streaming of abuse online they're using money transfers because it's just more convenient. Over all there is a massive trend of a shift or migration from traditional payments to alternative payment methods because it's less traceable. And for them it means it's less vulnerable and provides more anonymity. So far the payment for content on commercial websites is 50 % money transfer, 30 percent credit cards and 20 % digital wallets or cryptic currencies.
Akio Kokubu: Reacting to reports - The role of hotlines
In Japan Child Pornography Law Article 3 (iii) was revised in 2014. Considered illegal is “Any pose of a child wholly or partially naked, and explicitly focused on sexual body parts such as genital area, buttocks and chest, and which arouses or stimulates the viewer's sexual desire, i. e. acrobatic posing that explicitly reveals buttocks region in very small bikinis, C-thru clothing that the genital area is visible, purposely showing underwear by flipping the skirt. So, many images considered “Grey Area” are already illegal in Japan. Eleven child welfare organisations among them ECPAT Japan, Think Kids and Lighthouse have pleaded a revision of the Child Welfare Law to ban the distribution and sales of images involving nudity of children aged under 15 years old. They also pleaded for a revision of the Child Abuse Prevention law to address the phenomenon that some children are forced to acts of abuse and exploitation by their parents.
The role of the hotlines is a reacting one, namely they do not search information by themselves to avoid criticism of censorship. User’s understanding for CSAM is necessary to receive reports. Awareness activities to users are very important.
With the information on illegal content received from Internet users, hotlines will generally inform police, submit notice and take down to website administrators and ISPs, inform related Institutions and handle illegal information through international co-operation.
An automatic content rating system on the Internet with image recognition technologies was developed in the past. It was good for a screening tool but confirmation by human eyes was still needed because such technologies did not take into account context of information.
Marie-Laure Lemineur: Syntesising the powers – The Message of the Communiqué "No Grey Areas" adopted by child welfare organisations around the world
Depictions of sexual exploitation of children ("any representation, by whatever means, of a child engaged in real or simulated explicit sexual activities or any representation of the sexual parts of a child for primarily sexual purposes" – so called child pornography) are proscribed by law in many countries worldwide.
However, the sexual exploitation of children is not manifested only through child abuse images. In our modern societies children can be sexualised and treated as sexual objects in many different ways, for example on the Internet through images depicting children in erotic or suggestive poses. These are part of so called “Grey Area” imagery that does not necessarily cross the lines drawn by the law to qualify as child sexual abuse imagery, but is exploitative in nature. It also violates children´s dignity and their right to privacy and damages their sense of security. These images are spread widely throughout the Internet and are much easier to find than child sexual abuse imagery.
Worldwide condemnation and combating those images in the Grey Area of child abuse and exploitation on the Internet is the postulation of organisations world wide, dedicated to the welfare and protection of children. In November more than 30 organisations from many countries around the world have signed a joint Communiqué addressing the condemnation of “Grey Area” imagery. The Communiqué can be found at www.i-kiz.de/NGA2015. The initiative is still open for other child welfare organisations to support and adopt the Communiqué. Please contact jc@i-kiz.de.
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