Cell Phones, PDAs New Tools For Child Pornographers
Cell Phones, PDAs New Tools For Child Pornographers POSTED: 9:47 am EDT October 4, 2005 TORONTO -- Sex crimes investigators around the world will need to step up their technological know-how as child pornography becomes more mobile and difficult to detect, a veteran of Toronto police's sex crimes unit told an international conference Monday. Handheld devices including cell phones, PDAs and portable MP3 players will increasingly be used to take and transfer images of child pornography, said Detective Sgt. Paul Gillespie. Gillespie spoke Monday about the Toronto force's Child Exploitation Tracking System on the first day of a five-day international conference on how police departments investigate and prevent the exploitation of children. "Everything's going to be in the size of a (cellular) telephone that has the computing power of 10 of the best PCs that are out there right now. Everything's going to be portable, mobile, wireless -- that's just going to pose huge challenges for law enforcement and I'm not sure what the answer is," he told The Canadian Press. In April, Toronto police and Microsoft Canada launched the Child Exploitation Tracking System, or CETS, a national database that allows investigators to type in an e-mail address, credit-card number or even an online handle to track child sex offenders. The "tip of the iceberg" was the arrest of a 36-year-old man last month for using a cell phone camera to take digital photographs under the skirts of young girls in the city's east end, said Gillespie, a 27-year veteran of the Toronto police force. "The criminals were very early to exploit the powers of the Internet to their own advantage and I think law enforcement took several years to realize it," said Gillespie, adding that child pornographers are sharing the latest trends in technology via online newsgroups and chat rooms. Toronto's child exploitation unit, established five years ago, has gained a global reputation of being on the cutting edge of child pornography investigations. News4Jax.com