How a common definition of online abuse could help to tackle it more effectively
Two Hat’s CEASE.ai Technology Integrates with Griffeye Analyze to Help Investigators Rescue Child Sexual Abuse Victims Faster
With this technical integration, law enforcement agencies worldwide can now easily access cutting-edge artificial intelligence to aid in child sexual abuse investigations
KELOWNA, British Columbia, August 12, 2019: Technology company Two Hat Security announced today that CEASE.ai, an artificial intelligence model that can detect, sort, and prioritize new, previously uncatalogued child sexual abuse material (CSAM) for investigators, is now available for law enforcement agencies using the Griffeye Analyze platform.
“A technology partnership between CEASE.ai and Griffeye has been a goal for us since the beginning,” said Two Hat CEO and founder Chris Priebe. “The aim is to provide this technology to law enforcement agencies worldwide that already use Griffeye Analyze in their investigations. CEASE.ai is designed to not only protect investigators’ mental health, which can be severely affected by viewing these horrific images, but also to help them find and rescue innocent victims faster.”
Built in collaboration with Canadian law enforcement and with support from Canada’s Build in Canada Innovation Program and Mitacs with top Canadian universities, CEASE.ai uses multiple artificial intelligence models to detect and prioritize new images containing child abuse. After investigators run their caseload against a hash list of known images, they can then rescan the remaining items through the CEASE.ai plugin to flag new and uncatalogued images.
“We’re thrilled to integrate CEASE.ai with the Analyze platform,” said Griffeye CEO Johann Hofmann. “We strongly believe that artificial intelligence is the future of technology to fight child sexual abuse, and this is an opportunity for us to work with a company that builds state-of-the-art artificial intelligence and get it into the hands of our law enforcement community. This will help them speed up investigations and free up time to prioritize investigative work such as victim identification.”
The growing number of child sexual abuse material has put investigators under enormous pressure. According to their 2018 annual report, analysts at The Internet Watch Foundation processed 229,328 reports in 2018, a 73% increase on the 2017 figure of 132,636. With increasingly large caseloads containing anywhere from hundreds of thousands to 1-2 million images, investigators struggle to sort and manually review all material. The CEASE.ai technology aims to reduce their workload significantly.
“If we seize a hard drive that has 28 million photos, investigators need to go through all of them,” said Sgt. Arnold Guerin, who works in the technology section of the Canadian Police Centre for Missing and Exploited Children (CPCMEC). “But how many are related to children? Can we narrow it down? That’s where this project comes in, we can train the algorithm to recognize child exploitation.”
Two Hat has also made CEASE.ai available for social platforms to prevent illegal images from being uploaded and shared on social networks. Learn more about how CEASE.ai is assisting law enforcement to detect and prioritize new child sexual abuse material on the Two Hat website.
About Two Hat Security
Two Hat’s AI-powered content moderation platform classifies, filters, and escalates more than 30 billion human interactions, including messages, usernames, images, and videos a month, all in real-time. With an emphasis on surfacing online harms including cyberbullying, abuse, hate speech, violent threats, and child exploitation, they enable clients across a variety of social networks to foster safe and healthy user experiences.
In addition, they believe that removing illegal content is a shared responsibility among social platforms, technology companies, and law enforcement. To that end, Two Hat works with law enforcement to train AI to detect new child exploitative material.
About Griffeye
Griffeye provides one of the world’s premier software platforms for digital media investigations. Used by law enforcement, defense and national security agencies across the globe, the platform gives investigators and intelligence professionals a leg up on ever-increasing volumes of image and video files