On July 14th the FBI blasted out a press release asking for help from the public to identify an "individual who may have information regarding the identity of a child sexual assault victim." In other words, they locked in on a suspect, seemingly exhausting investigative leads, and reached out to the public to take on their hunt. That hunt did not last long at all. The next day, the FBI updated their release with “John Doe 44 has been identified and located. He is currently in custody." Crowdsourcing their manhunt worked. What is even more horrendous about this case is the suspect swore to serve and protect, he was a police officer.
Take a second, go to the search engine you use, type in ‘child exploitation’ under the News tab, then hit enter. What you see should turn your stomach and outrage you. The internet is festering with those exploiting children for profit and deviant pleasure. Wouldn’t you take on the fight to identify suspects and witnesses if you could help fight child exploitation?
Child sexual exploitation is a sensitive topic but one that must be discussed in an open forum. What is it? Summarizing the federal statute, it is any person, including parent and legal guardians, that entices, persuades, or coerces a minor to engage in "any sexually explicit conduct for the purpose of producing any visual depiction of such conduct or for the purpose of transmitting a live visual depiction of such conduct.”
Headlines don't capture fully what child exploitation truly is. It doesn’t emphasize that the child is being used for sexual gratification and being used for profit. It doesn’t emphasize that the child’s life is forever altered. Who can do such a horrendous act as sexually exploiting a child? The image you expect to see may surprise you. From youth football coaches to married couples to politicians to those in the medical field and beyond. Many of these criminals have direct access to children.
What is the government doing to crowdsource? The FBI created the Endangered Child Alert Program (ECAP) as a tool to collaborate with the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children (NCMEC) to essentially crowdsource. Their site currently has a little over a dozen active images of unidentified individuals they need help finding “whose faces and/or distinguishing characteristics are visible in child pornography images.” The ECAP site does not appear to be updated regularly, in fact, several of the images they seek information on are over a decade old.
The NCMEC received over 21 million reports on their CyberTip line. Millions of millions of exploitative images transferred from one suspect to the next. The reports said they, “included 33.6 million images, of which 10.4 million were unique, and 31.6 million videos, of which 3.7 million were unique. The larger numbers are due to the fact that many of those images and videos had been circulated or shared by multiple people and appeared in more than one report. Children are revictimized by the continued circulation of the files of their abuse and the technology that is used to identify these files, is critical to their protection.”
21 million reports and the FBI is currently only asking help for a little over a dozen. Predators use crowdsourcing to transfer their illicit image within and outside their aberrant networks. The tables need to be turned on these predators. We can turn the tables on predators and use crowdsourcing to track them down and provide the information to law enforcement, but the FBI needs to step up the effort. It works, they proved that. The one recent case they pushed out was an outstanding success. Why are they not doing more?
Let the public crowdsource use social media to identify potentially critical information that can be used by law enforcement. It will save lives.
Report child sexual exploitation to the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children using the CyberTipline at www.cybertipline.org .
Dr. Jason Piccolo has been a federal agent for over 21 years and is a former U.S. Army Captain (Operation Iraqi Freedom). You can find him regularly on CourtTV. @drjasonpiccolo
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