Supporting investigators with an agile digital forensics tool

The risks of online child exploitation are constantly growing and changing in scope. From the growth in online content, to the sophistication of malicious actors, we know that investigators are spinning many plates. For the teams developing digital forensics tools, like us at CameraForensics, this begs the question:

How do we make sure that investigators have the techniques needed to safeguard victims and stop offenders?

The answer lies in tech developers and investigators working together to safeguard as many children as possible. Here’s what we mean, and how we’re doing it.

Why tech and law enforcement need to work together

We talk a lot about the importance of working together to combat child sexual abuse material (CSAM). Cecilia Wallin, Founding Partner of Onemi-Global Solutions, sums this up perfectly here:

“If we don’t collaborate, we can’t do anything; but if we do collaborate, anything’s possible”.

As tech developers, we need to be part of this collaboration for two major reasons:

Investigators need to be reactive. As digital threats evolve, we’re having to create experimental tools to keep up with them. We don’t always know what to expect from the applications we’re building, so input from investigators is crucial.

We don’t have access to the material we’re building countermeasures for. Not only are we developing completely novel tools, but we’re doing so by proxy. We rely on investigators to help us understand exactly what their image forensics challenges are, so that we can help them effectively.

Iterating to develop a user-centric platform

To develop a digital forensics platform that helps combat online child exploitation, we need to keep iterating until we meet investigators’ requirements.

That’s why we follow Agile methodology – a type of software development framework with iteration at its core. To us, being Agile is all about making small changes, releasing them to our customers, getting feedback, and iterating that process.

'Responding to change over following a plan’ is one of the four Agile pillars that we particularly believe in. If one of our tools is no longer up to scratch, we need to refine it quickly. If investigators need a new image forensics capability to safeguard child victims, we need to action it immediately.

Our Agile methodology in action: a mini case study

We recently built a sophisticated tool for the detection and takedown of illegal content – a real-world example of our Agile methodology in action.

Law enforcements analysts and investigators needed the capability to crawl sites for child sexual abuse material, so that they could analyse the content, find leads, and issue takedown notices. We needed to develop this capability without exposing ourselves to the content it was trying to identify. In this case, we liaised with our trial partner users on an almost daily basis, so that we could understand their feedback and integrate it into our next development sprint.

LinkForensics is another example of how we’ve combined regular feedback with an Agile approach. For this project, we created a tool that could identify whether or not a link leads to child abuse material.

Previously, our customers were conducting this process manually, which meant crawling the internet, downloading suspicious files, and analysing the content. We’ve been able to automate this previously time-intensive, and mentally exhausting, process, and speed up the identification of harmful link pathways – all thanks to almost weekly user feedback.

How to get the best from your digital forensics tools

When we first started developing the CameraForensics platform, we didn’t receive much feedback at all. Of course, we understand why: law enforcement agents were dedicating all their time to safeguarding victims.

That’s why we’ve since focused on putting ourselves in front of investigators, such as through our Connect events, so that we can streamline the process of collating feedback – for us and for you.

If you’d like to expand your investigative technologies or discuss your imaging forensics challenges with us, you don’t need to wait for an in-person opportunity. As part of our commitment to R&D, we work in partnership with LEAs and government organisations worldwide to support the process of online imaging forensics. Simply contact us to start a conversation.