U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement says that while technology is contributing to growing amount of child pornography, it’s also being used to help officials find and rescue children more quickly than ever before.
ICE says it identified and rescued 1,004 victims of child sexual abuse and online exploitation in fiscal 2015, the agency announced Monday. While arrests were down compared to 2014, ICE spokeswoman Danielle Bennett told the Washington Examiner the agency was able to process significantly more data this year.
In 2015, the agency’s Homeland Security Investigations analyzed 7,500 terabytes of data — equivalent to nearly 100 years of high definition video — seized during search warrants, half of which was related to child exploitation. That number was up from 5,200 terabytes in 2014, according to Bennett.
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Since HIS forensic analysts receive 40 percent more data to analyze with every year, the rate at which it can crunch data is critical to staying on top of the workload.
“When a child is being sexually abused or exploited, it’s a race against time for investigators to identify and rescue that child,” said ICE Director Sarah R. Saldana. “ICE is fully committed to conducting victim-centered investigations in which the identification, rescue, and stabilization of the victim is the first priority. When we identify a victim, more often than not we also find the perpetrator.”
