Am I reading this correctly that the address where they found the child was where her mother’s boyfriend was living?
> "So we narrowed it down to [this] one address… and started the process of confirming who was living there through state records, driver's licence… information on schools," says Squire.
> The team realised that in the household with Lucy was her mother's boyfriend - a convicted sex offender.
There’s a lot of focus on Facebook in the comments here, but unless I’m missing something the strangest part about this story was that the child’s mother was dating a convicted sex offender and they had to go through all of this process to arrive at this? It’s impressive detective work with the brick expert identifying bricks and the sofa sellers gathering their customer list, but how did this connection not register earlier?
EDIT: As others have pointed out, the wording is confusing. They made these connections to the identity only after identifying the house
The registry did come up, as soon as they had enough information for it to be useful. They were looking for a specific child, starting just from the images that her abuser was sharing on the internet (in which he intentionally tried to hide identifying details).
The registry is just a big list of names and addresses.
Sex offender registries are just registries. They only work if someone decides to actually do a query. It might prevent them from getting a childcare job, but it doesn't really prevent them from accessing children at all.
The registers are also massively bloated, some people get put on them for nothing more than public urination.
The only sex offenders who actually get regular checks that might identify this type of thing, are those on parole, or similar court ordered programs.
Other things that could get you on the registry include visiting a nude beach in California or being an 18-year-old high school student with a 17-year-old girlfriend and having your sexual activity discovered by a vindictive parent (that last one will get you the bonus bar of shame of criminal activity involving a minor). The registries are rather blunt tools and also end up doing things like making getting housing difficult (there was a news story I saw in the 90s about an encampment under a freeway in Florida as it was the only place people on the sex offender registry could legally live in a major city (I think Miami but this was 30 years ago). A more recent story in Chicago pointed out that a restriction on sleeping on the CTA would cause homeless people on the registry to end up being unable to meet the terms of their parole). I don’t really have much sympathy for child sex abusers, but if people are such dangers to society that they can only live under a freeway or will be reincarcerated on unavoidable technicalities, something is very wrong.
Right but I'll be honest, I've never thought about looking up the people I've dated in the past. No one really talked about it when I was younger. I don't remember my mother telling me to do criminal background checks on people I'm seeing.
Happened to me. Went out with somebody who turned out to be a serial shop lifter who operated with a small gang of other shop lifters. Everything looked fine up front until they disappeared when we had plans without contact for days. Thought I was ghosted. Turns out they were arrested.
A friend went out with someone who destroyed his car after he broke up because she was violent twords him. He had to get a restraining order. A friend of his dug up a link to a FL police site. Turns out she did a little time down there for assaulting another woman, beating her with a coat rack during a fight. He never thought to look her up either and she seemed nice at first. Shit happens. Don't blame the victim for not being paranoid that everyone they're dating might be a criminal. Especially when there are damn good liars out there.
Back when my wife and I were renting, we only found out our landlord was on the list because his parole officer stopped by and asked if he'd informed us as he was legally required to do.
We moved out rather quickly after that. If we were in a situation where we had to rent again, and went with an individual renting their own house rather than a company, checking out the registry is on the checklist of things to do.
About 0.3% of the adult population is on registries in the US.
With 40,000 couch sales, there would be roughly 120 sex offenders would have bought that couch. You can see what I mean about the registries being bloated.
Doesn't really narrow things down until you add the brick factory, but then they already had it down to 40 houses.
But it's a mistake to even assume the couch was bought by the same house as the offender. The offender could just be visiting, or the couch could have been moved to a different house since purchase (sold second hand, or the owner moved). And you are assuming the offender had been caught before, or was even on the sex offender registry for abusing children.
I think what is confusing is likely that the investigators/detectives were probably trying to make sure that the girl was actually in the house where the sex offender was registered or technically living, and not maybe kept somewhere else. A lot of detective work is building the case, but also confirming what you believe is actually true and you need the evidence to also request the warrant on factual grounds. They could have busted in the door of that house and found that there was no such brick to be found anywhere and the girl was sold off to someone else or something like that.
It’s really rather sick and deranged though that this kind of dynamic of women with children associating with sex offenders is not exactly rare. Frankly, I hope the mother was also charged.
Would you want her charged if she didn't even know?
There is nothing in the article suggesting that the mother conspired with her boyfriend, or that she even knew he was a sex offender. I can imagine a scenario where the mother blames herself for not knowing and is utterly destroyed by misplaced guilt. Who knows what actually happened? The article wasn't about that.
> Would you want her charged if she didn't even know?
Yes. She is responsible for making sure her children is safe and well taken care of. I say this morally, not as a legal fact. She should know what they are up to, and she should notice if any of them are regularly abused over an interval of years.
> Would you want her charged if she didn't even know?
Yes? There are laws against child endangerment for a reason, and giving someone unrestricted accsss to your child without performing a basic background check very much falls into that territory.
I had a friend threatened with this by a cop. I was there. We had been drinking and he wanted to change his oil at a Jiffy Lube. Unbeknownst to us there was a park on the other side. He just got a ticket but the cop made the threat. It doesn't disprove your claim but it is an example of why the belief might persist
It's a stupid meme. Public urination, like actually taking a piss in public while no one is around you, is likely going to be a ticket for disorderly conduct if a specific charge for it doesn't exist. You won't get an indecent exposure charge unless you're purposely exposing yourself to others, it requires intent. Sometimes flashers will use the excuse of urinating for their intentional exposure or will lie that their indecent exposure charge was due to public urination and not because they were really masturbating in plain view. There probably have been prosecutors that have tried to slap an indecent exposure charge on an innocent public urinater but like everyone else says, they can't find any proof of it actually sticking.
I'm not sure that's what you meant to link to. The description there is beyond lurid, and that guy only ended up on a registry after a lot of shenanigans.
> some people get put on them for nothing more than public urination
When minor offences can get people put on the register, this dilutes the meaning of being on the register.
Every actual sex offender will claim they're on there not because of the serious crimes they committed, but because they went nude on the wrong beach, or something similarly minor.
Queensland allows residents to see the details of offenders in our local area, but you need to provide extensive ID to do so, and leaking that information is itself a crime. Daniel's Law was introduced in 2025 so this is pretty recent.
The whole thing about people getting put on the sex offender registry for public urination is a myth and there's no verifiable cases of it happening. There are two cases that are relatively close. The first is James Birch, who pled guilty to indecent exposure for peeing on a Taco Bell because he was representing himself and didn't understand that meant he'd have to register as a sex offender. He realized his mistake and the court let him undo the plea and the charges were dropped. The second is Juan Matamoros, a meth dealer from Florida who claimed in the mid-2000s that the reason why he got put on the Massachusetts sex offender registry in the 80s was public urination. Due to the age of the case and Massachusetts privacy laws the court records aren't publicly available and his lawyer from the 80s responded to a request for interview about the case with "no judge I am aware of would allow someone to be put on the sex offender registry for peeing in public".
If anyone tells you that's why they're on the sex offender registry, it's extremely likely they're lying about it and you should really look them up.
It was standard practice by the police and DA in 2000s Massachusetts.
Neighbors were annoyed at loud college parties at the school I went to, so local police waited in bushes to catch people peeing in them, arrested them, and one of the charges was indecent exposure.
Happened to one person I knew personally so it must have happened to several others at just this school.
My friend plead out to some lower charge or probably got a continuance, but it massively increased the leverage they had over him and the fees and fines they could collect, and it massively lowered the chance of him doing any pushback that could have lead to a jury trial, which at least as far as he understood at the time would have put him on the registry, and which is why they abused the law and charged people this way.
Are you entitled to a jury trial for peeing in the bushes in the USA?
That isn’t the case here in Australia.
You can go to trial, but it will be a judge-only trial, and is typically conducted by the magistrate who saw you for your first appearance on the matter, in the magistrates court, which is the lowest court here.
I believe most of the colonies are approximately the same.
95% of cases are settled before reaching jury trial. Usually a plea bargain for criminal cases. Settlement for civil cases. Or dismissal. The other 5% are expensive.
Unfortunately in the US we do in fact go so far as to criminalize urinating in public. It's weird to me that speeding (up to some limit) in a school zone is ranked below pissing in a shrub along the road.
Not surprising to me at all. I’m a straight man and I’ve always dated single mothers, and it always shocked me how bad their ex partners were. Woman are drawn to toxic abusers like men are drawn to OnlyFans models and the real victims are the children. And women can be incredibly blind to what is going on with their child when they’re in a codependent relationship with the abuser.
"women are drawn to toxic abusers" is very, very wrong. It indicates a wish/desire/need to be abused. No, they are not drawn to that. Many abusers know how to look nice and perfect and are great at manipulation.
Also, there may just be a lot of bad men in your social peer group.
> "women are drawn to toxic abusers" is very, very wrong. It indicates a wish/desire/need to be abused.
It doesn't have to indicate that. I think it's more likely that those traits that those women find attractive are the same traits that toxic abusers have.
> Don't make it sound like it's the womens fault.
I don't think he was doing that - people can't help what traits they find attractive.
It's not very wrong unfortunately. Do you remember back in school that the nice, timid guys were friendzoned but the assholes always had girls after them ?
There must be some evolutionary justification, but we have to live with that unfortunate reality..
But then again remember the incredible amounts of fan mail serial killers and serial rapists get while in prison. (this is taking it to the extreme of course)
It is the same like guys finding toxic sociopaths attractive, against our better judgement.
No, I do not remember that because I've seen different things.
There is a lot of different things going on, like perceived confidence. This is just myth.
There is no woman out there who wants to live in fear.
It’s not a myth. What convinced you that there is a myth?? Almost everyone seems to agree it’s a real thing from what I see online. I recommend you watch this video by YouTube channel @Elephantintheroom https://youtu.be/Gvj8hG2UvbA?si=qz_7aC4jYq2CBfJl
Apparently it’s much worse than what we see around us. Women literally fall in love with monsters.
Both statements can be true. Although the first is better phrased as drawn to traits that correlate with toxic abusers.
You could similarly observe that social groups have a tendency to select toxic people for leadership roles. The explanations as to why are various but the end result is plain to see.
I met a guy who was the creepiest dude I ever met in my life. Who intentionally was making me uncomfortable with personal questions (and admitted it when pressed! With a grin!). His job? Spending all day with mentally disabled children...
That's not evidence for any wrongdoing obviously, but it left me quite disturbed.
I seem to remember a test (I believe I read it in the Kevin Dutton book on psychopaths) where psychopaths would be shown a video of people walking down a corridor, and they were more likely to choose vulnerable people than either chance or the norm.
Whichever it was, they could spot a vulnerable person just from their manner while they walk.
I wouldn't say they were drawn to vulnerable people, though. Like anyone else, they assess opportunity and effort, and these people are easier than others for getting what they want.
Edit: I found one of the studies -
> Key takeaways
> Higher Factor 1 psychopathy scores correlate with improved accuracy in assessing victim vulnerability based on gait.
> Inmates with elevated psychopathy scores consciously utilize gait cues to judge vulnerability more frequently.
> Psychopathy's Factor 1 traits, like manipulativeness, drive effective victim selection among violent offenders.
> Victims often display distinct gait characteristics that predict perceived vulnerability to assault.
> Understanding body language cues may inform victimization prevention strategies for at-risk individuals.
Remarkable. What does vulnerability mean in this context?
Edit: They asked people how many times they had been victimized, which they defined as "worse than bullying".
> Twelve video clips of unsuspecting targets walking from Wheeler et al.
(2009) were used in the present study. The targets were undergraduate stu-
dents, of whom 8 were women and 4 were men. As described in Wheeler
et al., targets were unknowingly videotaped from behind as they walked
from room A to B, to capture natural gaits. The targets indicated whether
they had ever been victimized and how many times they had been victim-
ized in the past (after the age of 18). The wording of the question was very
broad, given the numerous types of victimization that can occur, and the
effects of any victimization are relative. If participants asked for clarifica-
tion, they were asked to think of victimization as being equal to or greater
than bullying. Each target’s gait was coded by two independent judges
according to the Grayson and Stein’s criteria (1981). As discussed in the
original Wheeler et al. study, interjudge reliabilities were high for all gait
characteristics (kappa = .77 to 1.00). Essential to the idea that body lan-
guage cues indicate vulnerability, targets coded as displaying vulnerable
body language in the Wheeler et al. were more likely to have self-identified
as a victim, rho (11) = .68, p < .05.
---
Edit 2: The study references a very similar study from 32 years earlier.
> The original 1981 study by Grayson and Stein was incredibly simple. It involved setting up a video camera on a street in New York City, filming people (60 persons) as they walked by (between 10:00 AM and 12:00 pm over a three day period), and then showing the footage to convicted offenders (12 of them), whose crimes involved violence, and asking them to select those individuals who they would target/victimize (on a scale from 1 to 10), in order to discover if there were any identifiable non-verbal cues that were commonly picked up on/identified.
So the 1st study focused purely on target selection and gait analysis, while the 2nd one interviewed the potential targets to see how that lined up with their actual history of being abused.
Now the billion dollar question of correlation vs causation: seems to go both ways, as usual. Neurodivergent people walk differently (and have differences in motor areas of the brain), but also trauma changes your posture and movement...
I think the point OP is making isn't "it's strange that the mother had such a boyfriend", but rather "it's strange that so much forensic effort was required to suspect the boyfriend when he should have been an obvious first guess".
I mean, there is no official database of “boyfriends”. Even after you identified the girl, and found the mom, how would you figure out if she has a boyfriend, and if so who?
Remember that if you tip them of in any way the abuser might go escape and hide with the girl or even worse decide to get rid of the witness by murdering the girl. So you can’t just do the easy thing and ask the mom nicely.
A Cuban fitness model engaged to a lowlife drug traffic currently in prison in Finland. She specifically traveled all the way to meet him after sexting with him on social media.
> It was impossible to work out who, or where, Lucy was.
Lucy is a pseudonym. They were trying to get Facebook to tell them who the girl was through facial recognition. There’s no reason to expect a priori that the offender would be in any registry.
There are a lot of women out there drawn to criminals of every kind. The primary demographic of true crime shows are women for a reason, not to mention the letters murderers and such receive. I would be curious to know why this is, and if it happens in other cultures too.
It's like that in all cultures that give more freedom to women. It's an evolutionary thing. Part of the reasons our ancestors did not trust women with freedom.
Relatively speaking there aren't plenty of women in prison for violent crimes. It's about a 9:1 ratio. Men obsessively sexualise everything in our patriarchal society.
You could still run the sofa customers list against a list of known offenders but is there a federal list? Maybe the number of states where the sofa was sold was to large and getting the full list not feasible?
> the strangest part about this story was that the child’s mother was dating a convicted sex offender
70.6% of beaten children are beaten at the mother’s custody. Most often it turns out the choice of companion of the mother is inappropriate. While many see that as blaming the mother and it is a huge taboo in our society, it is such a huge humanitarian problem that it’s worth educating women better over that specific problem, and taking sanctions if necessary.
70.8% in the case of death. Source: CDC 2001-2006 if I remember. Incoming: Many ad-hominem about the source, it’s a problem that never gets addressed.
There's also a lot of "WHY AREN'T YOU FOCUSING ON THE MOTHER?" whataboutism in the comments, which I find appalling. The article was about something else, and who knows what her circumstances were.
Most crimes like this are, sadly, committed by someone who has some connection to the family. It’s standard to investigate connections first. That’s not “appalling” to suggest, it’s just a sad reality of these crimes.
They should be focusing on everyone connected to the family if known. It would be negligent not to.
The confusion came from the way the article was written. They didn’t know the identity until afterward.
I just want to point out that there’s a huge difference between thoroughly investigating the family after abuse of this magnitude has been proven, and making parents legally culpable for any harm that comes to their children in general.
We can react to the fact that mothers can do more to protect their children from abuse in many ways. We can give them better access to information and support in getting away from abusers. We can create better links between police and communities they serve. We can create more pathways for children to be exposed to healthy adult behavior and connections with healthy adults, even when the family is dysfunctional.
But when we find evidence that existing supports have failed, deeply investigating why is critical.
> She said at the point Homeland Security ended her abuse she had been "praying actively for it to end".
You can provide your plausible suggestions as to what the family relationship looked like that the girl could neither ask her own mother for help nor was her father there for her.
However damaged someone is they have a duty of care to their children. There's someone else with a blame in the story but to excuse this is very wrong.
Sorry, but the wording isn't confusing, I think you just didn't read it properly. All they knew was a girl, somewhere, was being abused. They didn't know who her mother was or, obviously, who was taking the pictures.
I’ve spent just a teeny bit of time helping international ICE investigators (not that one; internet child exploitation) postpone PTSD with technology. It seems like after two years of their job, they’re going to have a mental break. So postponing is all you can really do.
It’s disheartening how underfunded these agencies are compared to, what feels like at least, the severity of the crimes they’re up against.
These folks are heroes. This is one place AI has a lot of potential (but very little commercial value).
Moderation feels like the one of the most ethical uses of AI. Being able to prevent a lot of the worst content from being posted and preventing people from being exposed to it.
I don't think the issue here is related to AI. Without AI, moderators would still have to look at these same videos. The difference is they would hit the public first before being flagged and sent to moderators. Now with AI they can be prevented from ever going public.
The fact that we still need to traumatize workers to confirm the automated decisions is sad. The only other ways I can see to resolve this would be either to just blindly trust the AI result without any human oversight, or to require all facebook users to link their government ID to accounts and only allow posting by users in countries where the authorities arrest the people posting these things.
Outsourcing everything. Even PTSD from training AI to India so privileged law enforcement officers and social media moderators don't have to. This system is so hypocritical and broken.
Another comment mentioned ICE as well, so I've been looking into it, and imagine my surprise to learn that ICE (yes that one) has been working in this space since since the Obama admin. Huh.
HSI was primarily the main investigative body responsible for human traffic and crimes against children prior to this administration. The second largest federal investigative agency behind the FBI (6k agents). Now doing immigration enforcement.
It's unfortunate that they are being repurposed to fix a problem entirely generated purposefully for political gain. Those individuals should never have been allowed to flood the system and take effort away from true egregious victims and crime.
Yeah, I looked into it, and ICE actually has two distinct components: Homeland Security Investigations (HSI) and Enforcement and Removal Operations (ERO). Pretty much everyone things ICE == ERO, so you've got stuff like Canadians agitating to close the HSI collaboration offices in Canada.
This administration pulled people off catching child predators to go after some Juan at home depot. in light of the epstein coverup, its hardly surprising.
Coyotes are frequently part of criminal organizations. They take advantage of people in any and every way that they can. Slavery, sexual and otherwise, is not at all an uncommon result of being brought into the country under the radar, so to speak.
AI for helping mitigate PTSD, or helping with the investigations?
Because the latter basically entails helping create a surveillance state. Which in theory could be an acceptable trade-off, but it seems disingenuous to say "AI companies have no financial incentives here" when the big issue is that AI companies would actually be helping to establish powerful dragnet surveillance capabilities. There would need to be a strong democratic process around this.
This is awesome - but they shouldn't have revealed the secret on how they caught them.. like 1000's of other offenders could land up making similar mistakes. It just makes sense to keep your mouth shut and keep on hunting.
I thought so too, but it actually wasn't the couch, brick or whatever. It was overconfidence and mistakes that were exploited and there is no patch for that
So do I read it correctly that good old detective work did the job, and that breaking e2e encryption and client side scanning wasn’t needed? Politicians tell me a different story.
Not that I agree with either of those things but I think the implicit argument is that breaking encryption would lead to faster arrest and fewer years of abuse for the victims.
They don't even arrest pedophiles when they have them on video tape and a client list when the president is on them. This has all become one big joke, justice I mean. There is no justice.
periodically the various forces tackling CSAM release images which are ENTIRELY SFW, and are purely of a jersey, a backpack, a location, a tea setting, and ask people to tell them things: Was this available in Belgium? Did you ever see this in a second hand shop? Do you recognise the logo on this bag?
Information inside images is useful for this kind of struggle to identify victims of crime.
Don't region lock yourself - abuse investigations in Europe or Australia may be from abuse in a different jurisdiction. Alternatively, a gift given from an Australian family member to a European could be a bit of information that helps an investigation rule out or close in on a potential abuser.
Tbf the brick industry helped indirectly and it just happened to be super helpful. They didn’t perform a mass mining of user data across the whole country or a large region. They had very little data to go off other than someone’s past memory of the material. I’m Facebook would have helped in that way too if it was able to.
However, this is exactly how I’d have hoped Facebook would have responded without some sort of court order for data, they shouldn’t be mining everything at the mere request for help by a law enforcement agency. I get this topic is one where you’d wish there was an exception but exceptions are slippery slopes.
>Flaming Alamos were not visible on the outside of any of the homes, because the properties were clad in other materials. But the team asked Harp to assess - by looking at their style and exterior - if these properties were likely to have been built during a period when Flaming Alamos had been on sale. "We would basically take a screenshot of that house or residence and shoot it over to John and say 'would this house have these bricks inside?'" says Squire.
Zillow and tax assessors will list the age\year built of any property.
There is only one location shown in the images, in the past there were several and much clearer, I cannot image how difficult it must be to find it if the europol cannot find it in 2026.
I'm impressed by the people doing this job. How do you turn off at the end of the shift and go home to sleep, when you know an hour more of work could make a more immediate difference? How does work/life balance work in this profession?
So, I had a friend. Had because he's dead. He did this work for a decade and a half and then couldn't deal with it anymore. In that time he put countless assholes behind bars. At some point he stopped responding to my emails so I called the unit and they were absolutely devastated, this guy was the backbone of their operation, the one with by far the most computer experience of all of them. RIP Ronald.
It is very hard to imagine what the life of someone on the frontline is like, the ones that are really battling online scum. So take that 'think of the children' thing and realize that there are people who really do think of the children and it is one of the hardest jobs on the planet.
Quote from TFA:
"The BBC asked Facebook why it couldn't use its facial recognition technology to assist the hunt for Lucy. It responded: "To protect user privacy, it's important that we follow the appropriate legal process, but we work to support law enforcement as much as we can."
So, privacy matters to FB when it is to protect the abusers of children. How low can you go...
The authorities simply needed to start an ad campaign with facebook targeting child abusers. Then FB would have that data packaged up and ready to sell in an instant.
So why wouldn't the investigators follow the appropriate legal process?
Now, I'm sure that everything present in this article is true. But I'm worried that the reason we get this article now (apparently the things the article describes happened 10-15 years ago) is because it's part of someone's job to build support for warrantless driftnet surveillance, mandatory real-ID systems etc.
So I think it's fair to ask: why was it so hard to give Facebook the warrant they asked for?
Note how they didn't say that the legal process wasn't followed just that they didn't want to use their fancy face recognition for a good cause in one very particular instance.
Let's see them stand tall then, now that the department of HS is going to make the request, no doubt through the appropriately bought and paid for channels.
That last bit is not really how it works. I've been in a small company that law enforcement would routinely reach out to for help with solving crimes because they thought we'd have relevant data.
99% of requests are wild goose chases based on nothing. Like literally dumb requests that are not only irrelevant, the request wouldn't even get past that cops boss, much less a judge. But a cop can just ask whatever they want regardless of merit or relevance and it's up to you to say yes or no.
In those years we received two requests with warrants that made more sense but when I see "company denied to help" I understand why. Most cases it's a random cop fishing for private info that has nothing to do with anything. And when it's true, just get a warrant then.
Otherwise you're more likely to be jeopardizing innocent people's data than actually helping anyone.
FB is more than large enough to have dedicated liasons to make sure that there is a difference between 'dumb requests that are irrelevant' get separated out from the ones that matter.
I don't think you understood, we weren't understaffed, that's besides the point as it's not hard to reply to an email. The main aspect is you should demand a warrant because you as someone that works for a private company shouldn't be the arbitrar of if a cop has enough or not (plus the cop will obviously not give you any details besides ongoing investigation in most cases). There's a job for that which is a judge. In my opinion even internal lawyers should not judge that outside of the legality of the request. In many jurisdictions you can get in trouble for doing that.
I've in FBs position and I'm happy to report that we had a very well oiled process to deal with pederasts and assisted LE in putting a couple of them - also in the US and Canada - behind bars. That's one of the reason I knew that officer that I mentioned above. These people need all the help they can get, their departments are overworked and understaffed. Investigations are often a bit more time sensitive than you seem to believe. But hey, it's just a couple of kids.
FB has armies of lawyers to stall each and every legitimate request for data and there is ample proof that they have done this many times over the years. This is just one of many cases where they - you - and their tech could have made a difference, but chose to withhold aid.
As for LE sharing proof to convince you that things are a bit time critical: I have never found that to be a problem, assuming you have the stomach for it. What you seem to miss is that warrants have to be more specific than is useful in many cases and FB is well aware of this. In this case the LEO went with that request because he knew that a warrant with that specific set of conditionals would be unlikely, even if it would have helped to solve the case that much quicker.
But given that they're a terrible company with an absolutely horrible person at the helm I should probably not be surprised. See, if the likes of FB would actually take a stand on this subject that would take the wind out of the sails of a lot of these efforts to really harm privacy. But they're happy to sell you down the river when it benefits them and to use the privacy argument when that benefits them too.
A few years ago I came across a company that was wholesale sharing the worst of the worst and the CEO of that company was making all kinds of silly arguments about how they were 'just a dumb pipe'. They refused to take any counter measures and it took me proving to them and their - future - investors beyond a shadow of doubt that they must be aware of what and how much is going on but willfully turning a blind eye. Privacy was - of course - their stated reason for upholding their values. Because it suited them commercially, not because they actually gave two bits about actual privacy.
FB is a massive conduit for child pornography. You know it. FB management knows it. They have their internal processes to deal with flagged content. But they could do a lot better and they don't simply because it is just a cost to them. So they do the minimum and hide behind the privacy cloak when it suits them, even if they know full well what is going on.
On the one hand, this is a beautiful (but depressing) story about humans standing up for each other.
On the other hand, this is clearly propaganda from the BBC to push police state functionality on the UK population by pre-justifying it. "See what happens? Never mind the part about it taking six years. Let us see everything in your fucking lives, you twats."
None of this required a police state. Just people working together to cross-correlate information in the way that you would expect to be able to do in an open society.
What wrong do you think was done here? What would you prefer to be different?
> They contacted Facebook, which at the time dominated the social media landscape, asking for help scouring uploaded family photos - to see if Lucy was in any of them. But Facebook, despite having facial recognition technology, said it "did not have the tools" to help.
Willing to bet my life savings that they are able to do exactly this when the goal is to create shadow profiles or maximize some metric.
> The BBC asked Facebook why it couldn't use its facial recognition technology to assist the hunt for Lucy. It responded: "To protect user privacy, it's important that we follow the appropriate legal process, but we work to support law enforcement as much as we can."
You don't need to imply they didn't read that part, because it doesn't really affect the point of the comment, that Facebook doesn't actually care about privacy. Even if they're not sharing things willy-nilly, they're still aggressively tracking everyone they can.
The two views aren't necessarily in conflict. I don't appreciate Facebook's use of facial recognition technology, but they built it. I'm extremely disappointed they proceeded to use this technology to influence elections while fighting against making the data available to law enforcement. I understand this may not have been intentional on their part, but the result is the same, and I was not at all surprised by it.
A fourth option is "I can and I will, but only after certain prerequisites are met - go away and meet them first", which looks to me what they were saying.
There's another option "I will but only if ..." which is what Facebook rightfully went with. Come back with a warrant is _always_ the correct answer when dealing with LE.
Facial recognition is very powerful these days. My friend took a photo of his kid at the top of Twin Peaks in SF, with the city in the background. Unfortunately, due to the angle, you could barely see the eyes and a portion of the nose of the kid. Android was still able to tag the kid.
I feel like Facebook really dropped the ball here. It is obvious that Squire and colleagues are working for the Law Enforcement. If FB was concerned about privacy, they could have asked them to get a judicial warrant to perform a broad search.
But they didn't. And Lucy continued to be abused for months after that.
I hope when Zuck is lying on his death bed, he gets to think about these choices that he has made.
Google photos has the advantage of a limited search space. Any photo you take is overwhelmingly likely to be one of the few faces already in the library. Not to say facebook couldn't solve the problem. But the ability of Google to do facial recognition with such poor inputs is that it's searching on 40~ faces rather than x billion faces.
> I feel like Facebook really dropped the ball here
This story was from more than a decade ago.
Facebook had facial recognition after that, but they deleted it all in response to public outcry. It’s sad to see HN now getting angry at Facebook for not doing facial recognition.
> I hope when Zuck is lying on his death bed, he gets to think about these choices that he has made.
Are we supposed to be angry at Zuckerberg now for making the privacy conscious decision to drop facial recognition? Or is everyone just determined to be angry regardless of what they do?
The EU AI act activates this year. Facial recognition is in the restrictive list. You don't want to give auditors ammunition before it goes live as top fine would cost FB around $4B, and wouldn't be a one time fine.
Even if only law enforcement can use it, having that feature is highly regulated.
[edit] I see this is from years ago. I should read the articles first. :)
I would hazard a guess that the facial recognition will limit the search scope to people associated (to some degree) with your friends account and some threshold of metrics gathered from the image. I doubt it is using a broad search.
With billions of accounts, the false positive rate of facial recognition when matching against every account would likely make the result difficult to use. Even limiting to a single country like UK the number could be extremely large.
Let say there is a 0.5% false positive rate and some amount of false negatives. With 40 million users, that would be 200 000 false positives.
The only explanation for this comment is you never used reverse image search by Google or yandex before it was nerfed or you'd know this is super plausible to find direct hits without many false positives.
> I feel like Facebook really dropped the ball here
This case began being investigated on January 2014 [0], which means abuse began (shudder) in 2012-13 if not earlier.
Facebook/Meta only began rolling out DeepFace [1] in June 2015 [2]
Heck, VGG-Face wasn't released until 2015 [3] and Image-Based Crowd Counting only began becoming solvable in 2015-16.
> Facial recognition is very powerful these days.
Yes. But it is 2026, not 2014.
> I hope when Zuck is lying on his death bed, he gets to think about these choices that he has made
I'm sure there are plenty of amoral choices he can think about, but not solving facial detection until 2015 is probably not one of them.
---
While it feels like mass digital surveillance, social media, and mass penetration of smartphones has been around forever it only really began in earnest just 12 years ago. The past approximately 20 years (iPhone was first released on June 2007 and Facebook only took off in early 2009 after smartphones and mobile internet became normalized) have been one of the biggest leaps in technology in the past century. The only other comparable decades were probably 1917-1937 and 1945-1965.
Facebook rightly retired their facial recognition system in 2021 over concerns about user privacy. Facebook is a social media site, they are not the government or police.
When people on hacker News talk about requiring cops to do traditional police work instead of doing wide ranging trawls using technology, this is exactly what they meant. I hope you don't complain when the future you want becomes reality and the three letter agencies come knocking down your door just because you happened to be in the same building as a crime in progress and the machine learning algorithms determined your location via cellular logs and labelled you as a criminal.
The grim meathook future of ubiquitous surveillance is coming regardless. At the very least we could get some proper crime solving out of it along the way.
There’s a pretty big difference between surveillance logging your every move your and scanning photos voluntarily uploaded to Facebook.
No, I don’t like Facebook using facial recognition technology, and no I don’t like that someone else can upload photos of me without my consent (which ironically could leverage facial recognition technology to blanket prevent), but these are other technical and social issues that are unrelated to the root issue. I also wish there were clear political and legal boundaries around surveillance usage for truly abhorrent behaviour versus your non-Caucasian neighbour maybe j -walking triggering a visit from ICE.
Yes, it’s an abuse of power for these organisations to collect data these ways, but I’m not against their use to prevent literal ongoing child abuse, it’s one of the least worst uses of it.
> From that list of 40 or 50 people, it was easy to find and trawl their social media. And that is when they found a photo of Lucy on Facebook with an adult who looked as though she was close to the girl - possibly a relative.
It sounds like Facebook was a huge boost to the investigation despite that.
Facebook did nothing to assist in narrowing a search area.
What Facebook actually did was host images .. so that after the team narrowed a list down to under 100 people they could look through profiles by hand.
It may as well have been searching Flickr, Instagram, Etsy, etc. profiles by hand.
Yes, and if Facebook didn't exist, presumably these images connecting the abuser to the victim wouldn't have been available anywhere for the investigators to find.
If Facebook didn’t exist, they would’ve found the photos on MySpace. Come on.
All Facebook likely did here that was any different than any other social media platform would have done, was gather Sandberg, Zuck and a cadre of snotty, sniveling engineers in a conference room and debate whether this was good engagement for the platform.
It seems to me that the BBC is including those passages at the beginning and end of their story as propaganda so the public begs (demands, even) for more surveillance, and the sale of private data to the government. I mean, think of the children, like Lucy! Seems to be having that effect in this thread, in any case.
It’s absolutely propaganda and a perfect example of how the public gets manipulated on a daily basis. Let’s break down the facts:
- Pushes for facial recognition
- Pushes for more state run surveillance
- Pushes for AI based surveillance
- Pushes for greater data collection, access & mining
- Legitimises it all under the classic “save the kids” meme and pushes emotionally hard for more.
The main issues i’ve seen discussed on HN the last couple of months have been critical of the never ending and increasing government surveillance. Both sides of the pond. This is their answer.
Simultaneously we’re hearing about how almost anybody and everybody beyond a level of power was well aware of industial level sex trafficking and abuse, and either totally turned a blind eye or joined in.
The article might carry some weight if it wasn’t from an authoritarian state backed organisation that’s very well known for covering up for, and protecting multiple famous high level sexual criminals within it’s own organisation, spanning multiple decades, that has never faced any real audit, investigation or justice for its own crimes.
I can't understand how anyone can do such a job for any length of time. I worked at a PC repair shop back in the 90s, fixed some dude's PC, and I saw a bunch of CSAM stuff (a lot, like thousands of pics, all children). I reported it to the local cops, then the FBI got involved, and that's the last I heard of it. My point is that the memory of those pics haunt me to this day. And I only saw a handful of pics, over, maybe, a period of about 2 minutes. To do that all day, everyday - how could one not become an alcoholic?
This is an old story about an old investigation. It is old news dredged up to try to win sympathy for DHS/ICE. It is propaganda resurrected to make DHS look useful.
They cherry-picked a story that they knew would win public sympathy since no one wants a child molester to run free. Lets show a time when an agent solved a case for an excellent outcome.
Pick a DHS/ICE story from this year and see what kind of dystopic shitshow you report on.
This is propaganda. Gullible people fall for this shit every day. Put some thought into the context before you swallow the turd.
The BBC spent 5 years making a documentary and just finished. They had no idea that the US would in its current state when they started. That doesn't free them from criticism of the content, but the timing is a coincidence.
I haven't watched the video (linked from the article) and I certainly hope the current events caused them to reflect on whether pushing for DHS to have more power is wise, but the last line in the article doesn't give me much optimism.
Although the past couple of years have been an even more stark descent into incompetence and malice, there has not been a moment in DHS's 24-year history at which it was worth defending, let alone with this pattern of propaganda.
It is perfectly possible to investigate and prevent child abuse without this particular configuration.
I'd argue the DHS is incidental and the real story is "law enforcement deserves open access to social media feeds." In this light, the BBC's angle becomes much clearer.
A cynic is simply a realist who has seen too much shit. I am a firm realist. I see the world as it is and hope that others will come along to help make it better but I don't naively hold my breath.
DHS needs a win in the public's eyes. BBC has the air of a trusted platform. It is no big stretch to make the connection that dredging up an old story about tracking down and capturing a pedo using an elite DHS unit would be a useful tool to win back some public support. You notice that there are no dates given in the article so the reader has no way to know that this went down years ago. It looks new and fresh.
Propaganda. I don't have to be gullible so I choose not to be.
And also to drege up "think of the children" rage that makes some people demand expansion of surveillance and free exchange of serveillance data with governments. Manufacturing consent.
Submitter is Canadian and re: America, posted "I read recently that Patrimonialism is a good way of describing the current regime" about 10 months ago.
Doesn't sound like paid DHS/ICE psyopper.
Any reason to think it is?
EDIT: Got the "you're posting too fast", so in reply to OP below:
> Submitter's nationality has nothing to do with it nor does his post history. WTF
Well, yes it does, its exculpatory evidence for a stranger you publicly accused of dredging up the news to try and win sympathy for DHS/ICE. (twice now)
Original post, by you: "It is old news dredged up to try to win sympathy for DHS/ICE."
This post, by you: "why do they need to dredge it up today?"
Are you suggesting that the BBC, the world service arm of a British public broadcaster (that is editorially independent from the state and even the wider BBC), began spending five years filming a documentary across the US, Portugal, Brazil, and Russia, just so that they could secretly support a US government agency half a decade before it became embroiled in controversy?
The claim is that an article was submitted intentionally to manipulate public perception of DHS.
We can't relax the claim to "well, it says DHS found a pedo, so it's propaganda ipso facto, because DHS did something good": they specifically argue the submission was the propaganda, specifically because it'd be absurd to claim it was published as DHS propaganda. (it's an article by the BBC)
Maybe it's just me, and I wouldn't have thought this a few years back, but my immediate reaction as I started reading this was "Oh look, somehow they got the fucking _BBC_ to run a DHS whitewashing feel good story. I wonder what's about to hit the media that they'd like buried?"
Related: A researcher for Meta, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram, warned executives at the tech giant that there may be upward of 500,000 cases of sexual exploitation of minors per day on the social media platforms.
- if evenly distributed (which is unlikely), then roughly 7-8% of all kids would feature in Meta exploitation yearly
That suggests very high reoccurrence; but even reoccurrence suggests the total rate remains quite high. A reoccurrence rate of 100x would suggest that roughly 1 in 1000 kids is exploited on Meta, yearly.
Just got done the doc they made. Long, disgusting, but informative/interesting from a tech/problem solving prospective. Not an easy watch tho. https://youtu.be/mNUku0jd4FA
Yet at the same time the status of Terabytes of abuse material seized from Epstein's properties is unknown because the abusers are rich guys protected by the president who is probably one of them. And law enforcement is actively helping to obstruct justice for the thousands of victims.
There's dozens or hundreds of abusers easily identifiable in there and so this hero story is just propaganda at this time.
>From that list of 40 or 50 people, it was easy to find and trawl their social media. And that is when they found a photo of Lucy on Facebook with an adult who looked as though she was close to the girl - possibly a relative.
> Squire works for US Department of Homeland Security Investigations in an elite unit which attempts to identify children appearing in sexual abuse material.
I'm wondering why they didn't cross reference the addresses they had from the furniture stores with those of registered sex offenders, as this abuser turned out to be? And further intersect that with "Flaming Alamo" brick houses??
From TFA: "Initially Squire was ecstatic, expecting they could access a digitised customer list. But Harp broke the news that the sales records were just a "pile of notes" that went back decades."
Note: the "agent" the title refers to has nothing to do with an AI/LLM agent. Originally I thought this had something to do with an AI agent, as if someone put an AI agent in charge of identifying dark web pictures for clues. It's a good story nevertheless and I'm glad the victim was rescued, but nothing to do with AI/LLMs.
First of all, sorry to hear about the poor girl’s ordeal, and I’m glad she was rescued. But after reading about all that complicated digital sleuthing, it basically comes down to this:
"The team realised that in the household with Lucy was her mother’s boyfriend - a convicted sex offender."
I feel like the police should’ve started there: cross-referencing people in her close circle against a list of known sex offenders.
Or, you know, if they knew who she was they would just go and rescue her?
How are people struggling so much with basic logic on this one? This is quite strange. Are some of you just unable to imagine having limited knowledge and not being able to just look everything up?
Am I reading this correctly that the address where they found the child was where her mother’s boyfriend was living?
> "So we narrowed it down to [this] one address… and started the process of confirming who was living there through state records, driver's licence… information on schools," says Squire.
> The team realised that in the household with Lucy was her mother's boyfriend - a convicted sex offender.
There’s a lot of focus on Facebook in the comments here, but unless I’m missing something the strangest part about this story was that the child’s mother was dating a convicted sex offender and they had to go through all of this process to arrive at this? It’s impressive detective work with the brick expert identifying bricks and the sofa sellers gathering their customer list, but how did this connection not register earlier?
EDIT: As others have pointed out, the wording is confusing. They made these connections to the identity only after identifying the house
The registry did come up, as soon as they had enough information for it to be useful. They were looking for a specific child, starting just from the images that her abuser was sharing on the internet (in which he intentionally tried to hide identifying details).
The registry is just a big list of names and addresses.
Sex offender registries are just registries. They only work if someone decides to actually do a query. It might prevent them from getting a childcare job, but it doesn't really prevent them from accessing children at all.
The registers are also massively bloated, some people get put on them for nothing more than public urination.
The only sex offenders who actually get regular checks that might identify this type of thing, are those on parole, or similar court ordered programs.
Other things that could get you on the registry include visiting a nude beach in California or being an 18-year-old high school student with a 17-year-old girlfriend and having your sexual activity discovered by a vindictive parent (that last one will get you the bonus bar of shame of criminal activity involving a minor). The registries are rather blunt tools and also end up doing things like making getting housing difficult (there was a news story I saw in the 90s about an encampment under a freeway in Florida as it was the only place people on the sex offender registry could legally live in a major city (I think Miami but this was 30 years ago). A more recent story in Chicago pointed out that a restriction on sleeping on the CTA would cause homeless people on the registry to end up being unable to meet the terms of their parole). I don’t really have much sympathy for child sex abusers, but if people are such dangers to society that they can only live under a freeway or will be reincarcerated on unavoidable technicalities, something is very wrong.
Louis Theroux did a very interesting but quiet sad documentary on this
https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b040qrxw
Right but I'll be honest, I've never thought about looking up the people I've dated in the past. No one really talked about it when I was younger. I don't remember my mother telling me to do criminal background checks on people I'm seeing.
Happened to me. Went out with somebody who turned out to be a serial shop lifter who operated with a small gang of other shop lifters. Everything looked fine up front until they disappeared when we had plans without contact for days. Thought I was ghosted. Turns out they were arrested.
A friend went out with someone who destroyed his car after he broke up because she was violent twords him. He had to get a restraining order. A friend of his dug up a link to a FL police site. Turns out she did a little time down there for assaulting another woman, beating her with a coat rack during a fight. He never thought to look her up either and she seemed nice at first. Shit happens. Don't blame the victim for not being paranoid that everyone they're dating might be a criminal. Especially when there are damn good liars out there.
Back when my wife and I were renting, we only found out our landlord was on the list because his parole officer stopped by and asked if he'd informed us as he was legally required to do.
We moved out rather quickly after that. If we were in a situation where we had to rent again, and went with an individual renting their own house rather than a company, checking out the registry is on the checklist of things to do.
How many of these sex offenders bought this couch and live close to this brick factory in homes built in that time period?
About 0.3% of the adult population is on registries in the US.
With 40,000 couch sales, there would be roughly 120 sex offenders would have bought that couch. You can see what I mean about the registries being bloated.
Doesn't really narrow things down until you add the brick factory, but then they already had it down to 40 houses.
But it's a mistake to even assume the couch was bought by the same house as the offender. The offender could just be visiting, or the couch could have been moved to a different house since purchase (sold second hand, or the owner moved). And you are assuming the offender had been caught before, or was even on the sex offender registry for abusing children.
So ~1m people are registered sex offenders? As in, 1m people who were arrested and found guilty of sex offences?
That’s insane.
It's more like 800,000
But I used number of adults, not total population. Because most children aren't registered sex offenders, or buying expensive furniture.
I think what is confusing is likely that the investigators/detectives were probably trying to make sure that the girl was actually in the house where the sex offender was registered or technically living, and not maybe kept somewhere else. A lot of detective work is building the case, but also confirming what you believe is actually true and you need the evidence to also request the warrant on factual grounds. They could have busted in the door of that house and found that there was no such brick to be found anywhere and the girl was sold off to someone else or something like that.
It’s really rather sick and deranged though that this kind of dynamic of women with children associating with sex offenders is not exactly rare. Frankly, I hope the mother was also charged.
Why just the mother? What about her absentee father?
> Frankly, I hope the mother was also charged.
Would you want her charged if she didn't even know?
There is nothing in the article suggesting that the mother conspired with her boyfriend, or that she even knew he was a sex offender. I can imagine a scenario where the mother blames herself for not knowing and is utterly destroyed by misplaced guilt. Who knows what actually happened? The article wasn't about that.
> Would you want her charged if she didn't even know?
Yes. She is responsible for making sure her children is safe and well taken care of. I say this morally, not as a legal fact. She should know what they are up to, and she should notice if any of them are regularly abused over an interval of years.
> Would you want her charged if she didn't even know?
Yes? There are laws against child endangerment for a reason, and giving someone unrestricted accsss to your child without performing a basic background check very much falls into that territory.
> There are laws against child endangerment for a reason
What do you think the reason is? The deterrence value is zero.
I hav heard this many times, but never found a single example - and I’ve looked. Everyone I’ve researched on the registry richly deserved it.
I challenge you and anyone else reading this to find an example of someone who is on the sex offender registry due to public urination.
I had a friend threatened with this by a cop. I was there. We had been drinking and he wanted to change his oil at a Jiffy Lube. Unbeknownst to us there was a park on the other side. He just got a ticket but the cop made the threat. It doesn't disprove your claim but it is an example of why the belief might persist
It's a stupid meme. Public urination, like actually taking a piss in public while no one is around you, is likely going to be a ticket for disorderly conduct if a specific charge for it doesn't exist. You won't get an indecent exposure charge unless you're purposely exposing yourself to others, it requires intent. Sometimes flashers will use the excuse of urinating for their intentional exposure or will lie that their indecent exposure charge was due to public urination and not because they were really masturbating in plain view. There probably have been prosecutors that have tried to slap an indecent exposure charge on an innocent public urinater but like everyone else says, they can't find any proof of it actually sticking.
https://law.justia.com/cases/massachusetts/supreme-court/201...
I'm not sure that's what you meant to link to. The description there is beyond lurid, and that guy only ended up on a registry after a lot of shenanigans.
> he was convicted in 2015 of two counts of open and gross lewdness for displaying his genitals to a neighbor through the window of his home
So he was naked in his own home?
#Land of the free
The salient point was that the person was in a relationship to the child’s mother.
They didn't know who the child was, yet alone the mother. All they had were photos of an unnamed girl being abused.
I didn’t understand that part. The child has a mother, why wasn’t she reported missing?
A child does not need to be missing to be abused. Most abuse happens by people the child knows.
Indeed, he may not have even been on the lease or title of the residence.
> some people get put on them for nothing more than public urination
When minor offences can get people put on the register, this dilutes the meaning of being on the register.
Every actual sex offender will claim they're on there not because of the serious crimes they committed, but because they went nude on the wrong beach, or something similarly minor.
Have you ever looked at one of the registries?
The ones I've seen have had details about the offense(s).
We don't have public ones here in Australia, so no I've never looked at one.
Having details would make it harder to play down the offenses. But only if someone bothers to check.
Queensland allows residents to see the details of offenders in our local area, but you need to provide extensive ID to do so, and leaking that information is itself a crime. Daniel's Law was introduced in 2025 so this is pretty recent.
The whole thing about people getting put on the sex offender registry for public urination is a myth and there's no verifiable cases of it happening. There are two cases that are relatively close. The first is James Birch, who pled guilty to indecent exposure for peeing on a Taco Bell because he was representing himself and didn't understand that meant he'd have to register as a sex offender. He realized his mistake and the court let him undo the plea and the charges were dropped. The second is Juan Matamoros, a meth dealer from Florida who claimed in the mid-2000s that the reason why he got put on the Massachusetts sex offender registry in the 80s was public urination. Due to the age of the case and Massachusetts privacy laws the court records aren't publicly available and his lawyer from the 80s responded to a request for interview about the case with "no judge I am aware of would allow someone to be put on the sex offender registry for peeing in public".
If anyone tells you that's why they're on the sex offender registry, it's extremely likely they're lying about it and you should really look them up.
It was standard practice by the police and DA in 2000s Massachusetts.
Neighbors were annoyed at loud college parties at the school I went to, so local police waited in bushes to catch people peeing in them, arrested them, and one of the charges was indecent exposure.
Happened to one person I knew personally so it must have happened to several others at just this school.
My friend plead out to some lower charge or probably got a continuance, but it massively increased the leverage they had over him and the fees and fines they could collect, and it massively lowered the chance of him doing any pushback that could have lead to a jury trial, which at least as far as he understood at the time would have put him on the registry, and which is why they abused the law and charged people this way.
Are you entitled to a jury trial for peeing in the bushes in the USA?
That isn’t the case here in Australia.
You can go to trial, but it will be a judge-only trial, and is typically conducted by the magistrate who saw you for your first appearance on the matter, in the magistrates court, which is the lowest court here.
I believe most of the colonies are approximately the same.
You are constitutionally entitled to a jury trial for any criminal charge in the US under the Sixth Amendment.
Thanks.
I’d imagine it would be cost prohibitive to take a peeing in the bushes charge to jury trial though?
Sounds like the sort of thing one would only do if they were aiming to set a precedent for some reason?
95% of cases are settled before reaching jury trial. Usually a plea bargain for criminal cases. Settlement for civil cases. Or dismissal. The other 5% are expensive.
Would peeing in a bush be a criminal charge? I'm not American but I thought there was a difference between misdemeanors and "actual" crimes.
Unfortunately in the US we do in fact go so far as to criminalize urinating in public. It's weird to me that speeding (up to some limit) in a school zone is ranked below pissing in a shrub along the road.
Misdemeanors are actual crimes, yes.
There was also that Chicago Sunroof incident.
Not surprising to me at all. I’m a straight man and I’ve always dated single mothers, and it always shocked me how bad their ex partners were. Woman are drawn to toxic abusers like men are drawn to OnlyFans models and the real victims are the children. And women can be incredibly blind to what is going on with their child when they’re in a codependent relationship with the abuser.
"women are drawn to toxic abusers" is very, very wrong. It indicates a wish/desire/need to be abused. No, they are not drawn to that. Many abusers know how to look nice and perfect and are great at manipulation. Also, there may just be a lot of bad men in your social peer group.
Don't make it sound like it's the womens fault.
> "women are drawn to toxic abusers" is very, very wrong. It indicates a wish/desire/need to be abused.
It doesn't have to indicate that. I think it's more likely that those traits that those women find attractive are the same traits that toxic abusers have.
> Don't make it sound like it's the womens fault.
I don't think he was doing that - people can't help what traits they find attractive.
It’s called “Hybristophilia” and it’s a well-known phenomenon.
It's not very wrong unfortunately. Do you remember back in school that the nice, timid guys were friendzoned but the assholes always had girls after them ?
There must be some evolutionary justification, but we have to live with that unfortunate reality..
A different explanation that rings true to my experience is that people are drawn to confidence rather than a desire to be abused.
Toxic abusers and high school garbage are good at signalling strength despite their poor character and choices.
Sure, that also must be a factor.
But then again remember the incredible amounts of fan mail serial killers and serial rapists get while in prison. (this is taking it to the extreme of course)
It is the same like guys finding toxic sociopaths attractive, against our better judgement.
No, I do not remember that because I've seen different things. There is a lot of different things going on, like perceived confidence. This is just myth. There is no woman out there who wants to live in fear.
"[ Indirectly ] drawn to X [ due to trait Y ]" is not the same as "directly desires X". You are strawmanning the other party.
The OnlyFans example can be twisted in a similar manner.
No one said there were.
It’s not a myth. What convinced you that there is a myth?? Almost everyone seems to agree it’s a real thing from what I see online. I recommend you watch this video by YouTube channel @Elephantintheroom https://youtu.be/Gvj8hG2UvbA?si=qz_7aC4jYq2CBfJl
Apparently it’s much worse than what we see around us. Women literally fall in love with monsters.
Just take off those glasses and everyone will realize you're secretly hot
Oh this is not a spiteful view of the world, I've been quite lucky with my love life, thanks.
“Woman are drawn to toxic abusers”
That’s not true. Abusers are very capable at identifying and targeting vulnerable people. Abusers are drawn to vulnerable people.
Both statements can be true. Although the first is better phrased as drawn to traits that correlate with toxic abusers.
You could similarly observe that social groups have a tendency to select toxic people for leadership roles. The explanations as to why are various but the end result is plain to see.
I met a guy who was the creepiest dude I ever met in my life. Who intentionally was making me uncomfortable with personal questions (and admitted it when pressed! With a grin!). His job? Spending all day with mentally disabled children...
That's not evidence for any wrongdoing obviously, but it left me quite disturbed.
I seem to remember a test (I believe I read it in the Kevin Dutton book on psychopaths) where psychopaths would be shown a video of people walking down a corridor, and they were more likely to choose vulnerable people than either chance or the norm.
Whichever it was, they could spot a vulnerable person just from their manner while they walk.
I wouldn't say they were drawn to vulnerable people, though. Like anyone else, they assess opportunity and effort, and these people are easier than others for getting what they want.
Edit: I found one of the studies -
> Key takeaways
> Higher Factor 1 psychopathy scores correlate with improved accuracy in assessing victim vulnerability based on gait.
> Inmates with elevated psychopathy scores consciously utilize gait cues to judge vulnerability more frequently.
> Psychopathy's Factor 1 traits, like manipulativeness, drive effective victim selection among violent offenders.
> Victims often display distinct gait characteristics that predict perceived vulnerability to assault.
> Understanding body language cues may inform victimization prevention strategies for at-risk individuals.
https://www.academia.edu/22213822/Psychopathy_and_Victim_Sel...
Remarkable. What does vulnerability mean in this context?
Edit: They asked people how many times they had been victimized, which they defined as "worse than bullying".
> Twelve video clips of unsuspecting targets walking from Wheeler et al. (2009) were used in the present study. The targets were undergraduate stu- dents, of whom 8 were women and 4 were men. As described in Wheeler et al., targets were unknowingly videotaped from behind as they walked from room A to B, to capture natural gaits. The targets indicated whether they had ever been victimized and how many times they had been victim- ized in the past (after the age of 18). The wording of the question was very broad, given the numerous types of victimization that can occur, and the effects of any victimization are relative. If participants asked for clarifica- tion, they were asked to think of victimization as being equal to or greater than bullying. Each target’s gait was coded by two independent judges according to the Grayson and Stein’s criteria (1981). As discussed in the original Wheeler et al. study, interjudge reliabilities were high for all gait characteristics (kappa = .77 to 1.00). Essential to the idea that body lan- guage cues indicate vulnerability, targets coded as displaying vulnerable body language in the Wheeler et al. were more likely to have self-identified as a victim, rho (11) = .68, p < .05.
---
Edit 2: The study references a very similar study from 32 years earlier.
> The original 1981 study by Grayson and Stein was incredibly simple. It involved setting up a video camera on a street in New York City, filming people (60 persons) as they walked by (between 10:00 AM and 12:00 pm over a three day period), and then showing the footage to convicted offenders (12 of them), whose crimes involved violence, and asking them to select those individuals who they would target/victimize (on a scale from 1 to 10), in order to discover if there were any identifiable non-verbal cues that were commonly picked up on/identified.
https://www.bostonkravmaga.com/blog/criminology/that-grayson...
So the 1st study focused purely on target selection and gait analysis, while the 2nd one interviewed the potential targets to see how that lined up with their actual history of being abused.
Now the billion dollar question of correlation vs causation: seems to go both ways, as usual. Neurodivergent people walk differently (and have differences in motor areas of the brain), but also trauma changes your posture and movement...
I think the point OP is making isn't "it's strange that the mother had such a boyfriend", but rather "it's strange that so much forensic effort was required to suspect the boyfriend when he should have been an obvious first guess".
I mean, there is no official database of “boyfriends”. Even after you identified the girl, and found the mom, how would you figure out if she has a boyfriend, and if so who?
Remember that if you tip them of in any way the abuser might go escape and hide with the girl or even worse decide to get rid of the witness by murdering the girl. So you can’t just do the easy thing and ask the mom nicely.
Case in point
A Cuban fitness model engaged to a lowlife drug traffic currently in prison in Finland. She specifically traveled all the way to meet him after sexting with him on social media.
https://www.is.fi/viihde/art-2000011776913.html
You've always dated single mothers?
After your late 20s, that's like 90% of your pool.
Where, in Utah ?
> an abused girl his team had named Lucy
> It was impossible to work out who, or where, Lucy was.
Lucy is a pseudonym. They were trying to get Facebook to tell them who the girl was through facial recognition. There’s no reason to expect a priori that the offender would be in any registry.
There are a lot of women out there drawn to criminals of every kind. The primary demographic of true crime shows are women for a reason, not to mention the letters murderers and such receive. I would be curious to know why this is, and if it happens in other cultures too.
It's like that in all cultures that give more freedom to women. It's an evolutionary thing. Part of the reasons our ancestors did not trust women with freedom.
If there were as many women in prison as men you can be sure there would be as many or more men interested in them.
Can I be sure? How? There are plenty of women in prison as-is, although high profile cases are rarer.
Relatively speaking there aren't plenty of women in prison for violent crimes. It's about a 9:1 ratio. Men obsessively sexualise everything in our patriarchal society.
I think the order went finding the house first and only then were they able to identify the victim (and consequently the offender)
That would make sense. Thank you.
You could still run the sofa customers list against a list of known offenders but is there a federal list? Maybe the number of states where the sofa was sold was to large and getting the full list not feasible?
Exactly, it sounds like they didn't know who the girl was from photos alone; "Lucy" was just a name they gave the victim.
> the strangest part about this story was that the child’s mother was dating a convicted sex offender
70.6% of beaten children are beaten at the mother’s custody. Most often it turns out the choice of companion of the mother is inappropriate. While many see that as blaming the mother and it is a huge taboo in our society, it is such a huge humanitarian problem that it’s worth educating women better over that specific problem, and taking sanctions if necessary.
70.8% in the case of death. Source: CDC 2001-2006 if I remember. Incoming: Many ad-hominem about the source, it’s a problem that never gets addressed.
> While many see that as blaming the mother
Yes, that's how I see it.
> it is such a huge humanitarian problem that it’s worth educating women better over that specific problem, and taking sanctions if necessary.
"Sanctions"? This is an article about successful digital sleuthing, but your takeaway is that we need to punish the mother?
Not to mention we're talking about rape not beatings. Beatings wouldn't put DHS on the case.
A lot of evils cannot be eradicated with just more education. Sunshine I we as a society have to put our foot down.
There's been several cases of mothers being put in jail for child negligence in such situations in my country.
They couldn't ID the child initially.
There's also a lot of "WHY AREN'T YOU FOCUSING ON THE MOTHER?" whataboutism in the comments, which I find appalling. The article was about something else, and who knows what her circumstances were.
Most crimes like this are, sadly, committed by someone who has some connection to the family. It’s standard to investigate connections first. That’s not “appalling” to suggest, it’s just a sad reality of these crimes.
They should be focusing on everyone connected to the family if known. It would be negligent not to.
The confusion came from the way the article was written. They didn’t know the identity until afterward.
I just want to point out that there’s a huge difference between thoroughly investigating the family after abuse of this magnitude has been proven, and making parents legally culpable for any harm that comes to their children in general.
We can react to the fact that mothers can do more to protect their children from abuse in many ways. We can give them better access to information and support in getting away from abusers. We can create better links between police and communities they serve. We can create more pathways for children to be exposed to healthy adult behavior and connections with healthy adults, even when the family is dysfunctional.
But when we find evidence that existing supports have failed, deeply investigating why is critical.
Something like 60-70% of violent crime involves victims and offenders that know each other, and with murder and sexual assault it's 70-80%.
You are right, the article is about:
> She said at the point Homeland Security ended her abuse she had been "praying actively for it to end".
You can provide your plausible suggestions as to what the family relationship looked like that the girl could neither ask her own mother for help nor was her father there for her.
My heart breaks for parents who learn that their children found themselves unable to confide in them about rape.
I doubt the mother didn't know.
True. Damaged parents are often the kinds of people who are taken advantage of by sex offenders. I think it requires a social fix of some kind.
However damaged someone is they have a duty of care to their children. There's someone else with a blame in the story but to excuse this is very wrong.
Sorry, but the wording isn't confusing, I think you just didn't read it properly. All they knew was a girl, somewhere, was being abused. They didn't know who her mother was or, obviously, who was taking the pictures.
absolute ~cinema~ surveillance
I’ve spent just a teeny bit of time helping international ICE investigators (not that one; internet child exploitation) postpone PTSD with technology. It seems like after two years of their job, they’re going to have a mental break. So postponing is all you can really do.
It’s disheartening how underfunded these agencies are compared to, what feels like at least, the severity of the crimes they’re up against.
These folks are heroes. This is one place AI has a lot of potential (but very little commercial value).
Moderation feels like the one of the most ethical uses of AI. Being able to prevent a lot of the worst content from being posted and preventing people from being exposed to it.
Putting that kind of filter in the way of speech seems ripe for abuse.
In the UK once website blocking powers were established, their scope was extended repeatedly by courts for IP protection purposes.
Sure... so now we end up with people watching abuse 9 to 5 to train AI. https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2026/feb/05/i...
I don't think the issue here is related to AI. Without AI, moderators would still have to look at these same videos. The difference is they would hit the public first before being flagged and sent to moderators. Now with AI they can be prevented from ever going public.
The fact that we still need to traumatize workers to confirm the automated decisions is sad. The only other ways I can see to resolve this would be either to just blindly trust the AI result without any human oversight, or to require all facebook users to link their government ID to accounts and only allow posting by users in countries where the authorities arrest the people posting these things.
Outsourcing everything. Even PTSD from training AI to India so privileged law enforcement officers and social media moderators don't have to. This system is so hypocritical and broken.
I always thought these were the perfect jobs for psychopaths, putting that lack of empathy/stress to some good use e.g. in similar police work.
Another comment mentioned ICE as well, so I've been looking into it, and imagine my surprise to learn that ICE (yes that one) has been working in this space since since the Obama admin. Huh.
https://www.ice.gov/careers/hero
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Justice_for_Victims_of_Traffic...
HSI was primarily the main investigative body responsible for human traffic and crimes against children prior to this administration. The second largest federal investigative agency behind the FBI (6k agents). Now doing immigration enforcement.
It's unfortunate that they are being repurposed to fix a problem entirely generated purposefully for political gain. Those individuals should never have been allowed to flood the system and take effort away from true egregious victims and crime.
Yeah, I looked into it, and ICE actually has two distinct components: Homeland Security Investigations (HSI) and Enforcement and Removal Operations (ERO). Pretty much everyone things ICE == ERO, so you've got stuff like Canadians agitating to close the HSI collaboration offices in Canada.
This administration pulled people off catching child predators to go after some Juan at home depot. in light of the epstein coverup, its hardly surprising.
Coyotes are frequently part of criminal organizations. They take advantage of people in any and every way that they can. Slavery, sexual and otherwise, is not at all an uncommon result of being brought into the country under the radar, so to speak.
AI for helping mitigate PTSD, or helping with the investigations?
Because the latter basically entails helping create a surveillance state. Which in theory could be an acceptable trade-off, but it seems disingenuous to say "AI companies have no financial incentives here" when the big issue is that AI companies would actually be helping to establish powerful dragnet surveillance capabilities. There would need to be a strong democratic process around this.
This is awesome - but they shouldn't have revealed the secret on how they caught them.. like 1000's of other offenders could land up making similar mistakes. It just makes sense to keep your mouth shut and keep on hunting.
I thought so too, but it actually wasn't the couch, brick or whatever. It was overconfidence and mistakes that were exploited and there is no patch for that
So do I read it correctly that good old detective work did the job, and that breaking e2e encryption and client side scanning wasn’t needed? Politicians tell me a different story.
Not that I agree with either of those things but I think the implicit argument is that breaking encryption would lead to faster arrest and fewer years of abuse for the victims.
They don't even arrest pedophiles when they have them on video tape and a client list when the president is on them. This has all become one big joke, justice I mean. There is no justice.
Except people wouldnt post such material to TOR if they knew the crypto is backdoored. They'd post it to an alternative that ignores the law
> "And the woman on the phone was awesome. She was like, 'how can the brick industry help?'"
That is an epic sentence!
periodically the various forces tackling CSAM release images which are ENTIRELY SFW, and are purely of a jersey, a backpack, a location, a tea setting, and ask people to tell them things: Was this available in Belgium? Did you ever see this in a second hand shop? Do you recognise the logo on this bag?
Information inside images is useful for this kind of struggle to identify victims of crime.
Sounds a bit more productive than Wordle. How can we get involved?
https://www.europol.europa.eu/stopchildabuse
For any Australians here, there is also https://www.accce.gov.au/what-we-do/trace-an-object - I hope there are similar sites for other regions too.
Don't region lock yourself - abuse investigations in Europe or Australia may be from abuse in a different jurisdiction. Alternatively, a gift given from an Australian family member to a European could be a bit of information that helps an investigation rule out or close in on a potential abuser.
This seems like the perfect job/challenge for those GeoGuesser pros
This speaks volumes of the moral values of Facebook vs the brick industry.
Tbf the brick industry helped indirectly and it just happened to be super helpful. They didn’t perform a mass mining of user data across the whole country or a large region. They had very little data to go off other than someone’s past memory of the material. I’m Facebook would have helped in that way too if it was able to.
However, this is exactly how I’d have hoped Facebook would have responded without some sort of court order for data, they shouldn’t be mining everything at the mere request for help by a law enforcement agency. I get this topic is one where you’d wish there was an exception but exceptions are slippery slopes.
> "He goes: 'Bricks are heavy.' And he said: 'So heavy bricks don't go very far.'"
Move slow, build things.
>Flaming Alamos were not visible on the outside of any of the homes, because the properties were clad in other materials. But the team asked Harp to assess - by looking at their style and exterior - if these properties were likely to have been built during a period when Flaming Alamos had been on sale. "We would basically take a screenshot of that house or residence and shoot it over to John and say 'would this house have these bricks inside?'" says Squire.
Zillow and tax assessors will list the age\year built of any property.
You can do the same yourself here: https://www.europol.europa.eu/stopchildabuse
I feel like I'm gonna puke, just knowing these are all cut out from images where a child is being sexually abused makes them feel so cursed.
There is only one location shown in the images, in the past there were several and much clearer, I cannot image how difficult it must be to find it if the europol cannot find it in 2026.
Old thread for context: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19469681
Human agents, for once, not AI agents.
I'm impressed by the people doing this job. How do you turn off at the end of the shift and go home to sleep, when you know an hour more of work could make a more immediate difference? How does work/life balance work in this profession?
Micki Pistorius (yes, Oscar Pistorius' aunt) talks about this in her auto-biography - Catch Me a Killer (2000)
[also made as a TV series of the same name in 2024]
To paraphrase "How can I sleep when I am the key to finding these murderers."
She was involved in more than thirty serial killer cases while at South African Police Service (SAPS) working as a Criminal Profiler.
It took a great toll on her life but she was ultimately able to overcome the stress of it.
So, I had a friend. Had because he's dead. He did this work for a decade and a half and then couldn't deal with it anymore. In that time he put countless assholes behind bars. At some point he stopped responding to my emails so I called the unit and they were absolutely devastated, this guy was the backbone of their operation, the one with by far the most computer experience of all of them. RIP Ronald.
It is very hard to imagine what the life of someone on the frontline is like, the ones that are really battling online scum. So take that 'think of the children' thing and realize that there are people who really do think of the children and it is one of the hardest jobs on the planet.
Quote from TFA:
"The BBC asked Facebook why it couldn't use its facial recognition technology to assist the hunt for Lucy. It responded: "To protect user privacy, it's important that we follow the appropriate legal process, but we work to support law enforcement as much as we can."
So, privacy matters to FB when it is to protect the abusers of children. How low can you go...
The authorities simply needed to start an ad campaign with facebook targeting child abusers. Then FB would have that data packaged up and ready to sell in an instant.
So why wouldn't the investigators follow the appropriate legal process?
Now, I'm sure that everything present in this article is true. But I'm worried that the reason we get this article now (apparently the things the article describes happened 10-15 years ago) is because it's part of someone's job to build support for warrantless driftnet surveillance, mandatory real-ID systems etc.
So I think it's fair to ask: why was it so hard to give Facebook the warrant they asked for?
Note how they didn't say that the legal process wasn't followed just that they didn't want to use their fancy face recognition for a good cause in one very particular instance.
> https://www.reddit.com/r/politics/comments/1r6wluq/departmen...
Let's see them stand tall then, now that the department of HS is going to make the request, no doubt through the appropriately bought and paid for channels.
That last bit is not really how it works. I've been in a small company that law enforcement would routinely reach out to for help with solving crimes because they thought we'd have relevant data.
99% of requests are wild goose chases based on nothing. Like literally dumb requests that are not only irrelevant, the request wouldn't even get past that cops boss, much less a judge. But a cop can just ask whatever they want regardless of merit or relevance and it's up to you to say yes or no.
In those years we received two requests with warrants that made more sense but when I see "company denied to help" I understand why. Most cases it's a random cop fishing for private info that has nothing to do with anything. And when it's true, just get a warrant then.
Otherwise you're more likely to be jeopardizing innocent people's data than actually helping anyone.
FB is more than large enough to have dedicated liasons to make sure that there is a difference between 'dumb requests that are irrelevant' get separated out from the ones that matter.
I don't think you understood, we weren't understaffed, that's besides the point as it's not hard to reply to an email. The main aspect is you should demand a warrant because you as someone that works for a private company shouldn't be the arbitrar of if a cop has enough or not (plus the cop will obviously not give you any details besides ongoing investigation in most cases). There's a job for that which is a judge. In my opinion even internal lawyers should not judge that outside of the legality of the request. In many jurisdictions you can get in trouble for doing that.
> we
Ah ok, never mind me then.
I've in FBs position and I'm happy to report that we had a very well oiled process to deal with pederasts and assisted LE in putting a couple of them - also in the US and Canada - behind bars. That's one of the reason I knew that officer that I mentioned above. These people need all the help they can get, their departments are overworked and understaffed. Investigations are often a bit more time sensitive than you seem to believe. But hey, it's just a couple of kids.
FB has armies of lawyers to stall each and every legitimate request for data and there is ample proof that they have done this many times over the years. This is just one of many cases where they - you - and their tech could have made a difference, but chose to withhold aid.
As for LE sharing proof to convince you that things are a bit time critical: I have never found that to be a problem, assuming you have the stomach for it. What you seem to miss is that warrants have to be more specific than is useful in many cases and FB is well aware of this. In this case the LEO went with that request because he knew that a warrant with that specific set of conditionals would be unlikely, even if it would have helped to solve the case that much quicker.
But given that they're a terrible company with an absolutely horrible person at the helm I should probably not be surprised. See, if the likes of FB would actually take a stand on this subject that would take the wind out of the sails of a lot of these efforts to really harm privacy. But they're happy to sell you down the river when it benefits them and to use the privacy argument when that benefits them too.
A few years ago I came across a company that was wholesale sharing the worst of the worst and the CEO of that company was making all kinds of silly arguments about how they were 'just a dumb pipe'. They refused to take any counter measures and it took me proving to them and their - future - investors beyond a shadow of doubt that they must be aware of what and how much is going on but willfully turning a blind eye. Privacy was - of course - their stated reason for upholding their values. Because it suited them commercially, not because they actually gave two bits about actual privacy.
FB is a massive conduit for child pornography. You know it. FB management knows it. They have their internal processes to deal with flagged content. But they could do a lot better and they don't simply because it is just a cost to them. So they do the minimum and hide behind the privacy cloak when it suits them, even if they know full well what is going on.
On the one hand, this is a beautiful (but depressing) story about humans standing up for each other.
On the other hand, this is clearly propaganda from the BBC to push police state functionality on the UK population by pre-justifying it. "See what happens? Never mind the part about it taking six years. Let us see everything in your fucking lives, you twats."
None of this required a police state. Just people working together to cross-correlate information in the way that you would expect to be able to do in an open society.
What wrong do you think was done here? What would you prefer to be different?
I have literally no idea how you've ended up at that conclusion from the article!
Plus a chance to dunk on their biggest competitor for ad revenue and clicks (Facebook)
In what sense are Facebook and the BBC competitors?
> They contacted Facebook, which at the time dominated the social media landscape, asking for help scouring uploaded family photos - to see if Lucy was in any of them. But Facebook, despite having facial recognition technology, said it "did not have the tools" to help.
Willing to bet my life savings that they are able to do exactly this when the goal is to create shadow profiles or maximize some metric.
The fine article actually ends with this text:
You don't need to imply they didn't read that part, because it doesn't really affect the point of the comment, that Facebook doesn't actually care about privacy. Even if they're not sharing things willy-nilly, they're still aggressively tracking everyone they can.
just remember even the patriot act started with good intentions, to get justice.
At the time that act was passed, many people pointed out that it would be abused.
Facebook shut down their facial recognition program in 2021 and deleted the data in response to public frustrations.
It’s really sad now to see people getting angry at Facebook not having facial recognition technology.
The two views aren't necessarily in conflict. I don't appreciate Facebook's use of facial recognition technology, but they built it. I'm extremely disappointed they proceeded to use this technology to influence elections while fighting against making the data available to law enforcement. I understand this may not have been intentional on their part, but the result is the same, and I was not at all surprised by it.
I can't help but notice the exact wording of FB's response - or rather what they didn't say.
If someone asks me to do them a favor, I have basically three options for a reply:
• I can and I will;
• I can but I won't; or
• I am not able to.
FB's answer was not option 3.
I think a more plausible explanation is that FB did not want to set a precedent of being the facial recog avenue of choice for the Fed.
A fourth option is "I can and I will, but only after certain prerequisites are met - go away and meet them first", which looks to me what they were saying.
There's another option "I will but only if ..." which is what Facebook rightfully went with. Come back with a warrant is _always_ the correct answer when dealing with LE.
Facial recognition is very powerful these days. My friend took a photo of his kid at the top of Twin Peaks in SF, with the city in the background. Unfortunately, due to the angle, you could barely see the eyes and a portion of the nose of the kid. Android was still able to tag the kid.
I feel like Facebook really dropped the ball here. It is obvious that Squire and colleagues are working for the Law Enforcement. If FB was concerned about privacy, they could have asked them to get a judicial warrant to perform a broad search.
But they didn't. And Lucy continued to be abused for months after that.
I hope when Zuck is lying on his death bed, he gets to think about these choices that he has made.
Google photos has the advantage of a limited search space. Any photo you take is overwhelmingly likely to be one of the few faces already in the library. Not to say facebook couldn't solve the problem. But the ability of Google to do facial recognition with such poor inputs is that it's searching on 40~ faces rather than x billion faces.
Can confirm, have seen Google photos misidentify strangers. I'm sure better technology exists, but Google's system has weaknesses.
> I feel like Facebook really dropped the ball here
This story was from more than a decade ago.
Facebook had facial recognition after that, but they deleted it all in response to public outcry. It’s sad to see HN now getting angry at Facebook for not doing facial recognition.
> I hope when Zuck is lying on his death bed, he gets to think about these choices that he has made.
Are we supposed to be angry at Zuckerberg now for making the privacy conscious decision to drop facial recognition? Or is everyone just determined to be angry regardless of what they do?
> Or is everyone just determined to be angry regardless of what they do?
People decide who they think are the good guys and who they think are the bad guys first, then view subsequent events through that lens.
The EU AI act activates this year. Facial recognition is in the restrictive list. You don't want to give auditors ammunition before it goes live as top fine would cost FB around $4B, and wouldn't be a one time fine.
Even if only law enforcement can use it, having that feature is highly regulated.
[edit] I see this is from years ago. I should read the articles first. :)
I would hazard a guess that the facial recognition will limit the search scope to people associated (to some degree) with your friends account and some threshold of metrics gathered from the image. I doubt it is using a broad search.
With billions of accounts, the false positive rate of facial recognition when matching against every account would likely make the result difficult to use. Even limiting to a single country like UK the number could be extremely large.
Let say there is a 0.5% false positive rate and some amount of false negatives. With 40 million users, that would be 200 000 false positives.
The only explanation for this comment is you never used reverse image search by Google or yandex before it was nerfed or you'd know this is super plausible to find direct hits without many false positives.
> I feel like Facebook really dropped the ball here
This case began being investigated on January 2014 [0], which means abuse began (shudder) in 2012-13 if not earlier.
Facebook/Meta only began rolling out DeepFace [1] in June 2015 [2]
Heck, VGG-Face wasn't released until 2015 [3] and Image-Based Crowd Counting only began becoming solvable in 2015-16.
> Facial recognition is very powerful these days.
Yes. But it is 2026, not 2014.
> I hope when Zuck is lying on his death bed, he gets to think about these choices that he has made
I'm sure there are plenty of amoral choices he can think about, but not solving facial detection until 2015 is probably not one of them.
---
While it feels like mass digital surveillance, social media, and mass penetration of smartphones has been around forever it only really began in earnest just 12 years ago. The past approximately 20 years (iPhone was first released on June 2007 and Facebook only took off in early 2009 after smartphones and mobile internet became normalized) have been one of the biggest leaps in technology in the past century. The only other comparable decades were probably 1917-1937 and 1945-1965.
---
[0] - https://www.bbc.co.uk/mediacentre/2026/bbc-eye-documentary-t...
[1] - https://research.facebook.com/publications/deepface-closing-...
[2] - https://www.cbsnews.com/news/facebook-can-recognize-you-just...
[3] - https://www.robots.ox.ac.uk/~vgg/data/vgg_face/
Facebook rightly retired their facial recognition system in 2021 over concerns about user privacy. Facebook is a social media site, they are not the government or police.
Facebook carried a ball?
I'm willing to bet said ball was kicked into the jungle five seconds after registering the domain.
When people on hacker News talk about requiring cops to do traditional police work instead of doing wide ranging trawls using technology, this is exactly what they meant. I hope you don't complain when the future you want becomes reality and the three letter agencies come knocking down your door just because you happened to be in the same building as a crime in progress and the machine learning algorithms determined your location via cellular logs and labelled you as a criminal.
The grim meathook future of ubiquitous surveillance is coming regardless. At the very least we could get some proper crime solving out of it along the way.
That's probably the worst attitude one could have about this topic in the whole space of possible opinions there is.
There’s a pretty big difference between surveillance logging your every move your and scanning photos voluntarily uploaded to Facebook.
No, I don’t like Facebook using facial recognition technology, and no I don’t like that someone else can upload photos of me without my consent (which ironically could leverage facial recognition technology to blanket prevent), but these are other technical and social issues that are unrelated to the root issue. I also wish there were clear political and legal boundaries around surveillance usage for truly abhorrent behaviour versus your non-Caucasian neighbour maybe j -walking triggering a visit from ICE.
Yes, it’s an abuse of power for these organisations to collect data these ways, but I’m not against their use to prevent literal ongoing child abuse, it’s one of the least worst uses of it.
> From that list of 40 or 50 people, it was easy to find and trawl their social media. And that is when they found a photo of Lucy on Facebook with an adult who looked as though she was close to the girl - possibly a relative.
It sounds like Facebook was a huge boost to the investigation despite that.
Facebook did nothing to assist in narrowing a search area.
What Facebook actually did was host images .. so that after the team narrowed a list down to under 100 people they could look through profiles by hand.
It may as well have been searching Flickr, Instagram, Etsy, etc. profiles by hand.
Yes, and if Facebook didn't exist, presumably these images connecting the abuser to the victim wouldn't have been available anywhere for the investigators to find.
If Facebook didn’t exist, they would’ve found the photos on MySpace. Come on.
All Facebook likely did here that was any different than any other social media platform would have done, was gather Sandberg, Zuck and a cadre of snotty, sniveling engineers in a conference room and debate whether this was good engagement for the platform.
It seems to me that the BBC is including those passages at the beginning and end of their story as propaganda so the public begs (demands, even) for more surveillance, and the sale of private data to the government. I mean, think of the children, like Lucy! Seems to be having that effect in this thread, in any case.
It’s absolutely propaganda and a perfect example of how the public gets manipulated on a daily basis. Let’s break down the facts:
- Pushes for facial recognition
- Pushes for more state run surveillance
- Pushes for AI based surveillance
- Pushes for greater data collection, access & mining
- Legitimises it all under the classic “save the kids” meme and pushes emotionally hard for more.
The main issues i’ve seen discussed on HN the last couple of months have been critical of the never ending and increasing government surveillance. Both sides of the pond. This is their answer.
Simultaneously we’re hearing about how almost anybody and everybody beyond a level of power was well aware of industial level sex trafficking and abuse, and either totally turned a blind eye or joined in.
The article might carry some weight if it wasn’t from an authoritarian state backed organisation that’s very well known for covering up for, and protecting multiple famous high level sexual criminals within it’s own organisation, spanning multiple decades, that has never faced any real audit, investigation or justice for its own crimes.
Not sure how we can help such heros !! These are the people that make the world a better place !!
I can't understand how anyone can do such a job for any length of time. I worked at a PC repair shop back in the 90s, fixed some dude's PC, and I saw a bunch of CSAM stuff (a lot, like thousands of pics, all children). I reported it to the local cops, then the FBI got involved, and that's the last I heard of it. My point is that the memory of those pics haunt me to this day. And I only saw a handful of pics, over, maybe, a period of about 2 minutes. To do that all day, everyday - how could one not become an alcoholic?
yeah and from the article, it sounds like they chat with the perps and befriend them to build trust.
Strange to think that right now, the people doing that work are not getting paid for it.
DHS? There are a lot of different orgs doing this type of work, but I'm pretty sure (nearly?) all of them are getting paid to do it.
Horrific job though.
Probably a reference to the shutdown.
first part of the article reads: Darkweb a encrypted part of the internet. Isn't darkweb just the part where bots don't index? is it realy encrypted?
I thought that was the deep web. The dark web I always understood as referring to the Tor network.
I think that that's the Deep Web.
It's all encrypted.
This is an old story about an old investigation. It is old news dredged up to try to win sympathy for DHS/ICE. It is propaganda resurrected to make DHS look useful.
They cherry-picked a story that they knew would win public sympathy since no one wants a child molester to run free. Lets show a time when an agent solved a case for an excellent outcome.
Pick a DHS/ICE story from this year and see what kind of dystopic shitshow you report on.
This is propaganda. Gullible people fall for this shit every day. Put some thought into the context before you swallow the turd.
The BBC spent 5 years making a documentary and just finished. They had no idea that the US would in its current state when they started. That doesn't free them from criticism of the content, but the timing is a coincidence.
I haven't watched the video (linked from the article) and I certainly hope the current events caused them to reflect on whether pushing for DHS to have more power is wise, but the last line in the article doesn't give me much optimism.
Although the past couple of years have been an even more stark descent into incompetence and malice, there has not been a moment in DHS's 24-year history at which it was worth defending, let alone with this pattern of propaganda.
It is perfectly possible to investigate and prevent child abuse without this particular configuration.
Propaganda made by the BBC to make DHS look good? You are awfully cynical.
I'd argue the DHS is incidental and the real story is "law enforcement deserves open access to social media feeds." In this light, the BBC's angle becomes much clearer.
>You are awfully cynical.
A cynic is simply a realist who has seen too much shit. I am a firm realist. I see the world as it is and hope that others will come along to help make it better but I don't naively hold my breath.
DHS needs a win in the public's eyes. BBC has the air of a trusted platform. It is no big stretch to make the connection that dredging up an old story about tracking down and capturing a pedo using an elite DHS unit would be a useful tool to win back some public support. You notice that there are no dates given in the article so the reader has no way to know that this went down years ago. It looks new and fresh.
Propaganda. I don't have to be gullible so I choose not to be.
> the reader has no way to know that this went down years ago
Not so.
> Last summer Greg met Lucy, now in her 20s, for the first time. > Lucy (left), now an adult...
You are correct. Thank you.
It’s a story taken from a documentary airing tonight. Unless it’s entirely AI slop, it probably predates the current DHS mess.
Edit: seven years in the making, so entirely coincidental
What better way to bolster your reputation than to get your buddies to prop you up with fluff pieces? Also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Five_Eyes
Are the Europeans suddenly willing to kiss the ring? They don’t otherwise seem to be buddies right now.
And also to drege up "think of the children" rage that makes some people demand expansion of surveillance and free exchange of serveillance data with governments. Manufacturing consent.
That's exactly right. Meanwhile these are the kinds of things that DHS is being pulled off of so they can spend more time harassing latinos.
Submitter is Canadian and re: America, posted "I read recently that Patrimonialism is a good way of describing the current regime" about 10 months ago.
Doesn't sound like paid DHS/ICE psyopper.
Any reason to think it is?
EDIT: Got the "you're posting too fast", so in reply to OP below:
> Submitter's nationality has nothing to do with it nor does his post history. WTF
Well, yes it does, its exculpatory evidence for a stranger you publicly accused of dredging up the news to try and win sympathy for DHS/ICE. (twice now)
Original post, by you: "It is old news dredged up to try to win sympathy for DHS/ICE." This post, by you: "why do they need to dredge it up today?"
From the fine article itself:
>Within hours, local Homeland Security agents had arrested the offender, who had been raping Lucy for six years.
Are you suggesting that the BBC, the world service arm of a British public broadcaster (that is editorially independent from the state and even the wider BBC), began spending five years filming a documentary across the US, Portugal, Brazil, and Russia, just so that they could secretly support a US government agency half a decade before it became embroiled in controversy?
The claim is that an article was submitted intentionally to manipulate public perception of DHS.
We can't relax the claim to "well, it says DHS found a pedo, so it's propaganda ipso facto, because DHS did something good": they specifically argue the submission was the propaganda, specifically because it'd be absurd to claim it was published as DHS propaganda. (it's an article by the BBC)
Maybe it's just me, and I wouldn't have thought this a few years back, but my immediate reaction as I started reading this was "Oh look, somehow they got the fucking _BBC_ to run a DHS whitewashing feel good story. I wonder what's about to hit the media that they'd like buried?"
Another example of tiny details being used to catch sex offenders is this story about marks on people's hands: https://www.wired.com/story/sue-black-forensics-hand-marking... / https://archive.is/89vOJ
It turns out that, even if all you can see is the assailant's hands, that may be enough to identify them.
Is there a way to volunteer for such investigations?
https://www.europol.europa.eu/stopchildabuse
Related: A researcher for Meta, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram, warned executives at the tech giant that there may be upward of 500,000 cases of sexual exploitation of minors per day on the social media platforms.
https://www.foxbusiness.com/lifestyle/meta-researcher-warned...
Who needs the dark web when Meta exists and is protected by the US government?
Edit: downvotes? Lol
That headline seems like a stretch after reading the article (Fox after all)
> sexually inappropriate messages were sent to "~500k victims per DAY in English markets only."
This sounds like a total count of unsolicited sexual messages sent to all users every day.
See also: the 17-strike policy for sex trafficking.
https://eu.usatoday.com/story/tech/2025/11/22/meta-strike-po...
Unbelievable. I mean, believable.. but WTF?
I always need to contextualize these numbers:
- there are 2.4B under 18 globally
- which means 500k is 0.02% of all children
- or around 1 in 5000 children globally, per day
- if evenly distributed (which is unlikely), then roughly 7-8% of all kids would feature in Meta exploitation yearly
That suggests very high reoccurrence; but even reoccurrence suggests the total rate remains quite high. A reoccurrence rate of 100x would suggest that roughly 1 in 1000 kids is exploited on Meta, yearly.
Anyway, disturbing.
TBF these easily could be cases of Meta protecting the US government rather than vice versa.
Just got done the doc they made. Long, disgusting, but informative/interesting from a tech/problem solving prospective. Not an easy watch tho. https://youtu.be/mNUku0jd4FA
Great article. On HN though “dark web agent” sounds like some AI bot did the work. It was far more interesting the way they did it.
So "agent" only means "AI agent" now?
So HN commenters only are trolls now?
Non-paywalled copy:
https://www.yahoo.com/news/articles/dark-agent-spotted-bedro...
Yet at the same time the status of Terabytes of abuse material seized from Epstein's properties is unknown because the abusers are rich guys protected by the president who is probably one of them. And law enforcement is actively helping to obstruct justice for the thousands of victims.
There's dozens or hundreds of abusers easily identifiable in there and so this hero story is just propaganda at this time.
A article this long just to blame facebook to not give away private data to a three letter organization.
Fricken love this story ...
And now I'm thinking who *wouldn't* want to volunteer to go all in on this kind of stuff once their main work winds down? (Facebook apparently).
... starts looking for dark web vigilante groups
> The team realised that in the household with Lucy was her mother's boyfriend - a convicted sex offender.
Erm... Are they that clueless they didn't start from there?
To know who the mother was they’d have to first know the identity of the child.
>From that list of 40 or 50 people, it was easy to find and trawl their social media. And that is when they found a photo of Lucy on Facebook with an adult who looked as though she was close to the girl - possibly a relative.
>They worked out the woman's address
And yet they didn't bother to knock on the door.
Was this guy law enforcement? How did he get the addresses of everyone who had bought that model of couch?
From the article: "Squire works for US Department of Homeland Security Investigations in an elite unit ..."
FTA:
> Squire works for US Department of Homeland Security Investigations in an elite unit which attempts to identify children appearing in sexual abuse material.
I'm wondering why they didn't cross reference the addresses they had from the furniture stores with those of registered sex offenders, as this abuser turned out to be? And further intersect that with "Flaming Alamo" brick houses??
From TFA: "Initially Squire was ecstatic, expecting they could access a digitised customer list. But Harp broke the news that the sales records were just a "pile of notes" that went back decades."
Note: the "agent" the title refers to has nothing to do with an AI/LLM agent. Originally I thought this had something to do with an AI agent, as if someone put an AI agent in charge of identifying dark web pictures for clues. It's a good story nevertheless and I'm glad the victim was rescued, but nothing to do with AI/LLMs.
The term "agent" with regards to law enforcement substantially predates "agent" in the context of AI.
True, but with every other article on HN being about AI nowadays I assumed there was something to it.
> The term "agent" with regards to law enforcement substantially predates "agent" in the context of AI.
The GP's account was created in 2019, so being born yesterday is not an excuse available to them.
To be fair, I initially had the same thought, and the HN item just two below this as I write also has agent (but the LLM kind) in its title.
First of all, sorry to hear about the poor girl’s ordeal, and I’m glad she was rescued. But after reading about all that complicated digital sleuthing, it basically comes down to this:
"The team realised that in the household with Lucy was her mother’s boyfriend - a convicted sex offender."
I feel like the police should’ve started there: cross-referencing people in her close circle against a list of known sex offenders.
It sounds like they had the abuse images but not her name or identity - hence asking Facebook to identify her via facial recognition search.
I don't think they knew who Lucy was. Otherwise the search would have been much narrower and faster than 'everyone who bought this sofa'.
Or, you know, if they knew who she was they would just go and rescue her?
How are people struggling so much with basic logic on this one? This is quite strange. Are some of you just unable to imagine having limited knowledge and not being able to just look everything up?