The Child Exploitation Tracking System (CETS) has been running at the CEOP center since its launch in April 2006 and is now being offered to police forces across the country, with Essex, West Midlands, South Wales police forces and the Hi-tech Crime Unit of Scotland all undertaking a pilot program.
The technology allows for the creation of a virtual investigation team, where police officers across the country can share and analyze information on suspected offenders, avoiding duplication and coordinating a national approach that will reduce the risk of offenders moving across geographic borders to avoid detection.
CETS was first developed by the Canadian police, international law enforcement experts and Microsoft to help law enforcement battle online child exploitation. Microsoft has donated more than $7 million to date for the system’s development and to assist in its global deployment.
Jim Gamble, chief executive of the CEOP center, said, We have to explore how it can be applied force by force, how it can join up investigations and create that all important virtual police presence and overall how it will help us in staying that vital one step ahead of the criminal mind. Criminals use technology to further their needs and now we are turning the tables and saying enough is enough.
CETS was created to increase the effectiveness of investigators and teams by providing them with software to store, search, share and analyze large quantities of evidence and connect the cases across law enforcement agencies and government jurisdictions. Previously, investigators had to manually sort through files and photos, making it challenging to analyze the large volumes of information gathered during investigations.
In the UK, the CETS technology has already been used in police investigations. In one recent case, an individual’s activities online were reported to the CEOP website on four separate occasions. By using CETS the CEOP center investigators were able to identify a number of online identities used by various pedophiles who were attempting to contact the individual and the investigators were able to pass these to a single force for investigation.
According to CEOP, in March 2006, CETS figured prominently in the arrest of 27 people in four countries who ran a private chat room of child exploitation.
