Houston man charged with child porn possession after Google cyber-tip

[Evoken]

This news item has been making the rounds lately...

A cyber-tip generated by Google and sent to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children led to the arrest of a 41-year-old Houston man who is charged with possessing child pornography.

Police say Google detected explicit images of a young girl in an email that John Henry Skillern was sending to a friend, the company then alerted authorities.

"He was trying to get around getting caught, he was trying to keep it inside his email," said Detective David Nettles of the Houston Metro Internet Crimes Against Children Taskforce. "I can't see that information, I can't see that photo, but Google can."

Source

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So, how did Google know it was a CP image?. Taking this from another comment in this link:

Google were sent the 'fingerprint' identifiers of known child sex images by the Child Victim Identification Program. They then checked to see if any of these matched images being sent by Gmail users. Once they had a potential match, the advised the police who then were able to obtain a warrant to search the account. The search proved positive and the paedophile was caught.

This isn't Google checking to see what all of our photos are to make sure they're 'acceptable', it's Google asking their database if any images match known illegal image fingerprints, and then alerting the police if there's a match.

It's like the post service being told by the CIA 'We know letter-bombs are being sent in packages that look like these:' Should the post service flag any packages to the police they notice that match the description of the letter bombs? Or should they deliver them because they should mind their own business, despite the fact they're leaving the opening of the packages to the police?

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Sounds reasonable to me.

 

[Almeuit]

Glad they caught him.

As for Google looking in the email... Doesn't bother me. I already let Google Now look at it to alert me about things such as the tracking of packages.

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