Cybercrime involving sexual attacks on children has become rampant over the years. In order to curb this menace, the Cyberdome, a wing of the Kerala Police, which keeps a tab on all sorts of illegal activities in the cyber world, joined hands with the International Criminal Police Organisation (Interpol) on Monday.
Cyberdome headed by ADGP Manoj Abraham are partnering the Interpol and the International Center for Missing and Exploited Children (ICMC) to combat child porn. Interpol had provided the State police access to its latest cyber investigation tools.
— Kerala Police (@TheKeralaPolice) June 10, 2019
In a meeting which took place on Monday between the Additional Director General of Police Manoj Abraham, who heads Cyberdome and the Interpol officials led by Guillermo Galarza, Director, Law Enforcement Training and Technology, International Centre for Missing and Exploited Children; and Jon Rouse, Senior Detective, Queensland Police Service, Australia, the Interpol offered to help by providing expert training to state police officials on ways to tackle these cases more efficiently.
The association would also lead to the transfer and development of the latest artificial intelligence powered cyber tools, to crack down on a wide range of crimes, especially against children.
This artificial intelligence technology would help the Kerala police track missing persons, especially children.
As per reports the Interpol also gave access to their latest cyber investigation tool, named the Internet Crimes Against Children and Child Online Protective Services (ICACCOPS) programme to the Kerala police.
This program, which can track online searches for child abuse content and identify IP addresses to track the location of those who share child pornography, helped the state police to apprehend 32 people in the last one week.
Investigators said the persons, driven by their sexual interest in children, also widely shared videos and pictures of children in their home, school, beach and leisure park environments more than they traded hardcore mainstream porn featuring juveniles.
Moreover, this programme can also be tweaked to conduct surveillance of persons suspected to have terrorist links and also to detect online fraudsters and a variety of other criminal activities.
Recently India also signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) with the USA to combat online child pornography.
According to the MoU signed between the National Crime Records Bureau (NCRB) of India and the National Centre for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC), USA, the United States will help India check online child pornography and content related to child sexual exploitation.
The MoU will provide access to more than one lakh Tipline reports available with the NCMEC and enable law enforcement agencies in India.
It will pave the way for setting up of an innovative mechanism for sharing information about child pornography and child sexual abuse material and taking legal action against offenders.
Meanwhile, taking a hard stand against Indian porn websites promoting child pornography and selling rape and gang-rape videos of Indian women and children the NDA government had last year had shut down five such websites which were being operated from India.
In 2015, the ministry of communications and IT, the department of telecommunications and the central government had listed over 800 websites and had issued an order to restrain service providers from transmitting them as their contents were found to be pornographic in nature.
