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The landmark case of New York v. Ferber made it were lawyers. More than half of the remaining hands
illegal to create, distribute, or possess CP. The result shot up. I don’t recall if I said this out loud or not,
of this ruling, along with significant law enforcement but I certainly thought, “Well, there is at least part of
efforts, was effective, and by the mid-1990s, child your problem. It is difficult to get things done when
pornography was, according to NCMEC, largely a the lawyers outnumber the scientists and engineers.”
“solved problem.” By the early 2000s, the rise of the Throughout the day of that first meeting, I
internet brought with it an explosion in the global repeatedly heard that it is incredibly difficult to
distribution of CP. Alarmed by this growth, in 2003, automatically and efficiently scrub CP from online
Attorney General Ashcroft convened executives from platforms without interfering with the business inter-
the top technology firms to ask them to propose a ests of the titans of tech represented in the room.
solution to eliminate this harmful content from their Among several challenges, managing the massive
networks. Between 2003 and 2008, despite contin- volume of data uploaded every day to social media
ued pressure from the attorney general’s office, these platforms was of particular concern. My second ques-
technology companies did nothing to address the tion to the group was, therefore, “Specifically, how
ever-growing problem of their online platforms being hard is the problem?” Here are the numbers that all
used to distribute a staggering amount of CP with the attendees agreed upon. Any technology must
increasingly violent acts on increasingly younger satisfy the following requirements:
children (as young, in some cases, as a only a few
months old). 1. Analyze an image in under two milliseconds
In 2008, Microsoft and NCMEC invited me to (500 images/second)
attend a yearly meeting of a dozen or so technology 2. Misclassify an image as CP at a rate of no more
companies to provide insight into why, after five years, than one in 50 billion
there was no solution to the growing and troubling 3. Correctly classify an image as CP at a rate of
spread of CP online. This meeting led me on a nearly no less than 99%
decade-long journey to develop and deploy technol- 4. Do not extract or share any identifiable image
ogy to curb harmful online speech. Along the way, content (because of the sensitive nature of CP)
I learned many lessons about how to develop and Developing a fully automatic algorithm to distin-
deploy technology at internet scale, as well as learning guish CP from other content with these engineering
about public and media relations, corporate indif- demands was, in my opinion, not feasible. It was not
ference, and the horrific things that are being done feasible in 2008 when we started to work on this
online and offline to some of the most vulnerable in problem, and I would argue that it is not feasible
our society. I will share some of these insights along today despite all of the advances in machine learning
with some technical details of the technology that and computer vision in the intervening years.
we developed. I was ready to concede that a solution was not
possible until I heard NCMEC’s then-CEO Ernie
COUNTERING CHILD EXPLOITATION Allen mention two interesting facts: 1) NCMEC is
At the first of what would be many meetings on home to millions of known CP images that have
this topic, I listened to several hours of discussion been manually reviewed and determined to contain
on the scope and scale of the problem of online child explicit sexual contact with a minor (in many cases,
exploitation. I heard why various technological solu- under the age of 12) and 2) These same images are
tions did not or would not work, and I heard many continually distributed for years and even decades
lawyers talk about liability, profits, and user privacy. after they are first reported to NCMEC. I thought that
Around midday, I was asked to share my thoughts. I even if we did not have the technological innovation
started with a simple question: Just out of curiosity, to fully distinguish CP from other content, we could
how many of you are engineers, mathematicians, or perhaps stop the redistribution of known CP content
computer scientists? One or two hands shot up, out instead. While this would not address the problem
of a room of 60 or so people. I then asked how many in its entirety, surely it would, given what we know,