In this safeguarding podcast we discuss Project Arachnid with Lianna McDonald Senior Executive of the Canadian Centre for Child Protection. We cover the “Continuum of Abuse”, the five different types of responses from service providers to hosting CSAM, the concept of “follow the money”, the CCCP’s Framework for Action, the Phoenix 11 and Project Arachnid.
There’s a lightly edited for legibility transcript below for those that can’t use podcasts, or for those that simply prefer to read.
Neil Fairbrother
Welcome to another edition of the SafeToNet Foundation safeguarding podcast where we talk about all things to do with safeguarding children in the online digital context. The online digital context comprises three areas, technology, law and ethics and culture with child safeguarding right in the centre of this Venn diagram and it encompasses all the stakeholders between the child using a smartphone and the content or person online that they are interacting with.
The output of a great deal of child sexual abuse are images and a lot of these images are digital images and they are posted online in surprisingly obvious and easy to get to places. One organization that is dedicated to removing, hoovering up all of these images from the web, cleaning it up is the Canadian Centre for Child Protection. And I’m absolutely thrilled and delighted to have Lianna MacDonald who is the Senior Executive of the Canadian Centre for Child Protection in our office in Covent Garden in downtown London today. Welcome to the SafeNet Foundation.
Lianna McDonald, Executive Director, Canadian Centre for Child Protection
I am so, so happy to be here.
Neil Fairbrother
Thank you very much. Now, could you please Lianna, give us some background to yourself, a brief resumé of who you are, and also explain to us who the Canadian Centre for Child Protection is?
Lianna McDonald
So my name is Lianna McDonald and I’m the Executive Director of the Canadian Centre for Child Protection and I have been at this very job for 21 years now. So there has been a very interesting journey for myself professionally as we watched with the beginning of technology and the ways in which technology has been misused to victimize children. So our organization 35 years ago was established, when a young girl, a 13 year old girl named Candace Derksen, she was coming home from school and she was abducted and then subsequently murdered. It took six weeks for her body to be located and at the time the family felt that there really weren’t adequate support, and back then we’re talking pre-internet, so we’re talking posters up on poles, we’re talking, you know, people handing out photographs. And so the family decided to set up what was the Child Find Organization, which was really dedicated to assisting in the location of missing children.
As the organization evolved and we saw at the beginning of technology, we started to see children going missing in Canada as a result of an online encounter. So this was, you know, the mid 1990s, most countries did not have grooming or Luring legislation. So our organization set out to in fact work with our attorney generals across Canada to develop what is now Canada’s Luring legislation. That was our sort of first entry point.
Shortly thereafter we realized that Canada did not have a reporting entity to report online crimes against children. So our organization renamed itself to better reflect our national work. We worked with government stakeholders, police to establish what is www.cybertip.ca, which is Canada’s national tip line to report online crimes. So our organization is independent of government, but we are part of the government’s strategy in terms of reporting crimes of which we then would forward to the appropriate police agency or child welfare agency or provide educational information to parents.
Neil Fairbrother
Okay. What is the scale of the problem is you see it?
Lianna McDonald
It’s bigger than we could have imagined. So a couple of years ago, our organization [was] feeling quite overwhelmed. We had been you know, receiving tips from the public, trying to get material removed, sending reports off and it was really just so overwhelming that we were just sort of spinning our wheels. So what we did is we sat down and we kind of did a strategic sort of look at things and we said, here we are seeing these victims in these images, yet we know very little about them. We don’t know if they’re identified, we don’t know if they’re safe. We don’t know about the impacts of this type of crime. So what we did is we kind of said, what can we do that no one else is doing and where can we sort of focus our efforts?
So we came up with really two pillars. The first was reducing the public availability of child sexual abuse material. So here we had, the police were investigating and continue to investigate trying to identify offenders and rescue children, but this historical and ongoing content was just growing.
The second thing was victim identification and remedies for victims. So we wanted to dive in and figure out, we’re going to have this first generation of victims whose child sexual abuse was recorded and potentially distributed online. We wanted to try and access them to learn about how this type of crime was different and the traumatic impacts.
So we basically created Project Arachnid, which is a tool set to help reduce the public availability of child sexual abuse material. And the second is we launched an international survey to survivors that we translated in four languages to promote and get them to come in and tell us about them. So that was the really beginning of our journey in, in both reducing and supporting survivors.
Neil Fairbrother
Okay, we’ll come onto Project Arachnid n a moment. Now you make the point on your website, and I found this particularly startling, that for 36% of victims, the duration of abuse extends into the adulthood of the victim. Now, I think most people would assume that a paedophile is attracted only to children yet the child as an adult continues to be abused. So there must be something else going on here other than an attraction to children. What does this tell us about the nature of a paedophile?
Lianna McDonald
So I think this is what we’re very careful of, even the term paedophile is more of a clinical [one]. So we’ll talk more about a Preferential Sex Offender. And you’re right. Typically in the images, when we analyse the images and we’ve done research, the vast majority of the children are under the age of eight. So what we found in the survey was game-changing for us. It was shocking and two big things came out from the 150 surveys that we did analysis on. The first was that in up to 50% of the respondents talked about being part of organized child sexual abuse. And what I mean when I say that, it’s multiple offenders acting in concert to abuse one or more children. So that for us was startling that we had that percentage of a number.
The second thing to your earlier question was that we were seeing these children commence being abused before the age of four in most instances, and it would go all the way up into adulthood. So it was a whole different sort of dynamic in terms of the intrafamilial type of this and how we would even see intergenerational abuse that we would hear and read in this sort of graphic detail.
So what we know is, what we see on the internet and what we see with child sexual abuse material is totally a social epidemic. But what we also know is that some of these survivors that are part of these organized, intergenerational abuse scenarios are completely off the grid we’re not uncovering them. They’re not disclosing. And we don’t know whether it’s sort of a power sort of issue that’s interwoven into it. But this is what we’re hearing from that community.
Neil Fairbrother
When you say they’re off the grid, what do you mean by they are off the grid?
Lianna McDonald
What I mean is when we looked at the numbers of those cases where they actually, because again, in the questions we talked about them reporting, or a criminal investigation. On the organized abuse case, very, very few of them in fact dealt with a legal or a law enforcement intervention. And what we read, what we heard, which was really heart breaking from this population is in many instances there was also a violence, a severe violent component. So these kids were being physically abused. They were in some cases describing torture, of what was going on to them. And so they were staying alive. These were victims who were trying to stay alive, let alone, you know, this idea that they’re going to go and tell someone.
So the other big part of the survey which came out is that we can’t rely on disclosure. This whole idea that we put the burden on the child to tell someone; we know they’re not. So we’re not doing any good service there. And secondly, we need protective adults around children to know the signs, to be able to identify what needs to be done and asking the right questions.
Neil Fairbrother
Okay. Now you refer to something in your Framework for the Protection and the Rights of Children which is called the “Continuum of Abuse”. What is the Continuum of Abuse?
Lianna McDonald
Sure. What we will see in again and it’s important that we have access to Interpol’s database and the RCMP and the policing databases that will help us know where we see an identified victim or a not identified but unknown series. So the child has not been rescued, but it’s a known series that has been repeatedly investigated by policing…
Neil Fairbrother
A series of photos?
Lianna McDonald
Yes. Show what will happen is a video, let’s say will be spliced and we will have still images of the continuum. So you might see a little four year old girl who is in a dress and but she’s completely visible. Within that series of still images you will then see her sexually assaulted. Our framework is saying, from coming at this from a child rights perspective, we want all of those images associated with that abusive incident to come down.
Neil Fairbrother
Right at the moment, the only illegal images would be those of the sexual exploitation. In this example, the four year old girl in a dress, that’s not an illegal image, so therefore there is no reason in legal terms for a service provider to take the image down. But for the victim, of course, it’s part of that continuum as you describe it and what you’re saying is that the whole continuum needs to be treated and taken down, not just the currently illegal ones?
Lianna McDonald
The truth of the matter is that we’re way behind and we’re failing children. We didn’t have the context that we have now and Arachnid has really given us that context. And so when we look at the fact that right now we are using a criminal law threshold for removal when we don’t need to be doing so. So what we are doing in the framework is basically saying that we are looking at this from a child rights perspective and when we are issuing notices to providers because we feel that something, even though it may not be technically criminally illegal, it’s causing harm and damage to the victim. We want that image down.
And so right now what we have is, we have internet technology companies making their own decisions. They have moderators making decisions of what to keep up and what not to. Even if you look at Facebook allowing nude images, we have regulation happening right now and it’s the tech companies that are doing it.
So I think we are trying to rally governments and organizations, child protection and child centred organizations together to say, we need to take the keys back. We need to start looking at this just as we would in the offline world. You wouldn’t allow, or if we saw a 11 year old girl walking around nude in a grocery store, we would cover her up, we would intervene. We want to expect that children have the same online safety and protection online as they do offline and the public is just not aware to the degree that we’re seeing the abuse and exploitation of children. And so this is why we wrote the framework.
Neil Fairbrother
Okay. Now you say that the service providers, there’s a mixed bag of responses, there’s a patchy response in the different service providers. And in fact, in your documentation, you said there’s a range of response which you’ve broken down into five different types of response. What are those five different types of response?
Lianna McDonald
Okay. So and again, because remember we issue like a huge volume of notices through Arachnid. So we’ve already issued 5 million notices and that means that we’ve had three sets of eyes going on one image before it goes out the door. So in doing so, what we’ve learned in the process is we have some companies that are being proactive, so they would be using the various hash sets and doing what they need to be doing to be proactive in terms of making sure that CSAM is not coming on their services.
We then have those who are reactive. So those would be the ones we issue a notice and they say, okay, you’ve issued a notice, we’re going to take action.
Then we have resistant so they could be in one and two. So we will be fighting or arguing with companies where they’ll say, no, I don’t think that this is a child under the age of 18 and then we’ll say, Oh, this is an identified 14 year old girl from Canada. Bring down the image.
Then we have those who are noncompliant so what they just do is they ignore us and they just, it’s radio silence.
And then we have the worst category where we have those who are complicit. So they are engaged in making this type of harmful material available on their services.
Neil Fairbrother
And they presumably are doing it because they financially incentived to do so?
Lianna McDonald
Funny you should raise that. We just last week presented to the major banks in Canada and we’re right now spending our time sort of uncovering the way the “shell game” plays for various participants to make money and get kickbacks in the equation. So this is new work that we’ve taken on because you’re exactly right. There’s benefits. So this isn’t all about people with a sexual interest in children. There are other people in the whole ecosystem that are benefiting from this type of crime.
Neil Fairbrother
Now in your Framework for Action report, there’s this very nicely produced but rather disturbing table which breaks down the responses from different service providers into different age groups of the victims. So zero to eight years old, nine to 12 year olds. And 13 to 17 and there seems to be a common theme whereby some of these services providers don’t remove the images because quote unquote, “they disagree with age assessments”. Now is that a point of principle that they disagree with the concept of age assessment or do they argue that any particular age assessment is incorrect?
Lianna McDonald
It’s completely insane. So this has been a major point of contention for our organization. Our analysts are trained in sexual maturation rates or development. We can’t even find out from most companies how their moderators are trained. We know from different sort of reports out that we’ve got, there is a lack of training.
This whole idea that we’re going to argue on the side of keeping this up, versus on the rights of the child makes absolutely no sense. So the sad reality, if you show for some companies if a child, we know girls for example, start puberty at the age of nine, puberty typically goes for five years until it’s complete. We have a number of companies, if they’re slight signs of maturation, budding breasts, a bit of pubic hair, they keep it up. So this is where…
Neil Fairbrother
How can they justify that?
Lianna McDonald
They have power.
Again, it’s about accountability. So I think what we’re starting to do as an organization and going forward within the next six to nine months, we’re gonna start you know, publishing some report cards on what we are in fact seeing, and looking at those companies who are doing more and those ones who are not doing what they ought to be doing because what we know for sure, is that these assessment on their ends, there’s issues.
So one of the things we did is we brought in one of the leading forensic paediatricians. She does our training for our analysts annually. She’s a very, very well respected, testifies around the world. And we brought her through to go through a hundred images on which we were getting pushback. She stated they were all CSAM. And so we had to go back out and say, now we have a forensic paediatrician who has said…
Neil Fairbrother
Okay, just for clarification. CSAM is Child Sexual…
Lianna McDonald
…Abuse Material.
Neil Fairbrother
Okay, thank you. So this range of five response types, and you mentioned you were looking at a method of flagging up the behaviours of the service providers in terms of … are you talking about some kind of a rating system for service providers, a sort of a red, amber, green a status report of different service providers where green is the proactiveservice providers and red would be the complicit ones. And then you would say, right, here’s a report. This is the list of all the social providers and this is their response. And you’d make that publicly available?
Lianna McDonald
Yes. So we’re still working through how we’re going to frame this up. So right now this is why it’s going to take us some months. We have the data, we have the data to date, but we need to really think through carefully how we do this and what the tone of this looks like. Because our objective is to make change happen. And right now what we know is because child sexual abuse material’s radioactive, you can’t access it. You can’t look at it. The general public does not fully understand what we’re talking about, nor do they understand the scope of the epidemic, the scale of the problem. So finally we have a way to start really showing the evidence of what we are seeing and we feel as an organization that we have an ethical obligation to start reporting out on that and making that information publicly available.
Neil Fairbrother
But naming and shaming may not be the most beneficial way of doing things.
Lianna McDonald
I don’t know. I think it is, we will be naming, we will be saying, and we will be looking at ranking systems. So that is essentially what is going to happen. But I think as an organization that is child protection centred, if we’re not going to do it, who is?
Neil Fairbrother
Okay. Now you mention a very intriguing thing. You mention Bulletproof Hosting Services. What do you mean by Bulletproof?
Lianna McDonald
Oh my goodness. This is not the area that I should be getting into. So you’re going to have to circle back to Lloyd. But what I would just say is they basically supply. They’re bad actors and they’re supplying like DDoSs protection so that they pretend they’re not knowing what is going on their services, but they are.
Neil Fairbrother
Okay. So they’re using technology to hide?
Lianna McDonald
Correct.
Neil Fairbrother
Okay. So let’s get on to Project Arachnid, which is really what you’re here to talk about. And as of yesterday from your website you have achieved some mindbogglingly impressive results with 104 billion images so far identified at least if not taken down, which is quite astonishing. But it’s almost like a finger in a fire hose. The volume of production is so much. So how much progress do you think we are really making? Do you think we’ll ever be able to remove all of this content and have a clean web?
Lianna McDonald
I think if I’m being very honest, no. I mean the idea, because right now people are recording everything on all kinds of devices and the upload of that, and even when we look at the cleanup of the internet, we have people sharing through devices. We’ve got the big fear of end-to-end encryption that is coming down the pipeline.
That said, I am very, very optimistic of the great progress we can make. So even with some series that we’ve been working on very hard, we basically have wiped them from the open web. And so we’re really paying attention to our ways from a victim centred approach. I think over time as we’re getting smarter and we’re harnessing the power of our collective work, we bringing other tip lines into Arachnid right now we’re instead of duplicating, we’re spending time classifying and, and working collaboratively.
That is the way forward. We can’t have people in different parts of the world all looking at the same images and not getting the sort of focus. So once we get through this mass classification, we don’t ever have to classify those images again. So the long short answer is, is that the issue of child sexual abuse is a historical issue. It’s going to be an ongoing issue. We’re not just going to stop that from happening. And because of that core root cause, we’re going to see the digital side of it and the recording of it being part of it. So I think there’s potential, I think we can do a lot for a lot of the historical content. It’s a matter of us being very focused and working collaboratively.
Neil Fairbrother
Okay. So a couple of questions on that. One is you can remove the historical content, but how do you stop the production of new content being distributed and what part do the device manufacturers who make the cameras have to play them?
Lianna McDonald
So, the first thing that I would answer in terms of the proactive side of it, a couple of things. This is exactly why too we’re working with our police partners around the world to get the digital evidence when we right away know a child has been sexually abused, it’s been recorded and distributed. Once it gets into the national databases, it’s automatically we get it into Arachnid. And so we’re looking at choking supply. Remember pre-Arachnid, there was no ability to do it. Now we can do that. So that is a really big thing that we’re doing.
What I also though have to say is in Arachnid and we only know 15% of the victims are identified, the other 85% we don’t necessarily know. So that that is a concern in of itself in terms of identifying who these kids are and looking at ways that we can even use technology down the road where they can self-identify. That’s sort of some of the work that we’re looking at.
In terms of the players, in terms of responsibility, I think right now as an organization, and certainly we’re starting to see this conversation, I think there are those discussions about responsibility and who plays what role in the protection or the harm of children. So I think device manufacturers, all of the tech companies, everybody has a role to play.
Neil Fairbrother
Okay. I know you refer to working with other tip lines and in the UK, the Internet Watch Foundation is the national tip line for people to report this kind of stuff if they stumble across it. And you also mentioned an analysing these images. Are you all working to a common standard, a common analytical framework to classify these images?
Lianna McDonald
So I think one of the things that, the conversations that are now starting, because again, the way in which we’re working with Arachnid, and we’re learning a little bit about how each hotline might have some variances. So that’s been a very positive thing in terms of us having the discussion. I think where we’re going as an organization, why we put the framework out, because we’re going to start issuing second notices. They’re not going to be tied and say, this is CSAM. We’re going to be saying this is a Terms of Service violation, we want this down. And so these areas that we talked about before that no one’s doing anything on, those pictures are going to be removed.
Neil Fairbrother
This is violating the terms of service of the service provider, right?
Lianna McDonald
So, basically we’re saying to them, the continuum of harm. So those examples we’re issuing a different type of notice and saying, this is a known victim. We want all of these photos of her brought down…
Neil Fairbrother
Because it’s violating your very own terms of service…
Lianna McDonald
Well no, we’re not necessarily seeing that. We’re saying it’s because it’s the principles within our framework. We are the agency that should have the say about if it stays up or down and we’re telling you to bring it down, [so] bring it down.
Neil Fairbrother
Okay. You’ve mentioned images and in documentation about Arachnid it says that it’s using photoDNA which came from the good offices of Microsoft. But PhotoDNA works only for still images. It doesn’t at the moment work with video and I know a lot of this content is video based. So how do you deal with video?
Lianna McDonald
You know, that again would be our tech people could answer that better. I think we’re looking at right now we have a way that we take video and we break it apart. So then we’re dealing with this still images.
Neil Fairbrother
Okay. That makes sense because the video is nothing more than a sequence of images, so I guess it could work in that way. Now is a trend for some of these online organizations, particularly in the app space, and one example is Telegram to make use of technology such that they become classed as stateless. In other words, they split themselves up across different legal jurisdictions across the world. Now you mentioned that you sort of take down notices; if you have a stateless organization, how do you serve a takedown notice to an organization that has no state? Do you have to serve multiple take down notices to all of the different constituent parts of that organization? How would you deal with that?
Lianna McDonald
I would have to find out what we’re doing currently on that, Neil. But can I say something else about that Neil, that I want to make a note of? I think when we’re looking at what’s going on with these many of these companies setting up the sort of new world standard, we have a very big problem with that. So as you would see in our framework, we feel that governments need to step in.
We are very relieved to see the UK government in terms of their Online Harms paper and looking at regulation. The fact that you know, [with] these big companies, there’s no rules and regs. When we look at what that’s done for children, it’s a problem. So as an organization, not only do we work with Arachnid and we work with technology companies to do what we need to have done and we need to have those relationships and partnerships.
But we’ve also been doing a lot of work with the “Five Eyes” and writing on behalf of the Phoenix 11, which I want to segue into the Phoenix 11…
Neil Fairbrother
And the Five Eyes are?
Lianna McDonald
So it would be New Zealand, Australia, the United Kingdom, Canada in the United States.
So that has been part of our efforts to call to government to say we need to expeditiously remove child sexual abuse from the internet. And we are calling on these governments to figure out how that needs to get done. So whether we have to look at fines, whatever we need to do, we need to have a consequence for not doing what needs to be done. It’s that simple.
Neil Fairbrother
Okay. Now you mentioned Phoenix 11, just there. You wanted to segue into Phoenix 11. What is Phoenix 11?
Lianna McDonald
So as I mentioned at the beginning, you know, we wanted to learn from survivors and victims. So we did the survey first. And so that was very powerful.
Neil Fairbrother
The surveys on your website.
Lianna McDonald
Yes. And we’d encourage any survivor to go and do that survey. It’s long, but we’ve heard great things after that. They, there’s a good feeling
Neil Fairbrother
Just search for Canadian Centre for Child Protection and you’ll find the survey there.
Lianna McDonald
Yes, correct. So we started also on this journey to connect with some US-based attorneys who were in fact working with this population for restitution purposes. It was through the connection to James Marsh and Carol Hepburn, two of the top attorneys working on this, that we started to develop a very, very close partnership in such these attorneys had these clients that they were dealing with. And so we thought, okay, we’ll bring some trauma experts. What we’re going to do is bring a small group of these women together and have a meeting.
So we brought them to Phoenix, Arizona. They named themselves the Phoenix 11. And at this sort of first time that we got them together, it was just phenomenal to how these women bonded together and how for the first time they were looking at others who were experiencing the same thing that they were going through and they didn’t think there were others like them.
So this was a really amazing journey to sort of get to see though those interactions with one another, their ability to connect. And it was kind of over the course of those two days, we raised the question of again, doing more with them and would they be interested in doing advocacy work supported by the Canadian Centre for Child Protection and the National Centre for Missing and Exploited Children.
So we would anchor them in terms of helping, you know, when we needed to bring them together, what we needed to do, bringing in outside experts. And the other opportunity, it was opening up doors. So for example, the 11 met with Minister Goodell who was our Minister of Public Safety. They each had two minutes to talk to them. They’ve travelled to the UK and met with other very, very senior officials here as well.
So the 11 to date have been very engaged over two years now in a number of important advocacy efforts. And they are really becoming a strong voice and I have to say to date, survivors and victims have been notably invisible in the conversation about their own imagery being on the internet and the questions surrounding government rules and responsibility and regulation.
So our goal is to use the voices of survivors, have survivor-informed thinking that also comes to the table. We are bringing our first group of males together next week. And we’re going to do that. And now we’ve also sat down with a group of mums who were Nonoffending parents, whose child children were sexually abused and recorded. And so kind of pooling what we’re learning from Arachnid, taking what we’re hearing from the survivor groups and their voices, knowing what we’re learning from the survey. This starts to give us the evidence and the information that we need to make change happen going forward.
Neil Fairbrother
Are there differences between the Phoenix 11 and the male survivors? Are there different sensitivities there or do they respond differently?
Lianna McDonald
Yeah, so we’re really fortunate. We always engage experts to help us understand that. So we are working with a really well known UK expert who is going to be facilitating that. And so there’s going to be different, you know, different things that we do, which will look different, that is more centred around what we know about the gender differences in those populations. And we’re not overexposing so we’re not causing trauma and doing this. Like they’re not going and telling their stories. We’re talking about larger issues and what they want people to know.
So we’re taking all of that and we’re also informing sort of our victim-centred strategies so we know how we can deal with this population. As you would’ve seen in the survey, 70% of the respondents feared being recognized and a subset of that 30% I think just over 30% were actually recognized, so this is not paranoia. We’re really seeing a consequence of what’s going on online and the ways in which these victims are both victims and survivors because they continue to be victimized through the propagation of their images.
Neil Fairbrother
Okay. Now I know we’re running out of time as always, unfortunately on these podcasts and I know you’ve got a hard stop because you’ve got to get over to some very important people after me. Even more important than me. You just mentioned something, the revictimization of victims through being recognized. If an adult recognizes another adult who was previously a child being sexually abused, the person who is making that recognition must have been watching child sexual abuse imagery. So they are almost, by saying I recognize you, they are admitting that they have broken the law, they are admitting to have a sexual interest in children. So does that give the victim an opportunity to have some kind of legal address against that other person?
Lianna McDonald
No, because typically it’s done anonymously. So we’re talking about online, they’re finding them let’s say through their social media avails. So they, and what we’ll find also is a number of these offenders are very focused on different survivors and they will try and share, they will ask people if they know where they are, they write details, personal details. So it’s more done in that way and it’s done in typically what we would hear where they’re blackmailed. So it’s almost like they want more imagery. It’s a game of violence. It’s not just sexual, there’s a whole other harm aspect to it. And it’s very damaging. So those are kind of the contexts that we would see that more often.
Neil Fairbrother
Lianna where I think we’re going to have to leave it on that rather dramatic note, unfortunately. So listen, thank you so much for taking time to come in to the office and I hope the rest of your visit in London is a good one.
Lianna McDonald
Thank you so much.