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<\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n\u201cThey\u2019re finding everything. They\u2019re finding things that you can\u2019t even conceive of or we can talk about publicly,\u201d said Polk County Sheriff Grady Judd. \u201cTwo years old, four years old, seven years old, eight years old. This last case we had this guy brought his little girl since she was six over to this other guy for them to batter her while they took videos of it. \u201c<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Judd said pictures and videos of Polk County children are being shared by pedophiles all over the world.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cIn the last operation, which we just had, we identified five child victims. Five,\u201d Judd said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The ABC Action News I-Team found that some companies reported millions of cases, while others were hardly reporting any at all. Experts said companies can take additional steps to identify and remove child pornography from their platforms.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Almost as many child porn images reported as children in the U.S.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
While most people know little about the proliferation of child pornography, the numbers of reported incidents are huge.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The numbers are shocking\u2026 The National Center for Missing and Exploited Children<\/a> operates the Cyber Tipline<\/a>, which tracks reports of child sexual abuse materials.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Last year, the center received 21.7 million reports of child sexual exploitation<\/a>, almost 60,000 tips a day. It was an increase of 28 percent from the year before.<\/p>\n\n\n\n 65.4 million photos and videos were reported last year, almost as many images as the number of children who live in the United States, which is estimated at 73 million.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Most tips come from electronic service providers which include big tech companies like Facebook, Google and Apple. They are required to report known child sexual abuse materials under a federal law enacted in 1999.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cThe creation and distribution of this type of material has lifelong effects on these survivors. That is part of the reason we do work with the companies,\u201d said Lindsey Olson, Executive Director of the Exploited Children Divison of NCMEC.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Olson says her organization serves as a clearinghouse, collecting and analyzing data from those electronic service providers, then sending leads to law enforcement.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Each child porn image has a unique code<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cThe companies that are voluntarily, proactively searching for this type of content on their platform and then removing it and reporting it to the Cyber Tipline are typically are using different types of hashing technology to find that content,\u201d Olson said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n That technology flags previously identified child sexual abuse content when it\u2019s uploaded to file share programs, websites or apps.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Retired U.S. Secret Service Agent Gus Dimitrelos has conducted thousands of child porn investigations over 25 years.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cAnything that\u2019s stored or shared is being hashed by the provider, meaning that a digital fingerprint, a unique fingerprint, is assigned to a file. Understand, there are no two files in the entire universe that have the same hash value,\u201d Dimitrelos said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Reports generated by the Cyber Tipline identify hash values of known images that have been previously identified.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Different series of photos and images depicting child pornography have been given names based on themes or images in the photo, which can range from \u201cColored Zebra Case\u201d to \u201c90\u2019s Earrings\u201d to \u201cBallerina Girl\u201d.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The reports also include the names of officers who worked prior cases involving those images, along with their contact information. Those reports also identify the city, state or country where the images are believed to have been produced.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cWe cannot stop it by ourselves. There\u2019s too many ways with technology today, there\u2019s too many ways to hide it,\u201d Judd said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n That\u2019s why Judd said tech companies need to play a bigger role in identifying and removing it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n