BOCA RATON, Fla. — In December 2016, law enforcement agents seized computers and hard drives from the home of Tay Christopher Cooper, a retired high school history teacher, in Carlsbad, California. On the devices, digital forensic experts found more than 11,600 photos and videos depicting child sexual abuse, according to court documents.
Among the videos was one showing a man raping a toddler girl, according to a criminal complaint.
“The audio associated with this video is that of a baby crying,” the complaint states.
Police were led to Cooper’s door by a forensic tool called Child Protection System, which scans file-sharing networks and chatrooms to find computers that are downloading photos and videos depicting the sexual abuse of prepubescent children. The software, developed by the Child Rescue Coalition, a Florida-based nonprofit, can help establish the probable cause needed to get a search warrant.
Cooper had used one of the file-sharing programs monitored by the Child Protection System to search for more than 200 terms linked to child sexual abuse, according to the complaint.
Cooper was arrested in April 2018 and pleaded guilty to possession of child pornography. He expressed remorse, according to his attorney, and in December 2018 he was sentenced to a year behind bars.
Cooper is one of more than 12,000 people arrested in cases flagged by the Child Protection System software over the past 10 years, according to the Child Rescue Coalition.
The tool, which was shown to NBC News earlier this year, is designed to help police triage child pornography cases so they can focus on the most persistent offenders at a time when they are inundated with reports. It offers a way to quickly crack down on an illegal industry that has proved resilient against years of efforts to stop the flow of illegal images and videos. The problem has intensified since the coronavirus lockdown, law enforcement officials say, as people spend more time online viewing and distributing illegal material.
The Child Protection System, which lets officers search by country, state, city or county, displays a ranked list of the internet addresses downloading the most problematic files. The tool looks for images that have been reported to or seized by police and categorized as depicting children under age 12.
The Child Protection System “has had a bigger effect for us than any tool anyone has ever created. It’s been huge,” said Dennis Nicewander, assistant state attorney in Broward County, Florida, who has used the software to prosecute about 200 cases over the last decade. “They have made it so automated and simple that the guys are just sitting there waiting to be arrested.”
The Child Rescue Coalition gives its technology for free to law enforcement agencies, and it is used by about 8,500 investigators in all 50 states. It’s used in 95 other countries, including Canada, the U.K. and Brazil. Since 2010, the nonprofit has trained about 12,000 law enforcement investigators globally.
Still, it’s a drop in the ocean of online child sexual abuse material in circulation. In 2019 alone, the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children received 16.9 million reports related to suspected child sexual exploitation material online.
Now, the Child Rescue Coalition is seeking partnerships with consumer-focused online platforms, including Facebook, school districts and a babysitter booking site, to determine whether people who are downloading illegal images are also trying to make contact with or work with minors.
“Many of these platforms have a big problem of users engaging in suspicious activity that doesn’t rise to criminal behavior,” said Carly Yoost, CEO of the Child Rescue Coalition. “If they matched their user data with ours, it could alert their security teams to take a closer look at some of their users.”
But some civil liberties experts have raised concerns about the mass surveillance enabled by the technology — even before it’s connected with social platforms. They say tools like the Child Protection System should be subject to more independent oversight and testing.
“There’s a danger that the visceral awfulness of the child abuse blinds us to the civil liberties concerns,” said Sarah St.Vincent, a lawyer who specializes in digital rights. “Tools like this hand a great deal of power and discretion to the government. There need to be really strong checks and safeguards.”
Rohnie Williams had waited 30 years for the news she received in November 2015: Her brother, Marshall Lugo, had been arrested on charges of possession of child pornography.
“It was exhilarating in a ‘Twilight Zone’ way,” said Williams, 41, a New York-based nurse manager. “Your heart starts palpitating. Your mouth gets dry. You feel like you are going to get justice.”
Williams got in touch with Megan Brooks, the investigator on the case in Will County, Illinois, and told her that Lugo, then a teenager, had sexually abused her from the ages of 5 to 7 — allegations that are documented in a police report reviewed by NBC News.
Williams had told her mother about her allegations when she was 11 on the way to a doctor’s visit after she got her first period.
“I was afraid the doctor was going to tell her I wasn’t a virgin. So I told her that,” she said.
Her mother didn’t report the allegation to the police and, according to Williams, told her daughter that if she told anybody else it would destroy the family. So Williams, like so many victims of child sexual abuse, kept quiet. (Williams’ mother confirmed her daughter’s account to NBC News.)
Police were led to Lugo’s mobile home by the Child Rescue Coalition’s technology, which detected the household IP address’ downloading dozens of videos and images depicting the abuse and rape of babies and children under age 12. When police searched the home, where Lugo lived with his wife and two young children, they found external hard drives storing child sexual abuse material, according to the police report.
Although too much time had passed to investigate Williams’ allegation as a separate crime, her testimony provided aggravating circumstances in Lugo’s sentencing to three years in prison following a guilty plea, according to Brooks, chief investigator for the Will County High Technology Crimes Unit, who led the case.
“Some days I feel like crap doing this job, but sometimes I have full-circle moments where it all feels worth it,” Brooks said. “This was one of those cases.”
While Williams has thrived professionally, she has struggled to forgive her brother. She spends her weekends working as a sexual assault nurse examiner, providing specialist care and forensic exams to rape victims.
“I chose to go into forensics because of what happened to me as a child, to make sure these victims had somebody taking care of them who was really invested in it,” she said.
Lugo didn’t respond to a request for comment.
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