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Full-Text Articles in Social and Behavioral Sciences
Finding The Key Players In Online Child Exploitation Networks, Bryce Westlake, Martin Bouchard, Richard Frank
Finding The Key Players In Online Child Exploitation Networks, Bryce Westlake, Martin Bouchard, Richard Frank
Bryce Garreth Westlake
The growth of the Internet has been paralleled with a similar growth in online child exploitation. Since completely shutting down child exploitation websites is difficult (or arguably impossible), the goal must be to find the most efficient way of identifying the key targets and then to apprehend them. Traditionally, online investigations have been manual and centered on images. However, we argue that target prioritization needs to take more than just images into consideration, and that the investigating process needs to become more systematic. Drawing from a web crawler we specifically designed for extracting child exploitation website networks, this study 1) …
Strategies To Disrupt Online Child Pornography Networks, Kila Joffres, Martin Bouchard, Richard Frank, Bryce Westlake
Strategies To Disrupt Online Child Pornography Networks, Kila Joffres, Martin Bouchard, Richard Frank, Bryce Westlake
Bryce Garreth Westlake
This paper seeks to determine which attack strategies (hub, bridge, or fragmentation) are most effective at disrupting two online child pornography networks in terms of outcome measures that include density, clustering, compactness, and average path length. For this purpose, two networks were extracted using a web-crawler that recursively follows child exploitation sites. It was found that different attack strategies were warranted depending on the outcome measure and the network structure. Overall, hub attacks were most effective at reducing network density and clustering, whereas fragmentation attacks were most effective at reducing the network's distance-based cohesion and average path length. In certain …
The Structure And Content Of Online Child Exploitation Networks, Richard Frank, Bryce Westlake, Martin Bouchard
The Structure And Content Of Online Child Exploitation Networks, Richard Frank, Bryce Westlake, Martin Bouchard
Bryce Garreth Westlake
The emergence of the Internet has provided people with the ability to find and communicate with others of common interests. Unfortunately, those involved in the practices of child exploitation have also received the same benefits. Although law enforcement continues its efforts to shut down websites dedicated to child exploitation, the problem remains uncurbed. Despite this, law enforcement has yet to examine these websites as a network and determine their structure, stability and susceptibleness to attack. We extract the structure and features of four online child exploitation networks using a custom-written webpage crawler. Social network analysis is then applied with the …