To catch a paedophile, you only need to look at their hands (2017)
wired.co.uk
wired.co.uk
But we're really sure that vein patterns are unique, and c'mon! he's a pedophile! so really we can stretch the point and appeal to authority and say "the science is settled" even if it is actually more complicated; because this one case justifies it right?
The implication there bugs me.
Edit: Are vein patterns even static? Seems to me "varicose veins" etc show that they change over the scale of years, at least, right?
Nope. I had surgery one time to deal with a varicose vein of sorts. The key "engineering bug" was that the problem vein hits the collector vein at a 90° angle, instead of a "sliplane" (been playing too much mini motorways), causing congestion. The fix is to simply cut that connection. The body routes around it, increasing throughput through other networks. I don't think any entirely new routes were created, but I'm sure the size, geometry, and paths all changed.
Worked well for about 15 years before the primary issues resumed.
I'm yet to be convinced by the accuracy of this forensic method.
Like, it would be one thing if they could actually provide stats, bayesian analysis, p/r curves, etc.
Except that the (accused, but innocent) "perpetrator" was a member of (ethnic group), as was the actual perpetrator, and it turned out that a high percentage of members of (ethnic group) exhibited this allegedly rare DNA feature.
To your point the study is so small it does not attempt to answer the question in whether veins are static.
There appears to be active research in this area in general. It does look like many companies and researchers are looking at ways to use vein patterns for bioinformatics
https://biosmart-tech.com/tpost/megjc72d91-palm-vein-scanner...
https://res.mdpi.com/d_attachment/applsci/applsci-10-03192/a...
I don't know how static vein patterns are, but in the particular case of varicose veins, my understanding is that they're existing veins that start to bulge outward. My guess would be that capillaries are pretty fungible, but the larger you get, the slower they'd change. For the best statistics, you'd probably want to incorporate the amount of time passing between two images, and model how much change is possible/reasonable. But there's plenty of signal to be had if you're careful to not overstate it.
I agree the she or the article are not making any claims. And she eventually got the study done.
But by appearing in court as expert witness and presenting her analysis, she implicitly claimed that it's accurate enough to be taken as criminal evidence, and that was before doing the science.
That's the dangerous part.
While a sample of 1000 to compare against is certainly small, it's in the ballpark where it's valid supporting evidence.
And if you want to make it better, maybe just contact Black and ask if/how you could submit your own sample?
Which means the trust you have in the team is a lot more important than the size of the dataset.
I don't know how checks and balances would look here. Maybe make available each analysis to the defendant and let him/his team check it out?
Like another commenter said in this thread, some people were convicted on DNA evidence of a hair that wasn't even human. A larger sample won't fix that.
What does that matter? Imagine some other characteristic that definitely changes over time lets say your clothing. The case in question had an expert saying: “Yes, the person recorded in the video is wearing the exact same clothes that we know the father was wearing the night of the incident, and that he is also wearing to court today. Now mind you, we dont know the exact statistical lilelihood that someone else would wear the exact same pants, shirt, tie, shoes and hat.” Your attempted counter argument is “yes ok, that is definitely the same clothes that the perpetrator was wearing and that the defendant wore that night and today, but he could change his clothes tomorrow, so…”
Consider some completely static characteristic. If the suspect is the perpetrator then there's an 100% chance they still have this characteristic, whereas if the suspect is innocent then there's a 10% chance they have this characteristic just by coincidence. Therefore if the suspect turns out to have this characteristic, you should update your prior to (1*0.01)/0.1 = 10%.
Compare to some dynamic characteristic. If the suspect is the perpetrator then there's an 20% chance they still have this characteristic, whereas if the suspect is innocent then there's a 10% chance they have this characteristic just by coincidence. Therefore if the suspect turns out to have this characteristic, you should update your prior to (0.2*0.01)/0.1 = 2%.
At the extreme, a completely dynamic characteristic. If the suspect is the perpetrator then there's a 10% chance they still have this characteristic, whereas if the suspect is innocent then there's a 10% chance they have this characteristic just by coincidence. Clearly in this case you shouldn't update your prior at all.
> "That research had never been done. I could say no more than everything matched, and we couldn't say it definitely wasn't him”
This seems to be exactly correct. It explicits says that it was not possible given the information at time to confidently identify someone from a photo, but that there was enough information to positively rule out identification in some cases - and that that wasn’t the case here.
I know the usual response is that not all pedophiles are going to actually carry out their fantasies, but really we have no evidence that "non-offending MAPs" or "virtuous pedophiles" (or whatever they call themselves) are a real or significant phenomenon; plenty of those who have claimed these titles have been exposed as abusers.
But man, reading this was upsetting. While this might appear light for some, it is much details for me (i understand trigger warnings now :/)
It looks like an open & shut case to me, but this sort of thing should be grounds for concern in a court case. Evidence that can be statistically quantified should be. Especially novel identification techniques.
I'm glad that more research went in to the technique before the convictions started to happen.
Edit: (*) beyond a reasonable doubt, as expressed in the law.
Which is exactly how it was used in the case in question—Black said it couldn’t prove the identity of the attacker, but was enough to show they couldn’t exclude the girl’s father.
It should be at least theoretically possible for someone to be a paedophile and not a molester, the same way one can be a heterosexual without being a rapist.
Just 9 fucking years for abusing an 18-month old child?!?!?? What is wrong with the authorities there?
It's strange to see this case dug up from 2017 asking for Apple to make tech to stop these crimes. Technology isn't moral and doesn't discriminate in application. As important as this cause is, I would look in many, many places before coming to a conclusion that no one can have privacy and that scanning everyone's devices 'just in case' is ok. That future, I imagine is worse.
> On average, men have 50 per cent more scars than women, but right-handed men are more likely to scar their left hands, while right-handed women tend to scar their right - no one knows why.
I asked my wife, and the best hypotheses that we could come up with together are:
* men are more likely to use tools, and to use them aggressively. Tool use is typically done with the dominant hand, while injury through tool use would typically be to the non-dominant hand
* women are more likely to perform tasks that require fine dexterity, which would often preclude the use of tools
> In the end, the match appeared strong. When presented with Black's report, Oketch changed his plea from not guilty to guilty; he got 15 years. That plea change was important, Black says. It meant money that would otherwise have been spent on trials was saved. It also meant the child was spared from having to give evidence in court.
> Once they have established the offender's features, they study images of the suspect, trying to establish a match.
The method as described by the article seems precarious.
There's a lot of room for human bias to sneak in when there's prior expectation of which thumbs should match. Easy to be lenient when matching features to the suspect's thumb, and strict when matching features to the dataset which you already know shouldn't match and would undermine your method if you found matches.
Deciding the features by comparing the suspect to the offender also introduces pitfalls. If randomly selected hands have 5 out of 20 matching features, then in most cases you'll be able to claim that a completely random hand matches the offender's hand in a way that 0% of images in the 500-image database do.
An improvement might be to have one person indiscriminately categorize features of the suspect's hand, and a separate person indiscriminately categorize features of the hand in the video. Neither person should see both images - especially not when deciding which features are relevant.
> The Oketch case presented her with two technical problems. First, he was black, "and all the people we had looked at previously had been white.
This has a lot of the smells of evidence analysis techniques that we find out in 20 years were ill-founded and lead to a bunch of false imprisonments.
> A suspect can be excluded with 100 per cent certainty, but a match can only carry a grade of "strong support" that the suspect and the offender are the same person. This equates to between a 1-in-1,000 to 1-in-10,000 chance that it could be someone else.
I worry that courts aren't properly equipped to understand that false positive rates aren't "the chance that it could be someone else".
As an extreme scenario, imagine it's 2050 and you're suspected of a crime based solely on a match from a comprehensive global facial recognition system (~10 billion faces). If the system has a has a 1-in-1,000,000,000 false positive rate, then that still means there's a 90% chance you're innocent (if given no other information).
Maybe a certain fruit company that's sitting on 200+ billion in cash can help?
A pedophile or minor attracted person does not however necessarily need to become a child molester. Not that this article makes a distinction, or anyone else...
I sure do appreciate do the oft repeated quip of 'get help', as if its my responsibility for being this way and if I just enroll in the appropriate treatment (and what decent person wouldn't?) I could get fixed and become a normal productive member of society like everyone else.
But it's probably easier to dehumanize me if you think that I'm such an evil person I willingly choose rather to remain exclusively attracted to a group of people I can never have a healthy fulfilling relationship with, that I'd choose perversion over my own happiness.
Source: Am a pedophile who doesn't rape children or look at CP.
I do find your username exceedingly tasteless, though.
Is this what people see us as? That we're a constant threat that needs to be managed?
I don't need to take possibly dangerous medication to kill my libido, because I can satisfy my libido through furry cub porn and having sex with adults.
Yes, it pisses me off sometimes that I can't have sex with people I'm actually attracted to. But in truth, being a pedophile doesn't really affect my day to day life. In fact, usually I only think about it when some asshole talks about how "all peodphiles deserve the death penalty" or when some article comes up talking about "pedophiles" (not child molesters mind you) in the context of crime.
You know all my friends in real life and online know I'm a pedophile. My family too. They aren't perverts. They're normal, sometimes religious, mostly straight people. They just know me and know I'm not a threat to anyone.
It's not even a secret, I just don't talk about it all the time, on account of having interests outside of being a pedophile.
Let me tell you something, that I really want you to consider: If you think you don't know any pedophiles, you're almost certainly wrong. One thing I've realized by being mostly public about it is that some of the most unexpected people from my life have come up to me and admitted that they're partially or exclusively attracted to children, but they don't want to tell anyone for fear of retaliation, or being grouped into a box as 'dangerous'. I mean, Jesus, look at Inkbunny, you really think attraction to minors isn't popular?
Unfortunately many people discover I'm a pedophile and that's all they see. They ignore the other aspects of me: That I'm a writer and an artist, a skilled programmer, that I try to be honest and live my life ethically. That I've got opinions and hopes and dreams and plans for my life that have absolutely nothing to do with my sexual orientation.
But instead apparently I'm dangerously mentally ill because I've realized that kids can be sexy. Sometimes I see it as a blessing though. The really interesting people to get to know are the ones who can see past that. Because of this, all my friends are really interesting people.
But I think people would be less likely to do that if they could put on special glasses and see everyone's sexual orientation floating above their heads. They'd be less likely to demonize minor attracted persons if they realized they were talking about their siblings or loved ones. Their friends or coworkers. The people they meet on the street.
Because you are. We're everywhere. You just don't realize it all the time, because most of us aren't monsters.
My username is fucking awesome by the way.
I once had a therapist (with a degree in psychology and a history of treating sex offenders, not that I am one) who didn't realize that 'pedophile' just referred to an attraction. When I told him I was a pedophile he incorrectly assumed I was a sex offender and asked me about the nature of my crime. We had a debate about it until the next session where he said he looked it up and yes, pedophile just referred to the sexual orientation.
If someone who works as a psychologist makes that mistake, it's safe to assume that calling yourself a 'pedophile' makes you a target for every would vigilante out there regardless of what you have or haven't done.
Most people who are pedophiles don't refer to themselves as such, even in communities there are filled with pedophiles, like Inkbunny, because of the negative connotations. They call themselves 'cubfurs' or 'cublovers' or 'shotacons' or things like that. And my close friends and I have our own terminology.
Hence some people have started to refer to as pedophiles as 'pedosexuals' or MAPs (Minor Attracted Persons) as a more neutral term. But I never liked the term myself because it feels too much like the beginning of a euphemism treadmill and I figured I might has well bite the bullet and call myself what I am regardless of if it makes people uncomfortable. (Which I'm sure it does, my apologies in advance.)
Like the war on drugs, this is a battle that is never going to end.
I wish some government agency, maybe NCMEC or someone else, would realize this and try actually catering to pedophiles as citizens of their country rather than pretending they are vermin that can be stomped out.
Imagine if a government put their vast resources into creating artificial child pornography so that people who want to look at child pornography (or perhaps aren't pedophiles but are just curious) have an outlet that doesn't actually involve children.
There are a million ways to do this. You could train a GAN on actual CP images that produce new original images without any actual victims, or maybe with enough talented researchers create one that never involved children to begin with.
You could pay some very talented CGI companies to create realistic child pornography, maybe with the help with actors that already look underaged but are not.
Or maybe even just commission some shotacon artists or cub furs artists off Inkbunny (although the community is already doing this.)
"Hey, we realize that you're sexually attracted to children and like all people have sexual desires that need to be fulfilled in order to be happy. We know you're not a bad person and we're sorry we can't give you real children to have sex with, but here are some links to artificial child pornography we've made so that you can be less sexually frustrated without breaking the law."
I really don't understand why, if the goal is to prevent the sexual exploitation of children, any government hasn't tried making photo-realistic synthetic child pornography. It seems like such an obvious solution that would actually make gains in reducing the consumption of child pornography.
I suspect most pedophiles who do consume child pornography would stick with a realistic ethically-made artificial alternative, if only to avoid possible prosecution.
It’s well known that some people develop fetishes, where they can only orgasm by experiencing their particular kinks. Probably if they had never seen porn that contained these kinks, they wouldn’t have developed into a fetish. So you could imagine someone who’s a half-pedophile, attracted to adults as well as kids, becoming a full pedophile after too much exposure to child pornography. That would be a pretty negative outcome.
Politically though, anything that improves the lives of pedophiles is a complete nonstarter regardless of how many children it saves from being raped. Because if you propose something that improves the lives of pedophiles, everyone will say “hmm, pretty suspicious that this is your pet project, how do we know you’re not a pedophile?”. So the whole discussion is kind of moot.
After all, I've developed a few kinks over the years, but I've never had the experience of not being able to obtain orgasm otherwise. And I'm especially skeptical of the claim that someone who's "half-pedophile" would be unable to get off on adults otherwise. I don't think that's been documented with shotacon or lolicon.
If someone who's bisexual masturbates to too much female porn do they lose their attraction to men?
You could also make synthetic child pornography "prescription-only" as a part of a treatment plan.
And all these concerns have to be weighed against perpetuating the sexual exploitation of children. People seem willing to forfeit their privacy for such a worthy cause, maybe this isn't so far off.