The officers are busy. Last year nearly 800 cyber tips filtered through the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children. Officers are carrying out search warrants on a weekly basis and some electronic files have been spread so widely that officers know their hash value by heart.
It’s difficult to say whether sexual exploitation and the spread of sex abuse materials has actually increased dramatically in recent years.
This whole article feels like a cute dog story with barely any journalism about something that is very threatening to the Internet. Was it was submitted to trigger debate about propaganda rather than on the merits of the reporting?
I imagine there is a lot of useful statistical analysis to be done on the list of filenames, their metadata, and various content hashes which could absolutely answer some questions about the patterms of CSAM over the past decade.