Was this guy law enforcement? How did he get the addresses of everyone who had bought that model of couch?
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Dark web agent spotted bedroom wall clue to rescue girl from abuse
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Re: Dark web agent spotted bedroom wall clue to rescue girl from abuse
#22Earlier quoted context omitted.
No, but note that my comment didn't mention pedophiles. Someone being a convicted sex offender should already be a big enough red flag that any parent with a working brain shouldn't ever let that person anywhere near their kids.
Then have you ever dealt with a convicted sex offender, same question.
Yes. I immediately broke off all contact with them as soon as I learned about it.
Re: Dark web agent spotted bedroom wall clue to rescue girl from abuse
#23> They contacted Facebook, which at the time dominated the social media landscape, asking for help scouring uploaded family photos - to see if Lucy was in any of them. But Facebook, despite having facial recognition technology, said it "did not have the tools" to help. Willing to bet my life savings that they are able to do exactly this when the goal is to create shadow profiles or maximize some metric.
> From that list of 40 or 50 people, it was easy to find and trawl their social media. And that is when they found a photo of Lucy on Facebook with an adult who looked as though she was close to the girl - possibly a relative. It sounds like Facebook was a huge boost to the investigation despite that.
Facebook did nothing to assist in narrowing a search area.
What Facebook actually did was host images .. so that after the team narrowed a list down to under 100 people they could look through profiles by hand.
It may as well have been searching Flickr, Instagram, Etsy, etc. profiles by hand.
Re: Dark web agent spotted bedroom wall clue to rescue girl from abuse
#24I'm wondering why they didn't cross reference the addresses they had from the furniture stores with those of registered sex offenders, as this abuser turned out to be? And further intersect that with "Flaming Alamo" brick houses??
Re: Dark web agent spotted bedroom wall clue to rescue girl from abuse
#25I’ve spent just a teeny bit of time helping international ICE investigators (not that one; internet child exploitation) postpone PTSD with technology. It seems like after two years of their job, they’re going to have a mental break. So postponing is all you can really do. It’s disheartening how underfunded these agencies are compared to, what feels like at least, the severity of the crimes they’re up against. These f…
Moderation feels like the one of the most ethical uses of AI. Being able to prevent a lot of the worst content from being posted and preventing people from being exposed to it.
Re: Dark web agent spotted bedroom wall clue to rescue girl from abuse
#26Related: A researcher for Meta, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram, warned executives at the tech giant that there may be upward of 500,000 cases of sexual exploitation of minors per day on the social media platforms. https://www.foxbusiness.com/lifestyle/meta-researcher-warned... Who needs the dark web when Meta exists and is protected by the US government? Edit: downvotes? Lol
See also: the 17-strike policy for sex trafficking. https://eu.usatoday.com/story/tech/2025/11/22/meta-strike-po...
Unbelievable. I mean, believable.. but WTF?
Re: Dark web agent spotted bedroom wall clue to rescue girl from abuse
#27> They contacted Facebook, which at the time dominated the social media landscape, asking for help scouring uploaded family photos - to see if Lucy was in any of them. But Facebook, despite having facial recognition technology, said it "did not have the tools" to help. Willing to bet my life savings that they are able to do exactly this when the goal is to create shadow profiles or maximize some metric.
Facial recognition is very powerful these days. My friend took a photo of his kid at the top of Twin Peaks in SF, with the city in the background. Unfortunately, due to the angle, you could barely see the eyes and a portion of the nose of the kid. Android was still able to tag the kid. I feel like Facebook really dropped the ball here. It is obvious that Squire and colleagues are working for the Law Enforcement. If F…
When people on hacker News talk about requiring cops to do traditional police work instead of doing wide ranging trawls using technology, this is exactly what they meant. I hope you don't complain when the future you want becomes reality and the three letter agencies come knocking down your door just because you happened to be in the same building as a crime in progress and the machine learning algorithms determined your location via cellular logs and labelled you as a criminal.
Re: Dark web agent spotted bedroom wall clue to rescue girl from abuse
#28periodically the various forces tackling CSAM release images which are ENTIRELY SFW, and are purely of a jersey, a backpack, a location, a tea setting, and ask people to tell them things: Was this available in Belgium? Did you ever see this in a second hand shop? Do you recognise the logo on this bag?
Information inside images is useful for this kind of struggle to identify victims of crime.
Re: Dark web agent spotted bedroom wall clue to rescue girl from abuse
#29First of all, sorry to hear about the poor girl’s ordeal, and I’m glad she was rescued. But after reading about all that complicated digital sleuthing, it basically comes down to this:
"The team realised that in the household with Lucy was her mother’s boyfriend - a convicted sex offender."
I feel like the police should’ve started there: cross-referencing people in her close circle against a list of known sex offenders.
Re: Dark web agent spotted bedroom wall clue to rescue girl from abuse
#30Am I reading this correctly that the address where they found the child was where her mother’s boyfriend was living?
> "So we narrowed it down to [this] one address… and started the process of confirming who was living there through state records, driver's licence… information on schools," says Squire.
> The team realised that in the household with Lucy was her mother's boyfriend - a convicted sex offender.
There’s a lot of focus on Facebook in the comments here, but unless I’m missing something the strangest part about this story was that the child’s mother was dating a convicted sex offender and they had to go through all of this process to arrive at this? It’s impressive detective work with the brick expert identifying bricks and the sofa sellers gathering their customer list, but how did this connection not register earlier?
EDIT: As others have pointed out, the wording is confusing. They made these connections to the identity only after identifying the house