When you report something to a hotline in your country you may wonder what impact this has. Our hotlines us INHOPE's ICCAM system

Once a hotline receives a public report, the hotline analyst assesses the reported material, and if it is believed that there is illegal material on that page, the URL is inserted into ICCAM. The system then crawls all information found on that URL and the analyst can classify each picture and/or video separately as baseline (internationally illegal according to INTERPOL’s criteria), nationally illegal or not illegal. All images and videos marked as baseline and nationally illegal are made available to INTERPOL through an ICCAM portal specifically designed for them. Consequently, INTERPOL downloads this material and transfers it for insertion into their International Child Sexual Exploitation Image Database (ICSE Database).

Hotlines also need the ability to work with Law Enforcement Agencies, which is where INTERPOL comes in. INTERPOL’s role is to enable police around the world to work together. With their high-tech infrastructure of technical and operational support, they help meet the growing challenges of fighting crime in the 21st century. INHOPE members also help law enforcement save time by ensuring only relevant reports are referred to national and international law enforcement, so that efforts can be concentrated on investigating confirmed cases of CSAM and working to identify and rescue victims.

INHOPE is also partner in the AviaTor project, a project that aims at developing automation and intelligence tools to greatly reduce the time spend by LEAs assessing and prioritising these reports.

Examples:

With close cooperation between the Danish Police, the telecommunications industry and Save the Children
Denmark, the Danish blocking system became a reality in 2005. Websites with CSAM can now be blocked
quickly and instead of CSAM, visitors to the blocked sites
are greeted by a Stop-page, that tells you that CSAM is
illegal and tells users how to get help if drawn towards
CSAM. The blocking system is a vital weapon in the fight
against CSAM.