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The sexual abuse or exploitation of children, often involving online platforms or coded language.
and its Homeland Security Investigations () routinely report rescues and identifications of child victims in discrete operations, but the agency does not publish a single, consistently updated aggrega...
A CyberTip submitted by Snapchat to the U.S. National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC) can and often does trigger law enforcement investigations that have led to arrests, but submissi...
and account suspensions in mid‑2025 accused users of violating rules, but reporting shows many of those suspensions were wrongful and caused significant distress, economic harm and slow appeals outcom...
The requires providers that submit a CyberTipline report to preserve "the contents provided in the report" — including comingled content and associated subscriber or account information — for one year...
Prosecutors obtain records when the refers reports to law enforcement or when investigators query NCMEC’s clearinghouse for records tied to an investigation; these records originate from public tips a...
Federal law requires online providers to report apparent child sexual exploitation to NCMEC’s CyberTipline and sets baseline content-retention and reporting-contact rules, while the 2024 REPORT Act ex...
Law enforcement agencies use NCMEC’s Case Management Tool (CMT) as a centralized conduit for CyberTipline reports, technical assistance, forensic resources and training to coordinate investigations th...
The word appears hundreds of times in the newly released documents and that repetition has reignited older theories that food words or emojis—especially "pizza" and "cheese"—functioned as coded refere...
Since 2010 academics have repeatedly pushed back against the simplifying media trope of “Muslim rape gangs,” arguing that it distorts evidence, amplifies Islamophobia, and misdirects policy away from ...
Platforms generate referrals by packaging structured incident metadata, account/user identifiers, content descriptors (including file-level details and cryptographic hashes), and supporting logs or ge...
’s collects reports from the public and , analyzes and prioritizes them, and forwards actionable referrals to regional Internet Crimes Against Children () task forces for local investigation . Once an...
A tip to NCMEC alleging nude images of underage girls generated by AI would usually be accepted into the CyberTipline and treated as a report of potential child sexual exploitation, but whether local ...
Police ethnicity records for child sexual abuse and exploitation (CSEA) in England and Wales are currently of limited reliability: recording is inconsistent across forces, large proportions of cases l...
A report to NCMEC’s CyberTipline does not automatically make content vanish from the internet because NCMEC’s role is a federal clearinghouse that reviews reports, enriches them with metadata, and for...
Using Tor or Tor-based search engines is not illegal per se: Tor is a privacy tool used legally by researchers, activists and ordinary users . However, seeking pornographic images on Tor carries clear...
The CyberTipline, run by the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children (NCMEC), functions as a centralized clearinghouse where the public and electronic service providers submit reports of susp...