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Sweden, U.S. Track Pedophiles with Search Technology

Sweden is the latest to implement search technology, which helps identify online criminal activity.

VIENNA, VA - The Swedish National Criminal Intelligence Service has implemented a new weapon against pedophiles and child pornographers in the form of software called RetrievalWare, a search technology that helps identify online criminal activity and gathers investigative clues.

Sweden is the latest to implement the Convera search and retrieval technology. More than 50 law enforcement and intelligence agencies of the U.S government and its allies are using the technology.

The technology allows Swedish police to investigate pedophile-related cases more effectively and efficiently by comparing newly gathered pornographic images against an existing database of more than 300,000 images seized from computers and Web sites around the world.

When new images arrive at the Child Protective Unit, they are scanned into an archive and are checked against the archive for similar pictures. RetrievalWare's Adaptive pattern Recognition Technology enables police officers to gather clues from these photographs by searching these images for underlying patterns in background objects, shapes and colors.

Previous to the installation of RetrievalWare, the police library increased to almost half a million images, leaving the department swamped as they checked each new image manually against the archive. The technology allows officers to do more investigating and spend less time going through files.