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Europol headquarters in The Hague, Netherlands.
Europe’s AI deepfake raid
Europol, the European Union’s law enforcement agency, arrested 24 people across 19 countries last Wednesday in a global crackdown on AI-generated child pornography. The arrests stretched beyond the EU with suspects taken into custody in Australia, the United Kingdom, and New Zealand in coordination with local police.
The crackdown is part of a campaign called Operation Cumberland, which began in November with the arrest of a lead suspect in Denmark. The ringleader allegedly ran a website where people paid to access images of children that he created with help from artificial intelligence. Europol wrote in a press release that there are 273 total suspects, and they’ve done 33 house searches and seized 173 electronic devices.
“Operation Cumberland has been one of the first cases involving AI-generated child sexual abuse material (CSAM), making it exceptionally challenging for investigators, especially due to the lack of national legislation addressing these crimes,” Europol wrote in a statement.
The agency noted that EU member states are currently discussing regulations specifically addressing this type of content, so it’s unclear what the exact legal basis for the arrests is. (Europol did not respond to a request for comment by press time.) Nick Reiners, a senior geo-technology analyst at Eurasia Group, said he believes the legal basis would be national laws that do not distinguish CSAM from AI-generated CSAM. That said, there’s good reason for a new EU law: “The objective of the proposed new Directive is primarily to harmonize, update and strengthen national laws across EU member states, in part to make it easier to prosecute,” Reiners added.
The agency has said that more arrests are on the way in the coming weeks.
EncroChat and Europol logos are seen in this illustration taken, June 27, 2023.
Europol’s CSAM problem
Europol, Europe’s policing agency, said it’s seen a marked increase in AI-generated child sexual abuse material, aka CSAM. And they predicted it’ll get worse: “The use of AI which allows child sex offenders to generate or alter child sex abuse material is set to further proliferate in the near future," the agency said in a statement. The technology also makes it easier for perpetrators to cyberbully and sexually extort victims for financial gain.
In a new report, Europol warns of the dangers of deepfake child abuse material. But it also says that the advent of AI makes it difficult to detect what’s real and what’s fake. And AI-generated images could be trained on real CSAM. Massive AI training datasets have been found to include numerous instances of CSAM.