For more than a decade, the UMass Rescue Lab has been the premier computer science research group working to thwart Internet-based crimes against children.
Our mission is to rescue every victimized child.
Our mission has several goals.
Thousands of children have been rescued from sexual abuse by investigators using our tools in every US state and over 40 countries. We have never charged for our tools or trainings.
All crimes against children should be investigated because all children deserve protection and rescue from abuse and justice for these crimes. But for decades, the number of perpetrators and the incidents of abuse has inundated the number of investigators and the resources they have been given. Further, investigators are in a continual arms race of technology with pereptrators. Perpetrators exploit the latest technology, originally designed for the privacy of law abiding citizens, to evade detection and prosecution. And perpetrators make use of the lastest platforms for social media, live streaming, and gaming to form relationships with children and groom them for abuse. The capture of sexual abuse in images and video and their distribution on the Internet is a grievous harm. Such child sexual abuse materials (CSAM) often remain on the Internet for decades, representing a re-victimization into the child's adulthood as they are traded.
UMass Rescue's mission is to provide the latest tools and insights for investigators. Our work for investigators includes methods and tools that: provide global view of abuses; defeat software used by perpetrators to evade detection and capture; gather high-quality, forensically sound evidence. We describe some of our work below.
We have designed, evaluated, and deployed a number of projects that are used daily by law enforcement to investigate online abuse of children. Our work includes:
If you are a graduate student at UMass Amherst in Computer Science, you can get involved. Take our course CMPSCI 596E Machine Learning for Child Rescue in Fall 2020.
Our work is strictly non-profit and in direct cooperation with law enforcement that use our tools daily. Our work is a force multiplier: every research advance we make and every tool we deploy makes it easier and more efficient for investigators to rescue children world wide. We can use your support; please donate to UMass Rescue via a gift to the Cybersecurity Institute. All funds will be dedicated to supporting our staff for working on this problem.
We are supported by the Department of Justice, including the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Office of Juvenille Justice and Deliquency Protection.
We publish in top academic venues on topics related to child exploitation, digital forensics, and Internet privacy.