Supercomputer Joins Hunt for Child Predators

Dec. 11, 2010— -- The tragedy of seven-year-old Somer Thompson's 2009 murder was that it didn't have to happen.

Somer's assailant, Jarred Harrell, 24, was in police custody in 2009. The police also had Harrell's computer, which contained child pornography. But investigators hadn't seen the material, which would have kept him locked up. He was released, and on Oct. 19 Harrel abducted the Florida child on her way home from school.

Two days later Somer's body was found in a Georgia landfill.

Now scientists from Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee, along with local and national collaborators, are working to save the life of the next Somer Thompson.

With the aid of the Jaguar supercomputer, the second most powerful computer in the world, Oak Ridge scientists hope to find child pornography faster than ever and then trace and arrest pedophiles quickly before they abuse or kill more children.

"These guys are on the verge of changing history," said Grier Weeks, executive director of the National Association to Protect Children. "There is no tool to interrupt child sexual abuse on a scale like this."

Every year U.S. law enforcement arrests between 2,000 and 3,000 individuals for charges related to child pornography, said Weeks. That's out of an estimated 300,000 people authorities suspect are engaged in this kind of criminal activity.

There is currently technology, developed last year by ORNL's Thomas Potok and Shaun Gleason, that could have helped investigators find the pornography on Harrel's computer, although they didn't have it. Still the new program, called Artemis, after the Greek goddess of the hunt, has helped make a dent in the local population of pedophiles.

When investigators, such as Tom Evans from the Knoxville Police Department, enters a suspect's home, they carry with them a copy of Artemis, which they run on the suspect's computers to find images with flesh-colored pixels, which could be child pornography.

Artemis has already helped the Knoxville Police Department in the roughly 30 child sex crime related arrests it has made this year, said Evans. "It can lead to a quicker prosecution and a quicker arrest," he said.