Project VIC

Project VIC started in 2012 as a small team of collaborators to create an ecosystem of technologies that could be made available to law enforcement officers worldwide to speed up the process for reviewing ever increasing volumes of child abuse materials. As offenders moved online it became easier for them to propagate their child abuse materials. What was once a problem of a couple printed child abuse pictures in a single physical world case, became a massive problem with tens of thousands of child abuse pictures in a single digital case.

Each day we operate with a Victims First mentality. We collaborate with law enforcement officers to understand the evolving tradecraft of child abuse offenders online. Then we get to work creating new technologies with our partners so that law enforcement can operate more efficiently and effectively. It takes a network to defeat a network.

In our early days we worked with our partners to create a set of intelligence (e.g.; Project VIC hashes) so that law enforcement could quickly find known bad images in a collection. In 2013 a Project VIC coalition including many partners built the VICS data model so that we could put that intelligence and new derived intelligence to work.

The VICS data model is the heart of the technology ecosystem. It enables the exchange of VICS Case data between tools built by our wide array of VICS technology partners. Building upon the VICS data model, several countries have built VICS based instances to store, analyze, and exchange the intelligence derived from each investigation.

From there we became the worldwide licensee for Microsoft's PhotoDNA tool for the crimes against children use case. This tool helps law enforcement officers reduce the need to review near duplicate images in a case.

As our technology ecosystem evolved, we found that we could solve the last mile integration problem that many large technology research companies have when they create new technologies for child abuse investigators. In 2019 we became the worldwide licensee of the VICS Safer technology from MITRE. This machine learning tool identifies features within an image that may indicate the presence of child abuse material. In 2020 we received a grant from Microsoft AI for Good to develop VICS Point, a machine learning technology that analyzes file attributes to make predictions on the presence of child abuse material. These new tools are assistive technologies for our law enforcement partners. When combined together with traditional known intelligence data and PhotoDNA's perceptual hashing, these tools help identify new child abuse material.
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In 2020 we started a volunteer team as the demand for our technologies, validation services, and training continued to increase. Our volunteer team works on all aspects of the Project VIC International mission.

That same year we received a grant from the End Violence Against Children fund to create Katalyst, a development effort to create a repeatable hybrid cloud platform that countries can use to launch new law enforcement initiatives to investigate crimes against children. We teamed up with several of our existing partners to make Katalyst a reality.

We continue to work with our law enforcement, industry and academic partners to develop and deploy new technologies to make the world a safer place for children. Victims First!